 Morning everybody, this is something new for me this winter. Christmas is over and we're on the countdown to next Christmas. This Christmas season I was able to install my new steering wheel that I got from Jim as well as the matching shifter knob here. I still gotta clean up the cables a little bit but that didn't know how to do that before. Now I know how to do that. I got a little bit of a wind coming out of the south here. So it looks like my steering wheel is not quite centered because I gotta give it a little bit of extra pull this way so that the wind doesn't push me onto the shoulder but if that continues to be like that next time I'm home I'll have to adjust the steering wheel just a little bit so that it's centered a little better. I think it'll be just fine. I'm bob tailing, I'm on my way to pick up an empty step deck, 53 foot. We're gonna go to Canora, put some lumber on it, go down to Minnesota. We're gonna be working hard now until the baby's born. Just quickly getting settled into the truck. I don't have a lot of time. I have an empty step deck behind me just like I told you. We got the new steering wheel, we got the new gear shifter put on here to match. I have the blue bar for on here as well but I'm just gonna hold off on installing that for now until I can get a cover for down here. So it'd be a nice cover down there and then blue. Otherwise it'll be like blue and chrome. So I just decided to keep it chrome all the way up for now. But that's fine just the way it is. I have the other piece in my shop. I also got a kettle from my wife for Christmas. She's like I was hoping for. So we're back to making coffee in here and making food in here. And that's a one liter kettle. The other one was only a 500 milliliter. So half of that. So I've got double the amount of water now or double the amount of hot water in the truck. So I can make soup and coffee at the same time. Right on. Let's go to Canora, let's pick up our load. Let's get down to Minnesota tonight before it starts snowing or something crazy like that. I really love this steering wheel. I think it suits the truck great. It's got the blue LEDs in the back as well. I'm getting a few more of those to put under the dash in the front here as well. That's an upcoming project. Got my extra plug outlets here now. Nice little blue one to match the truck with little buttons there. So I can turn them on and off. That way I don't have to constantly dig between my cups here to get to the lighter plugs there. Plug in the phone, charge that up, buckle ourselves in so we don't fall out. We are officially off Christmas vacation now. I didn't book any time off for New Year's. So if we get home for New Year's, we do. If not, that's okay, I didn't book it off. It's on the weekend, so we'll see what happens. Here you'll the chain right now. It's about a two hour drive to Canora and we'll be driving into the night tonight. Probably get to Brainerd around 10 o'clock tonight or so or maybe a little earlier, we'll see. Hopefully nothing goes wrong and our border clearance goes through in a timely fashion. Time I have booked off is paternal leave, March 17th. Like you all know, Brits due date, our first baby, is April 1st. That's also my birthday, so I'm about to get the best birthday present ever. But I'm going to be taking off two weeks before that just in case the baby comes early also to make sure the nursery is prepared and ready and that we are prepared and ready and that Brit is prepared and ready. And then we'll see how the birth goes. If I only need to take two weeks off after the birth, that's great. If not, then I'll take another four weeks after the birth, so it'll be a total of six weeks and then it'll be back to work. So until then, I'm going to be working my high knee off to make sure that we can financially swing that. We shouldn't have any problems and we should be good. It is our slow season here at work, but we'll make it work. Inspection when we know everything is good on our truck. No, I do understand why they do it because there's a lot of guys that try to get away with equipment that's not fit for the road. When you take care of your truck and you know there's nothing wrong with your truck, it really sucks to get pulled in and have to go through an inspection. Why is this guy on the brakes? Why are we slowing down, man? Construction speed limit's 70, not 50. Just talking about how we're always in a rush. Just getting the sticks put on the flat bed here right now. I've got 12 of these eight footer stacks. We've got two, four, six of them on here so far, so half of them. And then I have four more stacks of nine footers, I think that are going on top of these here. Losing our sunlight out here already, but that's okay and we will work in the dark. I've called ahead to the receiver down in Minnesota. They're expecting me there tomorrow, late morning, to close to noon, maybe a bit early. Doesn't really matter. It's first come, first serve anyways, but they like to know that we're coming and he knows me. All I gotta do is I'm Josh, Blue Kenworth, Blue Tarps. He knows then that I'm one of the guys that'll help him. That I won't just sit in my truck and unload, I'll help him get the donage off the trailer and make things go as quickly as possible for both of us. I hope that's a reputation I'm earning