Ahem…shall I say a long while…yes, and I feel guilty. Rest assured that my absence does not indicate a lack of progress in our house. Things have been busy, we finished up one semester, spent a good deal of travel time over the holiday break, and recently started up a new semester. It has been a whirlwind for me, both professionally (I stick to categorizing myself as a professional student) and personally.

I have made some serious progress toward my dissertation research in the last few months…which, if I remember correctly was the beginning of me neglecting this blog. My academic life is incredibly important to me and generally gets a higher priority than most other things in my life (much to the chagrin of Austin). It is a challenge to separate my personal identity from my academic one, and I sometimes get bogged down and forget to be a human and a scientist. As I progress in my PhD program, it is becoming increasingly clear that I must balance my life out, and working on the house has become one of my favorite ways to do this, though I do love to let myself geek out every now and them. I’m toying with the idea of adding a new page for some of my more scientifically oriented musings…perhaps it will only be of interest to myself, but I think it will be fun to distill my thoughts on more scientifically oriented topics and improve my ability to articulate scientific content. After all…I will be full time writing here soon (read: full time dissertation writing).

But like I said, we have been busy bees over here and I am proud of everything we have accomplished in the last 6 months in this house (I can hardly believe it has already been that long). One thing I have learned is how much I love our home projects….a lot more than writing about them! Though I do love writing and sharing, and I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback lately from people who enjoy catching up via my bloggy-blog. So I’m back, and (hopefully) more committed.

and boy have I got some stuff to share!!

here’s a teaser…our kitchen has gone from this:

to this:

So yeah, things aren’t quite finished in there, but we are so close! And Euclid (the pup) seems to appreciate the new floors more than we do, we couldn’t even get her out of the room to snap a photo! It is by far the most dramatic improvement we have made to this house.

There have been many other projects since the last time I posted, and I will be sharing some of them soon, so stay tuned!