Thanksgiving Break

Thanksgiving break provided a much-needed reprieve from schoolwork. In all reality, I had a lot of work that I should have completed over the break, but I chose to ignore them in favor of being lazy and getting unrelated work done. I spent the first two days of break working on finishing up my Jeep’s slip yoke eliminator install, but that will be covered more in depth in my next post. For those of you who are interested, I had to tear apart my transfer case to install the eliminator, replace my rear differential yoke, install the driveshaft, set the pinion angle, and finally install shock relocation brackets. All in all, it took around 20 hours.

The next project I had for break was organizing tools that my mom had found at a garage sale over break and some tools from my grandparents that they no longer needed. Most of these tools were various drivers, pliers, wrenches, and sockets. We have a few tool chests, but these tools did not fit with the current organization. I had to reorganize some of the drawers to be dedicated to drivers and pliers and another dedicated to wrenches. I also realized that there were a ton of sockets. My grandparents had three socket sets, the garage sale provided more than 280 loose sockets and I already had four socket sets. Keeping these organized is quite the challenge. I decided to keep completed socket sets together and combine loose sockets and sockets from incomplete socket sets together. I was originally going to buy a piece of wood and put nails in to keep each socket in its own location. However, there were way too many duplicated sockets to do this effectively. In fact, on average there were seven of each size. There most of one socket that I had was the half inch socket, with a total of 17. When I include the complete sets I have, I have at least 25 half inch sockets. I can’t imagine any scenario where I might need all of them at once, but it is very convenient to have spares if I lose any. I have a picture of most of the loose sockets I had to organize below. Organizing them wound up taking around two hours since they were all mixed up in a single container.

Once I had completed my Jeep and tool projects, I just had schoolwork to complete. However, I did not want to complete it, so I decided to relax for the remainder of break. I watched more YouTube and played more video games in around four days than I had in the previous month at school. It was totally worth it, though. Now it is just three weeks until winter break. Most of my classes are getting to the end, so it is a matter of finalizing projects and then taking exams. I hope everyone else I hope everyone else’s classes are also finishing up without too much stress, and good luck preparing for exams!