July 17, 2012

Mom and Dad’s Visit and Father’s Day Gift

My parents came to visit two weekends ago while they were in town for the Good Guys Car show. Unfortunately the show was scheduled for the hottest weekend to date, so they were a little miserable during the day at the fairgrounds (well, as miserable as my dad can be when he’s around old cars). It doesn’t help that they drove his Nova 3 hours to get down here (well, it probably took him 4 – 4.5) without air conditioning and then went straight into the fairgrounds for a few hours. They were still overheated when they got to our house on Friday.

They hadn’t seen the house yet, so it was great to show them everything – they were impressed. We think are families are always surprised at how big and fairly nice the house it. We assume everyone just thought we’d buy a starter home, but we don’t plan to go through the home-buying process anytime soon. We had dinner and just hung out at our place until bedtime. Mom gave me some suggestions for our garden/landscaping areas that we are already putting into place – she’s kind of an expert at that kind of thing. I was waiting to do some things until she came down and gave me ideas.

They were getting up at 5:30 a.m. to get back to the fairgrounds because dad wants to get a certain spot so he can watch all of the cars come in. I was picking my mom up around 11 to hang out for the day. We went to Morgan House, lunch, for Jeni’s Ice Cream, and then to Earthfare. Once mom and I got home, dad had already returned to the house so they got ready to head over to where most of the people with their old cars cruise around for the evening. We took these pics when Lo and I got home from watching the UFC fights. My parents were still up despite the fact that they were getting up super early again to hit the car show for a couple of hours before driving back home.

It was a short visit but nice. I’m looking forward to more family coming to visit (hint, hint sisters, if any of you are reading this). 🙂

Below is my Father’s Day gift for dad – I just got them to . He’s really hard to buy for because he has such simple tastes, like neon green car show shirts. His main hobbies are classic cars, playing basketball, watching high school basketball, and hanging out at an auto body shop (he’s actually in the tv commercial for the shop). Those hobbies aren’t very conducive to buying gifts that he’s use a lot. I had mom scan pictures of cars that he has (he doesn’t have the black ’39 anymore, but its one of the ones that he had the longest and rebuilt first). I organized them into a collage and framed them. I also gave him a few smaller prints because sometimes he likes to have them when he’s at various car shows. He seemed quite pleased with them. Now I’m out of ideas again for him for presents, but I have until Christmas – though his birthday is days after Christmas, so it’s a double-whammy.