Excuse me while I smash that plate over your head.

So yes. The father-in-law.

He met me at the door when I arrived this morning with a brief "Good morning" and a "What is your name?" and that was the extent of our conversation for the day. It isn't due to any language barrier; my employeress assured me that he speaks fluent English, "because he's an ophthalmologist." For most of the day, he just pretended I wasn't there. Okay, fine with me.

Not that we didn't interact, after a fashion. I think there was definitely some communication going on when he rattled his dirty dishes at me from his position in front of the TV, waiting for me to take them to the kitchen. His eyes never wavered from the screen. Plate. Bowl. Spoon. Rattle-rattle. This happened three times over the course of the late morning.  On the positive side, the Granny seemed determined to be extra-friendly, as if to make up for her son's treatment. My employeress told me this morning that her grandmother's only complaint about me over the last month is that I simply do not eat enough. I knew she was trying to fatten me up.

On another subject, we had our first "Sig O's" bookclub meeting tonight and it seemed to go pretty well. We read and discussed "A Visit from the Good Squad" by Jennifer Egan. The conversation was more thoughtful and less faux-intellectual than any bookclub I've ever heard of. My one complaint is that I fixed my mother's famous, nationally-known, award-winning buffalo chicken dip and no one ate any. Except me, of course. But then, the other goodies were...let's just say, not up to bunko levels. Wine, cheese, and veggies, nothing fattening, no beer, very little chocolate. That's gotta change.

What do your books say about you?

Thanks to Pastor and Susan Gehlbach, we are the proud owners of Enough Bookshelves (for now, at any rate). They brought a load of our wedding gifts--which they had been kind enough to haul up to WI last week--and added in two new shelving units. They're pretty enough to go in the living/family/dining room and we worked on setting up the first one last night.

Evan and I have worked on projects before--see my family's house--so we already know that we work well together. And he knows that I really don't know what I'm doing with tools, most of the time. And that I'm often dreadfully clumsy. So, I guess, when I say that we worked on setting it up, really I mean he worked on setting it up and I just tried not to undo anything important. I did take the job of hammering the wooden pegs into the screw holes and, let me tell you, those are some well-hammered pegs.

After the shelf was built and in place came the very most important process of filling it. Cookbooks were an obvious first step, as they had already outgrown their original home in the cupboard over the stove. We have a pretty darn impressive collection of cookbooks, for newlyweds.  After the cookbooks were in place, we started searching our current shelves for "impressive books." I'm going to blame this one on the first week of business indoctrination: we were working on our brand through the books on our public bookshelves. Sigh. Anyway, our brand is, apparently, composed of old things, pretty things, and things no one else has ever heard of.  We still have that second shelf to set up, so we'll see how the brand goes from there. Of course, if they were to set foot in the guest room, they'd see that our brand is leans much more heavily toward "widely-read language and history geeks with 5 different copies of Pride and Prejudice."