No, the picture is not out of focus. Today in the NW Ry Museum's kitchen car the cook stove was fired up to make cookies for the Santa Trains. Fired up on coal. I wish this was Smellonet and not just Internet, because it was like firing up, well, you know what. The garbage pails to the left are filled with ballast size coal. The cooks also made lunch for the 50 volunteers that were here to do museum fall clean up and minor maintenance. 40 were from Microsoft. Never say Microsoft Support isn't great! Three guys actually washed all the windows in the train, inside and out.

I'm not going to say, "Microsoft does Windows!"

Why are you making Christmas cookies so early?

Guests attending the annual event consume approximately 24,000 cookies. Without a series of prebakes, we can't handle the surges because there is room in the ovens for only about 60 - 80 cookies at a time. Add to that periodic problems with the ovens being to cold or too hot and we simply can't keep up. So several thousand cookies are placed in the freezer until the day of the event.

--Richard