It’s a special Christmas video from me to you!
Where I’ll show you what Santa brought me…
No surprise, it’s a model train!
And I’ll tell you about some things I’m thankful for this year...
Like the blazing-fast fiber optic Internet service here at our new house.
I’ll also show you a few projects I’ve been working on...
Including putting together these storage sheds…
Digging holes for the next row of trees I’ll be planting…
And the big one: my future vegetable garden.
First and foremost, I want to wish you a very merry Christmas!
Obviously, due to the pandemic, it’s not possible to have those big family gatherings that have been the highlight of Christmases past, but…
Hopefully, you’ll be able to be with a few of the people you love this year.
And just like they say in the classic old Christmas song, "God Rest You Merry Gentlemen"...
I want to take the time in this video to bring tidings of comfort and joy to you!
This guy is all about comfort and joy!
And it is my wish for you this Christmas.
It’s been a weird year for everybody.
Of course, some have had it much worse than others.
I think about all the people that lost their jobs because of the pandemic.
And all the people whose loved ones have died from Covid.
It’s been just a horrible year for a lot of people.
Now for me, personally, all I can do is focus on how lucky I have been, and be thankful about that.
In what was such a horrible year for so many other people…
I was able to retire, have a beautiful home built for me, and move to Washington to be closer to my sister and her family.
That’s a much better year than most people have had!
Things have continued to go well for me here on YouTube.
I’ve now had 22 of my videos get over a million views on YouTube.
And a total of over 310 million views for all my videos combined.
Thank you to every one of my 415,000 subscribers for being interested in what I’m doing!
Now I know that quite a few of my subscribers are with me because of my model train videos.
So, I want to show you what I bought myself for Christmas this year.
Like I really needed more model trains!
This is a narrow-gauge steam locomotive that is modeled after a real steam train that used to operate on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.
The real locomotive that this model was based on was built back in 1875…
And for about the first 15 years it was in service it was used to haul lumber.
Later in life, it was used to haul passengers on the California side of Lake Tahoe…
From Truckee to Tahoe City, until 1926.
Then it sat around unused for quite a few years after that…
Until finally being donated to the Nevada State Railroad Museum.
They put a lot of money and effort in to restoring it...
A task which they completed in 2015.
At some point, I'll do a proper video of my new Glenbrook locomotive running through the house or maybe out in the yard…
But for now, I’ll just let you hear the sounds it makes as it runs on a little test track I set up in my garage.
So, that’s the latest addition to my model train collection.
And I think that makes 21 locomotives in my collection now.
Now, in the spirit of being thankful for the good things in my life…
I want to tell you a little bit more about this beautiful new house we moved in to a few months ago.
If you haven’t already seen the tour of the house which I posted to my YouTube channel in November...
I’ll put a link to it, up in the corner of the screen right now…
As well as in the description of this video.
But there were a few little details about the house that didn’t make it in to the house tour video...
And I thought it would be fun to just share them with you now.
The first one I want to show you is the closet lighting.
When I open up any of the closets in the house, a motion detector activates a little light inside the closet.
This is such a simple little feature, but it makes a huge difference when you’re trying to find something in the closet!
Another thing I really love about the house is the fiber optic wiring.
There is not just one, but actually three fiber optic cables that come in to the house from the street!
One of them is for the cable television service…
One of them is for high-speed Internet service…
And one is not currently used, it’s there just in case it’s needed someday in the future.
I kind of take the cable TV service for granted…
I’m used to having good cable TV service with hundreds of channels...
Including video on demand, since we had that at our California house.
The thing that blows me away here at our new house is the amazing Internet service.
With the fiber optic cable coming directly in to the house, we can get incredibly fast Internet upload and download speeds.
I'm showing you here a little speed test.
We got a 12 millisecond ping time, and upload and download speeds of right around 850 megabits per second.
That is incredibly fast!
Comparing that to what we used to get at our California house…
It’s about 15 times faster at downloads and about 25 times faster at uploads.
As a YouTuber… some of the videos I upload are 2 gigabytes in size.
To be able to upload a file like that in a minute instead of 25 minutes is kind of a big deal!
Now let’s put the drone up in the air for a minute, above the house, and…
I’ll show you a little project I recently finished.
Notice the two garden sheds there on the west side of the house.
Each of those took about a day to assemble.
I like having those because it allowed me to move a lot of stuff out of my garage and in to the sheds for storage.
Things like my lawnmower, rototiller, and the back seats from my minivan...
Which I usually leave out of the van since I rarely carry anyone other than my wife in the van, but...
Quite frequently use the van for hauling lumber or other large items back from the home improvement store.
So, having the two storage sheds has given me a lot of usable space back in my garage.
I’ve been doing a lot of work in the back yard over the last couple of months.
I’m trying to get all my ducks in a row for this coming Spring, when I’ll be planting quite a few more trees in the back yard.
