In-Laws Visit

Hello everyone!  I hope you all had a wonderful weekend.  Chris’ mom and Mike came down to visit us this weekend and today I am thankful for them.  I am very lucky and blessed to have such wonderful in-laws.  I really enjoy spending time with them and it was great to have them in town for a few days even though it was a quick trip for them.  They started their 10 hr drive back to MN today and I am hoping they have good roads today being it was raining here when they left.

I knew my mother-in-law and Mike before I even knew Chris.  It was because of Mike that I met Chris in the first place.  I hear from other friends “awful in-law” stories but I do not have that at all.  I feel like part of the family and really enjoy spending time with all of Chris’ immediate and extended family members.

Mike did a LOT of work for us around the house this weekend.  I felt really bad that he spent his vacation time working around the house, but he taught both of us a lot of things.  They ran speaker wire for the two back speakers for the surround sound, changed out a couple of the light switches, and installed a ceiling fan.  They one project we thought would be quick and easy was hanging a shelf to put one of the speakers on in the family room.  It turned out to be the most difficult including needing an extra trip to Lowe’s to fix it.  If there is one piece of advice I can give on home ownership, it is to NEVER buy a “floating” wall shelf.  We finally ended up buying some decorative wall brackets to mount underneath the shelf so that it would hold on the wall instead of continuing to fall off the back bracket.  In doing so, we determined that the shelf itself was warped and would not lay flat on the brackets.  After resting the speaker on the shelf for a while, the shelf started to settle and the warping seemed to ease.  Needless to say there multiple people had a few choice words throughout that project.  Now we know to just buy shelves with angle brackets to begin with.  It would have saved us a lot of headache.

We did squeeze in some board game fun this weekend as well as a lot of eating out so it wasn’t all work.  All in all it was a great weekend and we look forward to seeing them again for the holidays.

Bessie

PS – as a follow up to my last posting, Grandpa is now out of the hospital with antibiotics in tow to help get rid of his pneumonia.