there. That's what I try anyway. So we've got eight on here right now. Not done tying it down, obviously, but once he comes with the rest of it, we'll work on that. It's a little bit slow moving here. I think he's gotta dig my stuff out from underneath everything. There's two more going on top of that there yet, so I was able to quickly snap this hub cover on this morning yet. So that's fixed. I have another one to replace the other side because that one has a little bit of a dent in it. It was like that when I bought it, but no big deal. I don't know if you can see it or not. Oh yeah, you can see it. I've got a dent in there. I got one to replace this too. I can do this either tonight or tomorrow morning. Sometime on this trip, I'll just have it inside the door here. It's right there. Took care of the other one first because the other one had actually popped off. So that was a lot more obvious, right? A lot more obvious than that was on there. We got that fixed up. We got the steering wheel installed. We got the shift knob installed. Making progress. Good, the good kind progress. As for my marker lights, they were delivered today, but I didn't have time to run and get them. Obviously we're working, so these fenders, fender signals will be replaced as well as all the marker lights on top of the cab and on top of the sleeper. That'll look pretty nice. That'll be a project for the next time I'm at the shop and have time. Whenever that'll be. And then these will be replaced with clear lens LEDs as well. I already have them marked off on Amazon unless I find a better deal on them somewhere. Got those two straps on there just to hold the tarps down. They're not actually holding the load down. They're just stopping the tarps from flapping too much. And that's that. We got to get going. We're already cleared at the border. So our customs broker is on the ball once again. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. We're about six hours away. So it's seven o'clock. We'll get there after midnight. Yay. Great. Loving the steering wheel. It's hard to keep it clean though. Hard to keep it clean. I got some dirt on it. I got to keep those fingerprints off of it. It's hard because I touch it all the time. Kind of have to, you know. Yeah. Oh, I think it looks way better. I got a comment on, was it on Instagram? One of you was telling me now I need to replace all the wood paneling in here with blue. There's gonna be this piece in here, around there, the little pieces on the door there. I love that idea. I think I'm gonna go with that. See if I can. See if I can get a replacement trim that matches this blue. Has to be the same blue. Otherwise it's gonna look weird. Because this matches the paint on the outside of the truck, right? And it also matches my sleeper theme. Matches the whole truck theme. That's why the truck is called old blue. Cause it's old and it's blue. Let's get out of here. It's gonna be a bit of a late night. At least we're trucking. Morning coming. A lonely road. Old blue, sing your song down this lonely road. We're sitting at about 79,000 pounds gross. It's pretty well split between my axles. With my drive axles being slightly heavier, it gives me better traction. Climb up these snowy hills and not gotta worry about spinning out. The steering wheel is very comfortable to hold too. The other one was a little thinner. That was a little worn out too, but it was a little thinner. This one's a little bit, just feels a little bit better in my hands, you know? I think I might have to realign it just slightly to the right though. Very slightly. I think it's just a little off center, a little bit too, like pointed to the left a little bit. I will do a whole trip on it, see how it is. Maybe it's just my eyes now. It's an easy fix if it is a problem. They put up a nice big new sign over here. To all the transport trucks, no engine brakes down this little road. Apparently a lot of us have been singing the song of our people past these residences here a little too often. Now they said, nope, no more. No more singing here, guys. Gotta wait til you get to that road down there. That's trans-Canada. You can sing all you want down there. Believe me, we will be. You just can't sing down this little downhill here. This is where I always liked to. So once again, I'm going to be crossing from Fort Francis, Ontario into International Falls, Minnesota. I hope nobody's coming, this is that blind corner. Night, it's a little bit better because you can see their lights coming around the corner if they are before you see them. Definitely feels good to be rolling again. It's for sure. One kilometer, slide right on. Trans-Canada Highway, Highway 11. Leaders, slide right on. Trans-Canada Highway, Highway 11. Turn right in 410 meters. I'm gonna take my tarps off out here this time. There's three guys inside already all waiting to get unloaded and one guy has to get reloaded. It was gonna be a little while so in the meantime they said I can take these off out here. It's a nice warm, calm day. Not a big deal. I'll get these off and then we'll just get in ourselves unloaded for more lifts to go. Then I gotta back out. So we're gonna end today's vlog here and we'll start tomorrow from the same spot. So don't forget to subscribe and tune in tomorrow. We're heading to Duluth, Minnesota from here.