So, I’ve been digging out the holes where the new trees are going to be planted…
And I’ve been working on covering all the bare dirt with river rocks.
I’m very proud of the fact that those rocks didn’t cost me a thing!
If you were to buy that many rocks, you’d be talking about way more than a thousand dollars but they didn’t cost me a thing.
We are just a few hundred feet away from the Columbia River…
And at some point in history, before the dams went in…
The river actually flowed right over this property.
So, the land here is excellent farming land, but it also has got quite a bit of river rock in it.
Which means there’s no need to buy landscaping rocks, you can just dig for them.
Every one of the rocks that I’m using to landscape my yard either came right out of the ground on my property, or from one of the neighboring lots.
This little contraption that you see here is a rock sifter that I built to separate the rocks from the dirt.
Separating that much rock out of the soil has been a big task...
But the cool thing about being retired is that I’ve got all the time in the world.
I can tackle a big job like that a little bit at a time…
Just spend a couple of hours at it every day… and pretty soon it’s done.
Another big project I’ve been tackling is building a raised-bed vegetable garden.
I’m using cinder blocks for the walls of the raised garden beds…
And red brick pavers to create walk ways between each of the 3 raised garden beds.
Right now, each of the three beds is only partially completed.
I’m holding off on building the ends of each garden bed until I’ve finished bringing in all the dirt that’s needed to fill them up.
For now, I’m temporarily storing the additional cinder blocks I’ll need here, next to the hot tub.
It takes a lot of dirt to fill up 3 raised garden beds, and I’m hauling it one wheelbarrow full at a time.
So, it’s a big project that I’m just working on a little bit at a time…
With a self-imposed deadline of having it done by the time Spring arrives.
Let’s send the drone up a little higher now, so I can give you a look at the progress of construction in the neighborhood.
This is a completely new subdivision that is being built on what used to be farmland.
This used to be a turnip field!
Our house was one of the first houses that was built in this neighborhood…
So, there’s been a LOT of construction going on all around us as they work on building all of the houses for our future neighbors.
You can see that construction is coming along nicely on the houses along our street…
And that there are only a few empty lots where construction hasn’t started yet.
All the lots in the subdivision have been sold, but as you can see…
Construction hasn’t quite started yet on a few of them.
It only takes them about three months to complete one of these houses once they get started…
So, I’m looking forward to things getting a lot quieter here in this neighborhood...
Once construction of all the houses wraps up in the first half of the new year.
I’m also looking forward to finishing my landscaping in the back yard…
It’s going to look a lot nicer back here after I plant the rest of the trees I’m planning on.
Then it will just be a matter of patiently watching the trees grow over the years.
I’m looking forward to those little Spruce trees growing big and tall someday, because…
The neighbor behind me is building a huge storage building in his back yard, where he’ll store his RV.
Right now, he’s just got the wooden columns and the cement pad installed.
I think he wanted that done before winter, and is holding off on the rest until Spring.
You can see from the height of those columns that it’s going to be a huge building…
And it’s going to be kind of ugly for us to stare at out our windows, or...
When we’re sitting on our patio… or when we're in the hot tub.
But once all my trees grow up, I’m hoping that they’ll be much prettier to look at than my neighbor’s big RV storage building.
Now before I wrap this up, I want to just fill you in on a few other things I’ve got planned for 2021.
I had a Caribbean cruise planned for February, but that got cancelled.
We do still have an Alaska cruise and rail tour booked for this summer, but...
I’m thinking that’s going to end up getting cancelled, too.
In lieu of cruising, what my wife and I have decided to do when we need a vacation...
Is to visit an all-inclusive land resort instead.
That seems like the next best thing to a cruise.
In Mexico and the Caribbean, they’re operating all-inclusive land resorts at only about 20% capacity right now… to prevent the spread of Covid.
So, I think that'll keep things safe…
And I think we’ll really like being in an un-crowded resort where the staff can focus all of their attention on a very small number of guests.
We’re going to start by visiting Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville resort in Cancun.
We had a really nice stay at the Margaritaville in Hollywood, Florida, a few years ago…
But this new one in Cancun really caught my eye because it’s the first all-inclusive Margaritaville.
All the food and drinks are included in the price of your stay.
I think I’m going to like that a lot better than the traditional pay-as-you-go system.
You’ll see a video or two all about it, in the new year.
So, that’s it for today. Once again, I just want to wish you a very merry Christmas…
And thank you for watching my videos.
I really had no intention of becoming a YouTube success story.
I just started making videos because I wanted my friends to see what I was up to.
The fact that so many people became interested in my videos has just been a delightful surprise for me.
And it’s literally changed my life, and made my retirement much more interesting than it probably would have been otherwise!
So, I really do thank you for watching…
And I appreciate it when you take the time to leave a comment.