Picture Time

Nashville
Mt Juliet
Knoxville
Chattanooga

All of those cities are places I have been today. Lord, what a long day. Today was "field trip" day at work where I got to go out on site visits with some of the people I work with, to "surprise" several of our stores and see how the stores are looking, how Christmas product has been merchandised, etc etc. It was a lot of fun, but one very, very long day. We met at work at 6 am and got back at 7. But it was a lot of fun and certainly a good day. I am ZONKED though. We visited our store in Mt Juliet, then two stores in Knoxville, stopped and had lunch and then visited two stores in Chattanooga. We were supposed to visit Murfreesboro on the way back up I-24 but luckily we decided it was getting late so we should save it for another day.

Anyway, fence building went pretty well on Sunday. It was another long day and we were able to finish the bulk of the fence, but once again we were working after dark by flashlight and streetlamp. We weren't able to do the gate at all, so that will have to be done this weekend. It really looks SO nice. I can't wait for it to be totally finished, but at least everything is secured enough where we can send Pips out to the front yard without having to have him on a leash. Hopefully by the end of this upcoming weekend it will all be finished. With it being dark during all waking hours we can't get much done in the evenings. I'll post a link to my Flickr when we're done for full before and after pics but here are a few for now. I don't have a final cost on this project, but I estimate that by doing it ourselves we're saving approximately $3-4 thousand dollars. A neighbor told us she had a quite for a 300 linear foot fence, where an old fence would be removed for $4,500!!! This project will cost us less than $2K (prob closer to $1,500 when we've made all our returns) and we're doing 2,100 linear feet of fence, including 3 gates. It's very physically demanding but it is not rocket science, AT ALL. I'd rather have that money for trips and clothes and furniture!

Fence Before: Old, rickety and junky. Really not secure for Pippin as it was patched a million times.









New Fence (in Progress). It's 8 feet vs the old 6 foot clunker.













And this is what Pippin did while we worked all weekend. He's quite cozy being a couch climbing monkey. Most days when I get home from work he's perched precariously on the couch arms.









Other than the fence and the work trip the only excitement this week has been yesterday's Veterans Day parade. Brent and I ran to it last year, but this year the parade was Monday so I walked down from work. I decided to skip the gym and just walk the parade route a few times to get some exercise in, support the vets and enjoy the nice fall temps. Here are just a few pics from the parade:

Tiny car, Big Horses. I would hate to be in that little car if one of those horses got sick....










Ahhhhh, parades in the South. Southern Pride.....Holla!!!













A different tank ran down Broad at about a million miles an hour getting jiggy all over the road which made me super nervous. This one just went slowly down raising its crazy arm. It was very odd to see all this militia coming through downtown.










And is it even a parade without Abe??? His comrades shot off a musket right next to the downtown High School, giving about a hundred high school girls + me a near heart attack.













Have a great rest of the week!