Product Placement: The Amazing Leatherman

I love my Leatherman. (Almost as much as my wife)  In fact, if someone asked me to be on one of those goons on a "As Seen on TV" advertisements for Leatherman, I'd jump at the opportunity.  These tools are amazing.(Not quite as much as my wife)  If the guy who films himself filming himself surviving in the wild depends on it, then it's probably good enough for some of the crazy stuff I face daily between my house and the classroom.
Such a crazy thing happened just recently which allowed me the opportunity to utilize the Leatherman to its full glorious potential, and now I must brag about it.

As you can see from the picture below, this dog won't hunt.

The radiator hose had sprung a leak and steamy green liquid was emanating from every one of the many crevices in my jeep hood. 

 Steamy green gooey liquid draining down the dirt road to infect the nearest cattle yard.  Be prepared for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Steak" coming to a store near you.

  

Between the leather gloves, knife, and the screwdriver on that precious gem, I was up running again in less than 10 minutes. I was also lucky that I had extra coolant in the back of the Jeep only because the Leatherman hasn't yet put a reservoir of it on their product.

 

Long story short; Leatherman products make you....feel like this guy:

Matchbox Car Ramp

Just a fun quick project on the camera.  They boys and I enjoy toy cars and ramps, so here's 1 minute worth of race-car fun!

Bunk Bed Project

To celebrate being pregnant with our third child, (Yes, that's kind of an announcement!) Em and I decided to create a little more space in the boys room by adding a bunk bed.  This couldn't be just any old "Wal-Mart special" or "K-Mart express" or an "ALCO piece of junk" or "Target over priced luxurious looking but still poorly made" piece of furniture.  This must be an Engle Project! 

So Em looked up some plans on *cough* Pinterest, and I did my best to not use them to build a bunk bed for our Mini-Me's.  However, directions soon proved to be essential so I found myself working away from *cough* Pinterest while having some fun myself.  Nothing makes me feel more manly then getting to go to the hardware store and spend money on supplies I'll actually put to use.  Actually, I think if I could have starred in this Old Spice commercial, I'd have felt more manly. 

 Anyway, I was very blessed to get the whole afternoon to work on it, so here's about 4 hours of work condensed into 30 seconds of still video.  The boys really enjoyed it and I even got a hug and a thank you from our oldest.  That was a great way to end a fun project!

Older Bro Vs. Younger Bro's Birthday

Do you remember first learning the concept of sharing?  Our son is facing one of his worst fears:  Someone else' birthday!  I can't get over how troubling it seems to this 4 year old that he will not be getting any presents on his brother's birthday.  I wonder if we aren't all a little like this when someone else is receiving something good?

With some subtitles, because even though he's 4; some things are only discernible to his highly intellijent parents.

Not GoPro, Redbull, or any other advertisement driven snowboarding video

Christmas break gave us a whole day of snow.  What follows is a 1 minute sampling of the fun times we had for about 3 hours the day earlier.  Great times with some risky guys once again!

 

Bumps and bruises abound from that short run we did over and over again.  We started around 3:00 pm and kept going until after dark.  The most successful runs went about 150 feet but with a top speed of 10 mph?  Fun times in the Kansas flat-lands.

Christmas and Guns (Politics free! Unlike your soda)

Christmas break was another enjoyable time spent with family. Instead of 12 days of Christmas, I believe we had 13 days of it! Here are a few of the highlights.

 1.  Getting woke up on a day off to the angelic music of Cherubs.

 2. Creating angelic music for some elderly friends in the nursing home.

 2. (Continued) Actually, I entirely lost my voice the day before so there may have been a little "Ron White" timbre in the background instead of angelic choruses.

 3. Riding in the "Family Bus" on our caroling tour.

 4.  Unrestricted boys in a large moving projectile/RV. (Don't tell the deputy)

 5.  THAT BEARD!

 6.  Ping Pong all along. 

 7.  7 degree (F) wake up calls at 7 am by our 7 month (+15 months) coughing kid.

8.  Shooting a photographer in the wild.

 9.  Shooting evidence of a shooter!

 10.  Target practice on snowballs.  If it ever comes down to a live or die snowball fight....

 11.  More guns!  Guns are as much a part of our family entertainment and enjoyment as some people's dogs are.  When you get the chance to shoot clay pigeons, give it a shot!

 12. My North Face model sister. 

13.  Brother in laws are a good thing.  Glad I had awesome sister's so they could marry great guys who I would mind-meld with.

Dashing through the snow and attack of the birds!

Christmas Eve gave me the opportunity to test out the Jeep in the snow.  The snow won.

 High centered in the snow.  Four spinning wheels don't do much good when they aren't touching the ground.

 Knee deep in snow.

 If it weren't for the fact that the jeep is unable to move an inch, this might make a good promo shot!

 I spent roughly 45 minutes digging with a broken window scraper.  While I created some great snow hills all around the jeep, it wasn't quite the tool I needed. 

 Now, if there were 10 more exhaust pipes on the Jeep, I may have been able to melt free!  Looking into some of these badboys for the future.

 As much as I'd like to be able to tell a story about using my own two hands to get unstuck, the real solution came from my cell phone.

 All that work really got me ready to blend in to the environment for Lemming hunting.

 Predator meets odd-shaped-tiny-gun Lemming Hunter.

 On the way home, I ran into a large flock of birds. 

 A really large flock of birds.

 A wall of birds.

 A sleepy wall of birds.

 I've seen flocks that are large before, but never any that covered my entire field of vision with this great of a density before.

These birds were everywhere!  Even the trees were littered with them.  Pretty sure these are the nasty Starling's we know and love around here.