Christmas and Winter Prep

I consider it a small victory in parenting that when my 3 year old asks to watch "Barney", he actually wants to watch the Andy Griffith show. 

So, we're quickly coming up on another month gap since my last update.  I better get something on here before it all runs together more than it already has. 

In my last post, I neglected to mention that C and I had just returned from an extended weekend trip to Nashville.  It was the first time we had left the boys overnight since L was born, and the first multiple-night away from home for the two of us since before N.  It was some much needed time away for us and we had a blast.  We definitely will do it again some time.  Thank you so much to Baba, Grandpa and Aunt M for watching the boys while we were gone.

The weekend we were in Nashville marked the start of the Holiday season for our hotel there.  Seeing all their decorations prompted me to do some updating to our Christmas decorations.  For nearly ten years we have used white rope lights for our decorations.  They have held up remarkably well, but this year I decided to change things up with some color.  The warm weather we had around Thanksgiving gave me a good opportunity to put up some new LED lights that look like the older lights with the larger light bulbs.  OK, so you can tell it's LED's and not the old bulbs, but I still like that it is something different from what we have done in the past. 

Workshop time has been balance between Ebay projects and tractor projects.  As I mentioned earlier, I had trouble getting motivated on the Ebay projects, and thus got a late start.  I have since found that motivation, and while I still haven't put as much effort into it as in the past, I have had decent success.  I've got a few more projects that didn't quite get finished before Christmas, so those will have to spill into next year. 

L, who is always wanting to help, expressed interest in painting some monster trucks of his own while I was working on mine.  He did actually did a remarkable job keeping the paint on just the truck.  His, however, won't be going on Ebay.  N also got into the act, creating his own 8-wheeled monster truck inspired by one of the monster truck shows we watched. 

Tractor work has primarily been focused on my "new" 317.  It took a little longer to arrive than I expected, but once I got my replacement driveshaft, it went in the tractor fairly easily.  I was very happy to find that with the drive shaft in place, the tractor ran and drove great.  When I went to put it away, I set the hydrostat really slow and let L ride the tractor into the garage (with me standing right next to him of course).  He was elated and exclaimed to me, "I'm driving it, I can't believe it!" 

While waiting for the driveshaft to arrive, I picked up a hydraulic snow plow for the 317.  After I got the tractor running, I couldn't wait to try out the plow.  I hooked it up and discovered the blade wouldn't raise.  It was not a problem with the plow, but with the tractor.  It seems all the tractor had ever done was raise a mower deck up and down, so the 2nd lever never got used and was frozen.  I had to take the hydraulic valve all apart to free it up, but now it seems to work just fine.  A new snowplow seemed to keep the snow away last year, so we will see if another one does the trick this year.