We've been pretty busy the past couple months, hence the reason we haven't posted in a while!

In October we started taking a wine class, and it has been a blast!  Our first class was on wines from the North Americas, so we covered California, Washington, Oregon, Argentina, and Chile.  Our two new favorites from that class were The Pinot Project, and the Palmina Arneis.  Our next class was on wines from France.  Our third class was on Italy, Spain, and Portugal.  And our last class will be on Germany and Austria.  We've really enjoyed learning about different regions and tasting different wines, and we're looking forward to taking the next class in February!

I've been very busy with class, research, and clients lately.  One of my classes recently ended, so I should be slightly less stressed at least until after Thanksgiving!  I'm currently seeing 3 couples and 6 individuals for therapy.  I've also recently been working on writing an entry for the Cultural Sociology Encyclopedia of Divorce, as well as various sections for a paper on cyclical relationships.

I (Jonathan) have been keeping busy at work, working TONS of overtime, which is good! I have been thrown in with a new team to work on a preliminary project to see if the ACTUAL project is doable. Which puts a lot of pressure on us to deliver a product that the client wants. If it is successful then next year will be VERY busy!

This past weekend we went to Kansas City to celebrate our 4-year anniversary of being a couple and our 6-month wedding anniversary.  We celebrated with a nice dinner on Friday at The Capital Grille at the Plaza.  On Saturday we did some shopping and in the evening we went to a performance by Idina Menzel at the Kauffman Center.  She was great, and performed some songs from Wicked, Rent, and other musicals.

This is us at our hotel before dinner:

Us at dinner:

Jon wanted a picture of my hand with my steak to show how big it was:

Our view of the stage at the Kauffman Center for the Idina Menzel concert:

Idina Menzel!!!:

So I (Jonathan) have been pretty busy these last two weeks! My job has been going very well! The drive takes about 50 minutes, with me driving on the now 75 mph I-70! It's a really nice drive, since I'm driving through the Kansas Flinthills area. Since it's so early when I am heading to Topeka, recently there has been a lot of fog, so with the hills it looks like I'm driving in and out of a sea of fog! Very cool! The computer that I use at work is VERY nice. It definitely rivals the computer I built for myself. Both the CPU and RAM is about double what I have, but I still have a better video card! Currently Bartlett & West has a fairly large contract with the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad company and so my team has been primarily focused on that. During my day, I enter different utility and road crossings into a geographic database. This makes it a lot easier for BNSF to find where there are underground water pipes or other things. What I do is pull up a permit, that might say that at Mile Post 23.5, there is a sewer line that crosses at a 90 degree angle to the track. I then pull up the geodatabase, and draw out the sewer crossing where it is supposed to be on the map of the railroad. That way, if BNSF needs to do some landscaping there, they can see that there is something there, and they can also pull up the permit to find out more information on the lease. We have also been given the go-ahead to work overtime, so I have been doing a bit of that as well.


Not a whole lot has been happening with me (Rachel).  I started my fall semester classes on the 22nd.  I'm taking a stats class and a class about assessments that we give to clients.  I've also been doing more research projects and I've been continuing to see clients.  I currently see five clients on a regular basis.  I've also been looking at PhD schools a lot recently.  Right now my top choice is the Sociology/Demography program at Penn State.  In order to get in there I would need really good GRE scores (kind of like SAT or ACT, except for graduate school, and MUCH harder).  So if anyone has some good advice about GRE prep, let me know!  My current second choice is Bowling Green State University in Ohio.  Other schools I'm looking at are University of Arizona, Colorado State University, and University of Wisconsin.  I won't start applying until next fall, so I've still got a while!

For a couple months now I have had a sore/blister on the inside of my bottom lip.  I went to the doctor a few weeks ago and she gave me some medicine and told me if it didn't get better to go to a facial plastic surgeon.  I went there last week and the doctor told me I had a blocked salivary gland.  He said that it would take a simple procedure to remove it.  I went in on Tuesday to have it removed, and it was slightly more invasive than I was expecting.  The incision is about half an inch long and is stitched up.  My lip swelled up pretty bad and it was definitely more painful than I was expecting.  The worst part has been that I can't eat very well and when I smile the stitches pull.  I went back to the doctor yesterday and they said it was more swollen than it should have been, but other than that it looks like it's healing and I should be good in a couple weeks.  That's been my excitement this week!


