Thank you, Andy and Bill!
Andy, good pun on the ripple effect!! 
I will have to say the only time I used joint compound for mortar joints was on plastic kits with molded windows and door frames. I found it tedious to get the compound out of the corners where the frames met the bricks. That was my only beef about it. You do get nice results. I may not be as patient as I used to be, but then again my hands didn't hurt when I did things like that years ago. 
I guess I do show a lot of trial and error. Sometimes, I get suggestions of a different way of doing things, and sometimes I just decide what I did wasn't going to work out as well. I find it is much more useful to see the the process, changes and all, when reading about others' modeling, than just seeing the final product.
