Down to the Wire

With my usual Christmas break coupled with a week of layoff, I had what (hopefully) will be my longest Christmas break ever.  Going into it, two and a half weeks seemed like an eternity.  I thought I had come up with a reasonable to-do list.  As I write this with only one day of break left, I realize that even with the extra week off, I still over estimated what I could get done.  Not getting everything done in this case is not really a failure though.  There were many instances where the workshop sat idle due to making memories, instead of making progress.  

Before getting layed off for a week, I took advantage of my free employee admission to the "new" Cat visitor center and finally took the boys.  We left Mommy at home to get some Christmas prep done, but Grandma and Grandpa met us there, so thankfully I had some help corralling the boys.  They had a ball climbing on the machines and doing the simulators.  I didn't expect N to show up Grandpa on "running" an excavator, but he seemed to pick up on it after only a couple minutes. 

Since I had used all my vacation, being layed off allowed did allow me the opportunity to attend Dad's retirement party.  It was great that our whole family was able to make it, and at least L was there to represent the grandkids.  Of course, the real star of the day was Dad.  It was great to see him in his element, with all his friends, peers and customers.  It's had to believe it's been 17 years since I worked there, but for me it was nice to see alot of the same customers, and even some of the guys I worked with back them come back to honor Dad. 

I also took advantage of my layoff week to take on a project we had talked about for a while; putting in a water softener.  We have had several instances lately of faucets/appliances having issues due to, what we assumed was, hard water.  Our water isn't terribly hard, but with evidence of scale build-up and the frequency of the issues lately we decided it would be worth putting in a softener.  I'll leave out the boring details, but good news is that, despite having to make 4 trips to Menards in one day, I still know how to sweat copper pipe. 

It's not often we actually get a white Christmas, but this was one of those years.  It wasn't alot of snow, but it has proved to be resilient.  It came in with a bitter North wind that, like years past, shut down our furnace. This time, since I was home, I kept a close watch and called our HVAC guy as soon as it started acting up.  Thankfully, he came out and got it back working, hopefully for good this time.  It was a messy snow that started as freezing rain.  Last year, our first snow was similar, and my first outing with Johnny's snow blade was pretty disappointing.  This year probably would have been similar, but the 317's ability to put down-pressure on the blade and scrape off the ice came in pretty handy.  With no more snow than we got I'm not sure I couldn't have done it about as fast with a shovel, but it was more fun with the tractor.

 

 Snow removal was in preparation of the first of our 3 Christmas celebrations this year.  The first one was with C's family at our house the Saturday prior.  The second was the day-of, with just our immediate family, the the third was the following Saturday with my family.  There are some benefits to spreading them out like that, not the least of which is giving me time to get all the boys presents put together and them time to enjoy them before getting overwhelmed with more.  Not surprisingly, the boys did pretty well this year.  It is a never-ending battle to keep them grateful for all that they have, but it is so hard not to spoil them.

Assembly, and even repairing, a few Christmas presents seemed to occupy alot of time in the work shop over break.  Of course, it didn't occupy all of it.  I finished cranking out a few last minute ebay projects.  I had plans to start into an engine rebuild on the Wheel Horse, but that didn't happen.  Instead, we started in earnest on N's pinewood derby car.  We got off to a rough start.  N didn't have any strong opinions on what he wanted to do.  We spun our wheels for a while on trying to come up with ideas, and finally settled on a plan to do one for him according to his ideas, and I would do one for myself that better suited my tastes.  We made good progress on his car.  It's tough for me to turn over the reigns on a project like this, but the design is all his idea.  I probably did more sanding than I should, but he did help, and continues to be excited to help and keep working on it.  Not surprisingly, I've got grand ideas for my car, but the execution so far has taken a back seat to getting his done.

With only one day of break left, I don't have high hopes of checking much more off my Christmas break list, but given everything that we did get done, I'm pretty content with all the projects, and more importantly, the memories, we completed the past 2+ weeks.