| Greetings! Early morning temp at Hoosier Valley on Saturday was 93 degrees. The late afternoon temp stood at 86. And a hot sun most of the day! A closed door Board meeting was going on when I arrived at 9 a.m. The early (11:00) train left over an hour late. Revised train consist included NKP and EL bay window cabooses, LIRR coach and B&LE caboose. MKT and NKP open flat cars and EJ&E wheel chair lift transfer caboose not running. Two guest engineers on EL Alco 310; one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The 2:45 passenger trip was annulled. A crew consisting of Matt Lasayko, Cory Bennett, Dave Cook, John LaOrange and Mark Knebel headed up to LaCrosse to start the installation of 365 ties on the old C&O east of town. Cory reported later that they got "4.3% of the job finished". Hot day for that kind of work! Jason Annen and Andy Cornwall were repairing holes in the car body of C&NW boxcar # 284. Joe Kingsbury had finished 98% of the lettering on NKP boxcar # 15979. Looks real good! I went up to Norwayne and picked up a gallon of orange paint for MDT refrigerator car # 14070. I managed to get the door on the north side of the car repainted in the morning. Not the greatest matching paint, but loooks much better than the faded pinkish color that was on there. Fortunately, that side of the car was somewhat in the shade. Couldn't do the south door as no room to get the lift in between the storage tracks. I asked the crew to reposition the car, but they ran out of time. Since I couldn't work on the south door of MDT 14070, I moved the lift down to sister car MDT # 13385. The sides of the 13385 were not cleaned up by Tom Travis and I when we did 14070 a number of years ago. Also, the whitelining of the reporting marks and car number, was still on the car. So I started in with sandpaper, getting rid of that paint. Managed to get the reporting marks done and the first three numbers before it clouded over, thundered and then started to rain about 3:30. I got off the lift and headed for the air conditioned depot. The rain was not hard, and did not last long and the heat dried up the car sides so I went back to work. Managed to finish the job just as my hands were cramping up. Steve Newland finished the bannisters leading up to the middle landing on Grasselli Tower. Still need to be painted, but looking good. Others at the museum included Joe Kingsbury, Jim Ochiltree, Randall Downs, John DeGan and Doug Kosloske, some of whom were working the trains. Margrett Cook, Bob Barcus, Loretta Kosloske and Pat DeGan in the depot. Joe Baker and Bob Jachim working on new electric for the NKP kitchen car. Bing Risley was cutting grass. Dan Siple was in town with the World War 2 re-enactment group and stopped in. I know that there were others around too, including engine crew and I apologize for not listing them here. As I was getting set to leave the museum at quater to 5, I got a call from my wife that a storm had just gone through Crown Point and was headed toward North Judson. I hit the road so don't know how bad the museum got hit, if at all. I do know however, that a tree managed to fall on my roof causing quite a bit of damage and knocking out power until 9:30 last night (Monday night). Which is the reason for this delayed report. As I type this on Tuesday afternoon, my home temperature gauge is reading 99 degrees. Hope everyone stays cool. Relief is supposedly on the way! Enjoy what is left of your week. Les | 
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