The weather here has been gorgeous lately!  We've had highs in the low 80's and mid 70's with little to no rain and sunny skies :)

Big News!!

We have had some big news this week!

Jonathan received an offer for a GIS Technician position at a company called Bartlett & West!  He has been pursuing this position over the summer and heard yesterday that they wanted to offer him the position.  Today he spoke with the company and accepted their offer.  He will be starting on the 29th of August.  We are really excited since this position is exactly what he was looking for.  From his interaction with the people at the company it also sounds like the position is fairly flexible in what he will be doing, and he will also have the opportunity to learn more of the programs that are used in this field.  Here is a link to the company if you want to find out more:

http://www.bartwest.com/

Also, I received an offer to be part of a research team that is going to China in May of 2012.  My advisor has done research on couples and domestic violence in China and he takes a team there every other spring to collect data.  We will be going for about two weeks in the latter part of May.  We will be presenting on MFT related topics, collecting data, and sightseeing.  We will fly into Hong Kong, but we will spend the bulk of our time in Guangzhou and Beijing.  I can't wait!

New Apartment!

This past week we moved into our new apartment!  We have been waiting for this since we got back from our honeymoon because we were getting pretty cramped at our old place.  We began packing last weekend and my parents came down on Tuesday.  Wednesday we moved all of our stuff into the new place and Thursday we all cleaned the old place.  We have spent the past few days unpacking and getting settled but I think we're done!  We really like the new place!  The kitchen has a lot more counter space than our old apartment did, which is good because we like to cook a lot.  We also like having two bedrooms.  We're using the second bedroom as an office with both of our desks and computer stuff.  The bedrooms are smaller than the bedroom at our old place, but we like the layout here a lot better.  This new apartment is also closer to campus so when it gets cooler out (not likely to happen anytime soon) I might actually be able to walk or ride my bike to school!

July was a pretty boring month for us.  I was taking a class and seeing clients, but not much else.  It got pretty hot here, we had 22 days of temperatures over 100 degrees, and that's not counting the heat index!

Here are some pics of our new place:

Above is our living room and the door out to the deck

Above is our dining room and the kitchen (Jon is cooking chicken curry!)

And this is our office!

New Car!

This is a picture of Jon with his/our new car!  Most of the jobs Jon has been looking at are in Topeka and we just couldn't justify keeping the Jeep which has poor gas mileage.  We decided to look for a newer and more reliable car and yesterday we went to Kansas City to look at used Toyota Corollas at a few different dealerships.  We decided on one and went back this morning to purchase it.  So this is our 2010 Toyota Corolla!

Other than that this past week hasn't been very exciting.  It has been VERY hot and humid here, with temperatures in the 100's and heat indexes in the 110's.  And the heat shows no sign of stopping!

I have been very busy the past week or so!  I finished the things I was doing to help the doctorate student with his dissertation coding.  I've also been working a lot on the project we're doing for the governor.  It's been a lot of work, but I really enjoy it so I've been having fun!  I also started my summer class on the 16th.  The whole class is about couples therapy.  Couples therapy is what I'm most interested in, so this class has been fun so far.  It's only 6 weeks long, so it's pretty jam packed and I will definitely be busy for a while!

Jon has been working on setting up some interviews for jobs. He's also continued to work on our media PC.  He's been cooking a lot lately, and he's also been driving me to and from school lately.  It's a big help to me because then I don't need to go to school super early to try to find a parking spot!  Jon has also been doing some things around the apartment for me :)  Today he hung all of the picture frames with our wedding pictures in them:

We received the CD in the mail with our pictures on them and it took us a while to decide which ones we wanted prints of.  We also get a memory book of some prints free from the photographer, so we have also had to pick out the pictures we want in that.  One of my bridesmaids and friends, Jessy, is going to scrapbook some of our prints for us as well, so we still have more pictures to choose!

