Hi There... A More Personal Post

I realized that with the recent birth-days, death, potty, meta-blog, and Jane Austen* business, I have hardly written about myself and how we're doing these days. It is true that if you like photos, my daily posts at the 365+1 project blog will give you some inkling as to how my days are being spent, but I still want to write about them, not just leave you with the pictures.

Job and House
Things are settling down here now that K is back at his job and very motivated by his new projects. A recent (last Friday) meeting with one of the vice-presidents of the company assured him that by no means this is a secure job. His current group's survival in the company has been deemed an experiment and if they don't present satisfactory results, they'll be out the door at the end of the year again. We won't mind too much if that happens, provided we have our residency secured and other options to pursue. The house across the street to the right from ours that went up for sale less than two months ago already sold, so we know that if we do the requisite renovations to this house, it will most certainly sell it easily since it's located in such a great neighborhood.

We're slowly beginning to work on renovation projects (and I owe you photos of our study and bathroom renovations, I haven't forgotten), the first one will be the boys' bedroom, then the guest bedroom and ours. I will soon post a most overwhelming to-do list to the blog and you'll see how much still remains to be done. We've already moved the boys to the guest bedroom and we hoped to finish painting by next week, but I doubt that it'll happen because we haven't even started! We have to paint ceiling, the window, door frames, and baseboard heat/ baseboards as well as patch some spots of the wall, paint it and then, finally, change all electric outlets and the light switch (this has to be done in every single room). THEN... we will remove the old carpets of the three bedrooms and the hardwood floors underneath will probably have to be sanded and re-finished...

I was feeling very depressed about the house and also not allowing myself to think about the things that we enjoy in it and in this particular region, but now I'm excited again, and I'm enjoying the house and looking forward to Spring and Summer here.

Dissertation (Parents to the Rescue!)
I shouldn't really be thinking about renovations now (and I won't really be working much on it) because I have a dissertation to finish. Good thing that my parents are coming again for the fourth time, poor things, so I can get done once and for all... They've already scheduled their trip and shall arrive on February 12. I want to get started between now and then (and, most importantly, have a defense date scheduled, more on that in a minute), but we also want to have the guest bedroom ready for them, at least painted, if not with the floor ready.

About the defense, I have yet to hear from my fourth committee member, but it looks like my advisor and the other committee members are OK with scheduling it for the second week of April. As soon as I hear back from her (she was on sabbatical last semester), I'll try to get everyone to agree on a date. And then... only then, I'll begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel!! My former advisor and chief helper in terms of revising my drafts is on vacation until the 21st and from then on we'll begin emailing drafts back and forth.

Looking for Enterprises
In other fronts, we're trying to find alternative ways to earn $ so we can do the house renovations and finish paying our remaining debt. I need to get more piano students (at the moment I have only one certain, at my son's school since one former student lives in New Jersey and the others in the city, a bit far) and we're looking into other things. Hopefully some of them will work out. I'm not entrepreneurial in the LEAST and I'm also very cautions and stressed out about money (one of my "issues" that I've been planning to blog about), so it's quite novel learning to be more adventurous and also more assertive in that respect.

Well, I hope to write more often about how things are going, and, hopefully, I'll be able to discuss some of my "issues" here, something I've been putting off until I feel OK about doing it. I'll come back soon with more Austen stuff as well as a couple of reviews for fun kid games.

* I'll be going back to Austen-themed posts soon, at least weekly while the PBS series lasts, I may even create a Jane Austen post label :).