In July, we spent our summer vacation on the Oregon coast; where we celebrated my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday.

Now, a month later, she spent some time at our new home in Alabama. She flew all the way out here from the Sacramento area, on the other side of the country.

I always enjoy her being around. She and I clearly both have the “can’t sit still” gene. We can certainly relate to each other.

As a passive viewer of every episode of every “house hunting” show on HGTV and Roku (because, you know, my wife…), I have always openly mocked the husband and wife as they say, “Oh, this would make a good space for entertaining guests…”

My immediate response to the TV is always, “Yeah right! You are not going to be entertaining guests! That’s just staged footage at the end of each episode that you set up for the camera crew and then you never have anybody over after that!”

I am quite passionate (and skilled) at heckling reality shows: “Really? You just conveniently saw three houses, made an offer on one that the two of you just happened to say the name of at the exact same time and then you were able to buy that house before somebody else made an offer?!”

Now that I think of it, why does my wife keep inviting me to watch these shows with her?

The funny thing is, the entire time we have been in the renovation process (which we are technically almost done with any day now), I have kept telling my wife, “It is very important to me that we host family and friends for meals together.”

So it makes me happy that we’ve already been able to do that, as we had my side of the family over while my mother-in-law was here. We are actually “entertaining guests”!

As I’ve said before, we are aspiring to live a quiet life here in Alabama.

To be able to have my mother-in-law fly across the country from her home near Sacramento to stay with us… to see her and my wife catching up on the back porch as the sun is doing down… that is the quiet life I came here for.