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Since between flying, and working on my car, and my job, and getting stuff in the house organized, I decided that I didn't have enough to do or enough to spend money on, so I'm taking guitar lessons.
We had friends over a little over a week ago, and I bought one of his guitars, with a case, to start my lessons on. It will do for the time being. I've had one lesson thus far; at this point I'm doing fingering exercises and playing scales. Chords come next, I guess.
My father-in-law wanted to know more about the guitar--here you go!
Here's the label inside the guitar body. I'm not a guitar person, so this doesn't mean much to me. 
It's a steel-stringed acoustic. The two highest strings (on the right) are bare steel, the other four are wrapped.
This guitar has a cut-away on the body so that your left hand get get to the very upper part of the fret board.
It has an internally-mounted electronic pick-up. The pick-up jack on the base of the body doubles as the strap attachment point.
This panel contains the battery that drives the electronic pickup, a volume control and an equalizer.
Oh, and my advanced tuning system
The back story: I've always wanted to play a musical instrument. I played piano as a kid, and again in college. I played tuba/suzaphone in high school. For my earlier attempts, I didn't have the maturity and drive to really buckle down and practice. When I took piano in college, I was focused enough to practice, but after that semester I didn't take the class again and it wasn't a priority.
Virtues that I'd like in an instrument: - it's portable - you can sing to it - the more different types of music you can play on it, the better - doesn't make the person I live with want to kill me
I'd love to play drums. But it pretty much fails all the criteria.
Flute is very portable. You can't sing to it. When I mentioned that possibility, my wife made a face and said "I don't even like _good_ flute music". So that's out.
The guitar does pretty well on all counts. It's extremely versatile, a great instrument to sing to, and my spouse seems relatively Ok with it. It's fairly portable. To take it on an airline trip, I'll have to get a good case for it, but that's doable.