Snow!

We've been hit by several snow storms, as has much of the rest of the country. While it's not so fun for us to shovel it, nor to try to drive on it when we don't have 4WD cars, Binsey is one happy puppy.

She really wanted to help Paul shovel...

So I brought her outside and she got right in there and told the snow where to go


And when the snow got out of line, she snuck up on it


Meanwhile, we're on week 3 of waiting for our HOA to approve our fence. It will be so nice to let Binsey run around off leash! And nice for us not to have to bundle up in our snow gear every time she needs to go out... Hopefully it'll come through soon!

Big Week!

This week Paul finished his first week at his new job! He's working for the local small business development center and we're excited about this opportunity! His commute is even shorter than mine - just 5 miles versus my 7 to campus. What a change from Chicago where we commuted 25 miles in bumper-to-bumper traffic taking an hour or more each way. It is so much nicer to be driving quickly past cow pastures and forests rather than sitting in that dense traffic.

On my end of things, I'm struggling to come up with an "interesting" and "feasible" master's paper topic since my previous master's thesis doesn't count here. Given that I have never done sociology research before, it's a challenge to come up with something new!

New Couch

Big excitement here this morning at the Simacek house: we got a COUCH!
Here it is in all its sitting glory:


Also, it snowed a couple inches last night, and Binsey's face is loving it!

A Domestic Experiment

Today we decided that Binsey is finally old enough that we can comfortably move her crate from our bedroom to the living room downstairs. As she's gotten bigger, there is more of her that smells like a dog and as much as we like her, we'd prefer to have our separate sleeping spaces.

We moved her crate down there late this afternoon and put her in there after dinner. So far, she's been pretty quiet there apart from a few grumbles and some whining. Hopefully tonight will be a quiet one!

Closet Space

Our last home project of my winter break was to improve our master bedroom closet. It's a sort of oddly shaped walk-in closet with two long shelves that didn't use the space very well. So I bought a Rubbermaid closet kit that was on sale at Menards, and we got to work putting it up. It is a pretty simple thing, just level the rails and screw it into the wall. It's the kind of thing you can do in a couple hours - BUT that's not counting removing the old hardware, filling in the holes it leaves in the wall and painting it over. So the quick project took about three days while we waited for spackle, primer and paint to dry, but the finished product is great! Plus, we can move the shelves/rods around any time we want.


I can finally put my sweaters on shelves that I can actually reach AND see! Yay!

New Semester

Last week was my first week of classes for the spring semester. We learned that one student decided not to return for the spring, so my cohort (I hate that word, but I don't know what else to call the people who started the same program as me in the same year) is now a little smaller. We had a cohort game night on Friday, and it was really great to see everyone; it's a great group I'm with, even if we do have very different political views (I try to avoid those conversations!).

Right now I'm taking three courses. One is a mandatory statistics course that I tried to get out of because I already took graduate-level statistics in the Sociology department at the University of Chicago, but apparently the course at Indiana covers more information so I have to take it again. Second is another required course that I can't get out of - Sociological Research Practicum (whew!). Basically it's a class to help get our master's papers started (yes, I have to write a second master's paper). Actually, it's not all that bad repeating things beacuse you always learn something new when you read something again, and it will help make my research skills even stronger.

The third class I'm taking is called Mental Health/Illness. It specifically has both health and illness in the title to make the point that these are two very different ways of looking at the issue. It will be really helpful for me to see how sociology looks at this issue since I've only really looked at it as a psychologist. I'm also working as an assistant instructor for an undergraduate sociology course on mental illness, so I'll be getting a double-dose of information!

All in all, I think this semester will be pretty manageable. In the meantime, I'm keeping my fingers crossed as I wait to find out whether I'll be getting any grants that I've applied for! I won't hear anything until March or April, so it's a long wait for what could be a lot of money! Wish me luck!

DIY dining room chair rail

We just finished our first big project in the house - the dining room. We figured we might as well do it now before we have any furniture for the room. The houses in our neighborhood are pretty cookie-cutter, so it's really nice to have something that feels like our own.

Here's what it looked like before:


The whole house has that same beige color on the walls with the white baseboards.

Here's how it looks now, with wedgewood blue paint and chair rails along the wall. We love the new look, and it's so great to see something like this that we've done with our own hands!


On a side note, the painting on the wall is one that Paul's grandfather made. It looks great with the new color scheme!