Labor day parade

Ashley's FFA teacher, Denine Trump, called her one day, a week or two before labor day and asked her if she thought her dad might have something they could use in the parade. In the past the FFA class has always just piled into the back of one of the pickups but this year she was hoping to be able to do something different. Well it just so happened to be that we had this big truck of some sort sitting here in our driveway for the past month! - Oxbo tends to leave random pieces of equipment parked in our yard through-out the year because we have room and we're kin of a central location-
So Bob was able to come home from Alberta about 3:00 that Saturday morning and that day they started working on the truck. It's a spreader truck of some sort so they had to build a false floor for the kids to sit on. He was really good about making sure the kids were involved in the work. He had Ashley & Jenna cutting all the boards to brace in for a floor. Then they screwed a bunch of sheets of plywood on top of the braces and we crossed our fingers hoping it would hold them all so they wouldn't end up in the bottom of the 'V' of the box!

In typical Bob style he decided it would not be complete without a kick butt stereo system. So he spent some hours out there wiring stuff and I scoured the internet for "appropriate" country/farm music to put on the ipod. Out in his shop he has the stereo system we got way back in the 90's when the speakers used to be 3ft tall, so he mounted those on to the back of the truck, wired them into some sort of inverter system, and I really don't know how but after a trip to radio shack for some adapters managed to get it working so that the ipod could be plugged in and playing at waaaay more decibels than was really necessary.
We brought it down to the school where a few more kids from FFA worked on loading some hay bales into it and adding some decorations.

Monday morning we had to be at the school at 7:30 to be judged and to hurry up and wait in line for the parade which didn't start until 10. They were hoping to at least place in the parade this year since they never have in the past and as we're sitting there waiting Bob & I decided to walk around and talk to some other people and check out some other entries when suddenly we hear a whole lot of cheering and yelling coming from the truck. Not only did they 'place' they got FIRST!! Bob happened to have a pack of zip-ties behind the seat - ok who am I kidding. He didn't "happen to have" he never leaves home with-out at least one pack of zip-ties! - so he strapped that trophy to the top of the truck and we were ready to hit the road!

It was a very fun weekend. Made for a long busy day but the response the kids got from the 'fans' was well worth it!  We had never gone to the labor day parade so we didn't realize how HUGE it was. I had bought 5 large bags of candy which I thought would be plenty but we ran out long before the end of the route. Lesson learned for next year. Much to Ashleys dismay we allowed Kendra & Tyler to ride along in the truck with the FFA kids...(only because the teacher said they could:) and it was definitely a great time for them too.

One other small hicup, besides running out of candy, was a fuse issue. As we got started the kids cranked the stereo in the back and it kept blowing fuses! This truck isn't the easiest thing to drive through city streets so as Bob is trying to pay attention to that I'm frantically combing through the manual, ripping various fuses out of the dash trying to figure out which ones we really can do without just to keep the speakers running. After all, without the music you lose the whole effect!;) Finally we figured out that if the kids in the back would just lower the volume about 2 decibels the fuse would stop blowing. So I tried to sort of climb out the window to yell instructions back at them. Thankfully we had all those glitches worked out by the end of the first block and it was smooth sailing from there!