A local diamond

One of my favorite blogs is Chookooloonks. I started following her blog for many reasons - she's a great photographer, and a very creative and passionate person - and then discovered that she lives in Houston! I have not sited her around town (nor have I tried), but its neat to read her occasional stories about life in Houston.

My MIL and FIL gave me a book she co-authored for Christmas: Expressive Photography. I love it. It is all about the art of story-telling through photography.

She writes about many more things than Houston and photography and I really enjoyed reading her post yesterday. You might too. Here's a quote from the post:

From Chookooloonks "random thoughts: the parent trap and other musings:"

In other words, when corporations not only make it acceptable, but encourage their employees to focus on their personal lives in addition to their professional ones, it can only help to enhance the productivity of its workforce.  Moreover, when Corporate America  finally makes it okay for ALL its employees to be parents, then no one will have to sacrifice career for family (or vice versa).

Enjoy!

Finishing projects

The husband and I tend to be terrific project starters and project workers but not project finishers. Oh well. The challenge is that we often enjoy the bigger parts of projects but dislike the parts like sanding and painting.

I finally took the initiative to finish the kitchen console (part 1, part 2) this past weekend. You might recall that this project started many moons ago. I think we'll just leave it at that.

As a refresher, we started with plans from AnaWhite.com.

Photo from AnaWhite.com

The husband worked on the building part.

Then the summer heat and all kinds of other things took over and the console sat lonely in the back room (i.e. projects-in-progress-room). That was until a few months ago when I painted and stained it and then the husband attached the back - without telling me that I needed to paint it. So it sat semi-finished in the kitchen for a few more months until this past weekend. Yay! Here it is, finally!

The details:

• I decided to paint it plain old white because I think this is a little more versatile in the event that we want to move it somewhere else in the house
• The stain is Minwax Ebony - two coats plus two coats of polyurethane
• I don't love the feet and will likely change them out but it was the best we could find at Home Depot and Lowes
• The pulls are from Home Depot and I chose them because they are the same style as the kitchen cabinets and were cheap - easy enough to change out when needed

I love the finished product and look forward to really using it. Despite having sat in the kitchen for all this time, we haven't done much more than pile things on it. So the next project is to get that thing organized and clean up some of the other clutter in the kitchen!

Changing it up

After my week long trip to NC, full of lunches and dinners out with family and friends, I needed a bit of a food adjustment. Feeling a bit uninspired by our food lately, I looked over a few of my favorite cookbooks for something different. I found a simple but tasty recipe for a baby spinach and prosciutto salad from Donna Hay's The New Cook cookbook.

For this recipe, I baked the prosciutto and tomatoes and blanched the asparagus in advance. With the main cooking taken care of, prepping this salad for dinner took about 10 minutes, most of which was spent making the fresh dressing.

There are so many things I love about Donna Hay recipes. The most important is that I know that with one of her recipes I can make a great-tasting meal or dessert with very few ingredients. Plus, her recipes use primarily every day foods, so nothing you will likely have to find at a specialty store. Although I love cooking of all kinds, for busy weeks, Donna Hay is a great go-to for us.

An update on that which is rarely spoken of

Sorry for the huge radio silence here at the messes blog. The blog has received little attention in the past few weeks because of school stuff. I had my dissertation proposal seminar last Tuesday. With the preparation for that, I've been unable to devote much time to anything else.

The whole dissertation and PhD thing is kind of confusing so I thought I would give an update on where I am in the process.

Last week was a big milestone. In my department, you write three chapters of the dissertation (introduction, literature review, and methodology) and complete a pilot study before proposing. At the proposal seminar, you present your pilot data to the faculty of the department and receive feedback. That is what I did last week. And it went well! It feels great to know that the work I've done on this has resulted in some progress.

The next steps are to make any changes (recommended during the seminar) to my research study, complete a full study, analyze the data and write a chapter on the results and a chapter discussing all of that mess.

I don't often speak (write) about what this process has been like for me because it has felt like one of my greatest disappointments (maybe even on the verge of failure). Everyone including myself expected that I would finish in three years and every month since then has seen a little bit more of my confidence dwindle away. I have become abundantly aware of the fact that often this process has nothing to do with me and that I have no control over any of it, which has only made this so much worse.

Proposing this past week gave me back a little of what I've lost over these years. I am so relieved to be one more step further along in this process. In many ways I feel so much better. The weight of this process has diminished a bit. I have renewed confidence in myself and in my ability to finally finish this thing.

I am so very grateful for the support from the few who knew in advance. Sometimes I'm a little superstitious and felt like if I told everyone it wouldn't happen or I would fail. So, I apologize for not putting it out there but with the way this process has gone, I needed luck on my side!

I'm glad to be back and I'll be sure to update you more often here!