Congratulations. You'll be a tractor veteran before you know it. Working the FEL will become second nature to you with a few hours practice. Keep the fittings greased. Remember it isn't a tank you can knock trees over with and you will be fine.

Showed the Mrs. the pic , there may be one in my future.

Thank you! I will!

I figured that out pretty quickly today. I'm a pretty physically and mentally capable kind of guy, but today I felt retarded. All the controls felt backwards. But I took a break and got back on it and it felt pretty good. Thanks for the feedback.

Good. You will like it. Watch craigslist and facebook marketplace for deals.

Looks good. If you don’t already have one get you a good grease gun to keep next to your tractor, and use it religously. You can’t overgrease a front end loader, and keeping things greased will make them last a lot longer.

Thanks for the advice. The folks I bought it from gave me a gun with the tractor, as well as a 5 gallon fuel tank and other assorted pins, chains, shackles, etc... How often should I grease all that stuff? How many tractor hours in between lube jobs?

Every 20 hours should be good.

Good weekend this weekend. It was Mrs. Irish's birthday on Thursday so I took her out to eat at Linde Marie's in Cave Spring, Georgia and they did not disappoint. We had the fillets and a bottle of Mark West Pino Noir...



I know... I'm a lucky dude... It's not every day you get a bottle of wine this good.



They do a good job on the fillets there.

I picked up some nice live edge spalled Sycamore from my buddy up on the mountain and I plan on doing some stuff with it...

Some if it is going to make me a desk so i can work from the cabin occasionally, some is going to make Mrs. Irish a vanity and a good bit of it I'm going to use to make a custom farmhouse table for the dining room.



One piece of that is mahogany. I'm not sure what I am going to do with that...

Now that I have the tractor I can spend more time doing the kind of things I want to do... Here's the driveway, parking and tractor access that I have been working on...





The tractor access/egress finally finished. This was a lot of work...



We refreshed the Leather chairs in the living room using Acetone and acrylic paint on a rag. They will eventually go up in our bedroom loft, so they don't have to be perfect. Mrs. Irish rearranged the living room and honestly it looks better.

Had to google that wine to see what ive been missing 😃 the lot looks good 👍

You been to the Canyon Grill over in GA near your cabin? I hear it's some count , me and Mrs. wanta check it out.

Looking good as always. I know y’all will and are enjoying it.

Never had a bad meal at Linde Marie’s......always great!
The ribeye ain’t to shabby either 😋

I was kidding about the wine... I'm damn lucky to have a wife like Mrs. Irish. She's a keeper. Any woman that will work all day pulling 12-2 wire through studs is a goodun.

But yeah, the wine is pretty decent. It's her favorite and it was her birthday.

I'll check it out. Maybe we'll get some friends together and go try it out.

The only thing we found fault with this time was the croutons on the Caesar salad. You could tell they were out of a box. A good Caesar salad deserves house made croutons. They do have house made bread though, so it would seem pretty easy to make the croutons themselves. We had a talk with the waiter. So hopefully that issue will be resolved next time we go...

I'm going to try the ribeye next time.




Thanks and we are. Looking forward to a little cold weather, a little hunting across the street, and a warm fire in that little wood stove when I get back, and really looking forward to spending the holidays up here with our family. Thanksgiving and Christmas up here are really going to be special this year.

Please do and report back. Got my info from a feller who is a pretty good food critic , says it's good , kinda upscale place for the area.

I'm posting this from my new Camp Little Ridge high speed internet connection. Yes friends... We are up town now... More on that later...

It's been a long week in places like Akerman, Starkville and Eupora, Mississippi, but I'm back at the cabin now. I did manage to find some decent eats while I was out and about roaming the land...

Ribeye steak at The Camphouse in Starkvegas... By the way... There are some pretty pretty girls in Starkvegas. All studying engineering no doubt.



I saw the face in the window in the Pickens County Courthouse. Boy... That was spooky...



On the way back home I diverted off of 82 and a place called Harvey's caught my eye just down the street from the birthplace of Tennessee Williams. I passed it by and then did a U-turn because there were so many cars in the parking lot. It didn't disappoint. I almost got the Steak and wedge, but I opted for the Shrimp and grits instead and it was pretty damn good... I'll have to take Mrs. Irish by the next time we pass through.



Getting to the cabin... So Mrs. Irish, the person I sleep with, (And this is a very important point) has been gently reminding me that she needs a better vanity in which to sit and put on her makeup, get pretty for cabin dinners and such... So I figured that might be something I should think about working on.

I took some of the sycamore that I had, cut a piece of it and mated it with a galvanized set of drawers that I got on a scratch and dent deal from Tractor Supply. I used some galvanized pipes and fittings that I got from Lowes and started making her a vanity that would fit the space between the closets... 32".

This picture is the first coat of a mixture of boiled linseed oil, mineral spirits, and oil based polyurethane. I have sanded and wiskered (Sand. wet with water, dry and then re-sand) several times) the wood and I am applying the coating with steel wool. I have several coats to follow...





Notice the "butterfly" I put in there to stem the split. She really liked that. I got bonus points, even though this is her birthday present.

Lastly for today... I've been waiting for the internet people to come out here for over a month. I've cut trees to get them out of the way, etc... So the guy shows up today and takes some readings and he's not getting enough signal. So I said,

"You need to get on this ladder and climb up to the roof line and I'll bet you can get some."

Well he didn't like getting up the ladder, so we went in the loft and got the signal we needed and then he goes back in his truck and says,

"I don't have the stuff I need to mount the receiver up there."

I'm like, "Think again Batman!"

So I quickly devised a way using some PVC pipe and a conduit brace to make him a mount. Doing that, we got her done! He was like, "You really want internet today." I'm like, "No chit. I design chit all day every day I'm not here to play!"

Anyway, so now we have about 50 mbps running at Camp Little Ridge for $70 a month...

No Whiskey tonight. Mrs. Irish had to work from the cabin. So it's just Bud Light and Tequila. Sad I know, but it is dangerous times we live in... I had to even resort to smoking a relight on a Free Cuba cigar...

Mrs. Irish asked me is I was OK. I told her' " I'm like a nine on the level of 'OK'

She’s going to enjoy the vanity. Irish why didn’t you go with a water pack unit instead of the window AC? Just curious.

BTW I was at the courthouse in Carrollton a couple of weeks ago.