Last weekend we went to the Bed Bath & Beyond in Topeka to order some things off of our registry that we didn't receive.  The Bed Bath & Beyond there is bigger than ours, so it had a little more selection.  We also bought some things off of our registry at Target.  After all that, we are completely out of giftcards!

We move into our new apartment in a little over a month now (August 3rd), and I think we are both ready now!  Our new apartment will be a little bigger, but it a more efficient use of space we feel like.  It will have two bedrooms so we will use one as an office.  Right now both of our desks are out in the living room and it looks pretty cluttered.  So only 39 more days of being cramped!

The past couple of weeks have been fairly eventful.  My Grandpa George passed away on June 4th and we drove to Iowa Tuesday and Wednesday for the visitation and funeral.  He had suffered a stroke a week before our wedding, but we were able to visit him in the hospital after the wedding reception.  It was good to see my family and remember the fun times we had with my Grandpa, but he will be missed greatly.

After returning last week I finally saw my first client at the clinic!  I am doing co-therapy with a guy in my program who is also one of my really good friends here.  We are seeing a couple.  I was really nervous for my very first session, but it went pretty well and I'm excited to continue seeing them!

Jon has been enjoying his "vacation".  He's been working on our media PC, which is a computer with all of our movies and TV shows stored on it.  It's been a long process of putting all of our movies and shows on (we have over 300), but we've been able to use it and it's very convenient!  He also found out that a GIS project he did at Central this past Spring is going to be written up into a paper by his advisor and will be published and presented at a conference in Turkey this summer!

It has been extremely hot and humid here lately.  We have been in the 90's and 100's almost everyday.  It cooled down a bit this weekend, but this week is going to be hot again! We were able to buy a small Weber gas grill with our Target giftcards from the wedding and we have been taking advantage of the "nice" weather and grilling out quite a bit.  It's been nice not having to heat up our apartment with the stove!

What we've been up to...

After the wedding we honeymooned at Couples Tower Isle in the Ocho Rios region of Jamaica.  We loved the resort and we can't wait to go back someday!  Be sure to look at the pictures we posted on facebook!


If you haven't already looked at the wedding pictures, be sure to do so!  They can be found on the photographer's website: http://www.blind-photography.com/index2.php  Once there, click on "Proofs & Orders".  This will take you to a new page where you will then click on our names and enter the password: lindstrom  The pictures are arranged by different categories and most have more than one page of pictures.


After returning from our honeymoon, we returned to my apartment in Manhattan, KS.  My parents drove down and brought Jonathan's things and the wedding presents.  Needless to say our one-bedroom apartment is now very crowded!  We have been rearranging and organizing things most of this week, as neither of us really have work/school things to do yet.  We bought a new desk for Jonathan and we found a good used dresser on craigslist for Jonathan as well.  


This week I was offered a small summer assistantship!  I was planning on working at the mall at Bath & Body Works or Gap, but I was NOT looking forward to it, so this assistantship was a lifesaver!  I will be working for my advisor, and I will be helping him with a state funded marriage study, and I will also be transcribing and coding interviews for the Air Force studies that he conducts.  In addition to my paid research work, this summer I am also helping a doctoral student with his dissertation by doing some meta-analysis coding.  I do not start class until June 16th, but I will start seeing clients at the clinic soon!  So far, it looks like I am going to have a busy summer!


Jonathan has mostly been organizing his things this week.  He had quite a bit of computer stuff to set up and also set up the computer desk we bought.  He has been learning to find his way around Manhattan, and is doing pretty well!  He is still job searching and today talked with a company called Bartlett & West here in Manhattan.


We had severe thunderstorms and flash flooding here last night, but it looks like the next week it will be hot and humid; sun and highs in the 90's! Perfect time to not have A/C in the Jeep!

We're Blogging!

Since we have a lot of family and friends spread out over the country, we figured a blog would be a good way to keep everyone informed about what's going on with us!