Dad had to fly up to Minnesota a couple of weeks ago for merchandising meetings. Only 64 people were selected from the stores to attend (2 from each Marketplace). It was a long, but short trip. Dad got up at 3am on Wednesday to get to the 6am flight and was in Minneapolis for 29 hours (12 hours of meetings) and then got back home at 1am on Friday morning. Luckily he didn’t get stuck in the Crowdstrike debacle, because the other guy in the marketplace didn’t actually get home until 10pm Friday night – spending most of the day on Friday in the airport waiting for a flight. Anyway, Dad and the other guy now have to teach back what they learned to the Marketplace AVP (Associate Vice President) and all the Marketplace Directors… of course they didn’t tell him this before he left. 😀 The only free time he had, he went over to the Mall of America to get dinner. The highlight of the trip was that he bumped into a friend from KC. His friend lived a block away and they went to school together from 1st grade through high school, but hadn’t seen each other since HS graduation.

Sam and Mom have been working tirelessly out in the yard and the dividends are really starting to pay off. The lawn is looking much better, the flowers are in bloom and we have lots of friends dropping by to say Hi. 😀

We also added some new outdoor seating to the venue…

And speaking of new friends… our next door neighbors have put their house on the market and we noticed the other day that it is already pending on Zillow. We didn’t go to the Open House, but we did look on Zillow and when we did we found a drone image of their house and ours. We saved the photo and cropped it a little so you can see our new cottage/shed and the new walking path (the grass is a lot greener in real life 😀).

Just a quick post to bring everyone up-to-date with life in Clayton. First off, Dad had Father’s Day off this year, but unfortunately Alex and Sam had to work. So we had a nice, low-key Father’s Day dinner on the following Wednesday (ribs, beef strips and farmer’s market potatoes and tomatoes). Meanwhile, we finished a couple of more projects around the house as Nana painted the front door and made some new curtains for the downstairs living & dining area. Mom and Sam have also been working diligently in the garden and are now starting to see some of their hard work over the last 2 years starting to pay off, so we decided to show some before and after photos of the yard.