Pippin & The Possum/Scenes from the 4th

I started this last week.......so, insert "last week" into everything here and change all "next week" to this week!

So, Tuesday afternoon a slew of contractors breezed in and decided they wanted to be done with us. About time, considering their piece of this puzzle was a lot less involved than ours. By 7 pm Tues night they were done with all trimming out of the cabinets and downdraft vent installation, all of our work building the sink pipes, installing the garbage disposal, the dishwasher and completing the gas lines was done. And best of all it seemed to WORK! That just leaves us with the one portion of countertop they cut short that is currently in production and set to be installed early next week. From there it's piddly jobs for us - finishing up the baseboards, patching holes left behind by all the before mentioned contractors and adding one more light fixture.

We fired up the range and I've basically been cooking ever since. I LOVE my new appliances. And it doesn't hurt that on this season of Top Chef they are using our EXACT SAME APPLIANCES. Every last one of them. Our old range was 30+ years old and basically cooked on "Inferno". It was either off or inferno. Don't step away for a second! Now we have massive options of heat and every burner actually has a simmer function! Love it!!!!

Our first meal was our infamous and wonderful chicken fettuccine alfredo from scratch. Not for the dieter. I swear we ate like we have never eaten and we were just plain GIDDY. We were cleaning up the kitchen around 10 and Pippin was out in the back doing his nightly patrol. He started barking, which is fairly rare for him. Then he kept on barking, which is extremely rare. He's a licker, not a barker. So, I sent Brent out to check on him. A minute later Brent comes RUNNING back in with Pippin on his heels yelling at me to get the bb gun.

"What??? What's going on???"
"Where's the bb gun???"
"Um, I don't have a clue!! What's the problem?"
And I'm thinking that whatever is attacking us really isn't going to be all that dazed by a bb gun anyway.
"Pippin corned a possum out there and he's playing possum and we need to shoot him."
I clearly didn't understand why we needed to shoot him, but Brent's the one from a small town so I was trusting him on this one. My possum resume is pretty short. Brent remembered where the bb gun was and we rushed back outside just in time to see him walking across our yard. Then Brent realized that the safety lock was on the bb gun, and he didn't know where the key was. At this point I started questioning why we needed to shoot him, and Brent was worried that he wouldn't be able to get out of our yard and would get into our air conditioner through a small hole we need to fill and chew it apart. I wasn't sure how he got in our yard, but I'm pretty sure they're good climbers since my only previous possum experience (besides seeing the roadkill ones) was watching two possum mate in a tree in college. Regardless, by the time Brent found the key the possum was gone and one more piece of wildlife was saved from our bb gun.

But let me tell you, Pippin goes out looking for that thing every night now. Personally I would have LOVED to see how it all went down. Can you just imagine Pippin wandering up on a possum? I can't even imagine how Pippin made it feel so threatened that it actually played possum. I'm just glad he didn't get bit or get into a fight with it.

July 4th morning we went for an early ride and picked blackberries. We did some things around the house (Brent worked on installing our snazzy new baseboards) and then we headed over to the Hot Chicken Festival near us. What a chaos of people. The lines were forever long so we decided to skip it and just make lunch ourselves. We did listen to our mayghber (mayor+neighbor - Nashville's mayor lives 4 blocks over!) give a speech. What I found to be hilarious was the homeless guy stretched out napping at the bottom of the stage enjoying some of the festival's free ice cream. That sort of sums up our 'hood - we don't mess with them, they don't mess with us. I love it!

We did more chores around the house and then headed to S&L's house for a good ole 4th of July cookout. Right around 9 we rushed to East Park for the best view of the downtown fireworks. Wow, beautiful! And we were out of the mess of downtowners. It was so awesome to watch it from our 'hood! Our show is supposedly the 3rd best in the nation and I believe it. They lasted for half an hour and I was highly impressed with what my tax dollars came up with. Next year maybe they can move them to be more center with the skyline.











Anyway, that's the early part of last week rewind! There's just so much to talk about and so little time! See ya!! Gotta figure out the ingredients to put in the fridge for tomorrow night's jambalaya! YUUUUUMMMMMM!