Finishing Touches

In my post summarizing last summer, I showed some pictures of the bathroom in my in-laws' house that I painted. We hadn't gotten any decorations for it by that point, but a couple months ago when they were in Puerto Rico (where my father-in-law's dad is from), my mother-in-law bought a few sea-themed decorations. And at some point she also found a shower curtain that matched perfectly! So I thought I would do a quick post to show you some true "after" pictures.

(Some of you can probably tell I'm still a newbie at photo editing, haha. I'm sure I overdid it a bit, like how the shower curtain is glowing in the dolphin one, but oh well.)

Another Road Trip

We spent the last week driving to Virginia again. Monday morning was kind of crazy. Chrisser needed to go to the animation lab for an hour to put some finishing touches on his shots for the film they are working on, so I went to take him there at 7:30 in the morning. As we were leaving, we noticed that our car was making noises, kinda like a spraying noise, under the hood. We were freaking out since we were supposed to leave for VA an hour and a half later, but Chrisser really needed to finish those shots so I took him to campus anyway. I drove straight from there to the shop I always take our car to. They weren't going to open until 8:00, so I was planning on just sitting there waiting until then. But the Jiffy Lube that is pretty much in the shop's parking lot was open and a couple employees were just hanging out outside since they didn't have any customers at the moment. So I walked over and, trying not to cry, explained the situation. One of them came over and looked at the car and discovered we were just out of power steering fluid. So he refilled that for me and, when I asked how much that would cost, said not to worry about it. Then he even gave me the rest of the bottle in case we needed more out in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming or something. Yay for nice people!

So we did get to leave right about when we intended to and didn't have any more car trouble, thank goodness. That day we drove all the way to North Platte, NE, stopping at some interesting rest stops in Wyoming on the way.

That night we stayed in a little motel, and we were rather excited to find that our room keys seemed to be "psychic paper" (a Doctor Who thing; a seemingly blank paper that shows a person whatever they are expecting to see, basically. The doctor uses it as "identification" a lot.).

The next day we drove to Nauvoo, IL, where we camped in Nauvoo State Park for the night. That was a bit of an adventure. A huge storm came through that night, which made it hard to sleep since we were just in a tent. Luckily it didn't start raining until after we got our tent set up so we were mostly dry. A few drops would occasionally make their way through the roof and drip on us, but not too often. The biggest problem was just how loud the rain was and how hard the ground was. But we survived. Oh, also, the evening we were there happened to be one of the evenings that Living Legends, a BYU group that performs Latin American, Native American, and Polynesian dances, was performing there. Chrisser and I had both only seen their show once before and it was quite a while ago for both of us, so that was fun. We also got to spend the whole morning wandering around town.

We went to the brick yard, which is the one place Chrisser kind of wanted to go to last year but we couldn't find soon enough, and we got one of the bricks that they give to all the families that sit through their presentation. And we also just wandered the gift shops for a while. Didn't buy anything 'cuz we have no money, but it was fun anyway.

Then we drove to my cousin's house in Ohio. She and her little boy weren't there, as they were visiting her parents that week, but her husband was home so we were still able to spend the night there. He had left for work before we got up in the morning, so Chrisser decided to leave a little thank you note on the kitchen table...

Yes, it was made from the little shape tile toys he found on the game shelf, haha. I had thought about leaving a Thank You on the fridge with their letter-shaped magnets, but I didn't see a T or a Y :(  And this one was definitely more noticeable anyway.

And then we arrived in VA on Thursday. Chrisser didn't get to stay at home for long, though. Early Friday morning he had to leave for a leadership retreat for work. It is a 2-1/2 day retreat for all the directors at the camp he will be working at this summer. It's kind of weird for me, as there hasn't been a single day since we got married that we haven't seen each other at all. There have been a couple of days when we only saw each other for like an hour or so, but never not at all. Ah well, it was bound to happen sometime.