Day 54

Hooray, more progress. I even took a great new photograph for my thesis.

My collaborator saves the day today by getting back to me on my paper. I will be spending from now through the weekend working on the paper instead of the thesis. The Boss wants to convene on Monday. That essentially means I'm expected to produce the next draft this weekend. Glad things are predictable.

Oh yeah, a 4th in the lab defended today. Gave me an anxiety attack. I really don't think I can talk about my work meaningfully for 45 minutes. Found out that you only need majority vote to pass though.

Day 53

I have finally booked a date for my preliminary thesis defense. It is September 10. Now, I figure I should have a draft sent to my committee by, say, September 1. That leaves me only a month left to write. Thank goodness. I certainly hope I can finish a draft before then. I also hope my prelims go smoothly and I don't have to do lots of work after it.

Scheduling the actual defense may be hard. I was hoping for it to be 2 weeks after prelim but it might be more like a month. I don't know if I should be scheduling that now. It feels a little too overconfident.

I wrote yet another section of my thesis today. Hooray for me! And my synthesis is happy today. Now I just have to set up my second Soxhlet and I can go home to nibble on homemade garlic herb focaccia.

Day 52

Ah, all is good. Put the progress back in my thesis and did a little more. My syntheses are behaving today. I have a whole slew of expertly cleaned, base-bathed glassware sparkling and dry.

Setting up my preliminary defense date is a small nightmare. It's nearly impossible to get three professors in the same room at the same time. Aaaaah. A sigh of relief. Time to head to the house then!

Day 51

This is a late post. I actually started writing another chapter yesterday (Day 51) but since I have a habit of just sleeping my computer, IT'S ALL GONE! No, not the whole thesis. Just the new chapter. Gahhhhhhhhh. Plus, I came into lab this morning to see my synthesis, once again, misbehaved itself.

On the other plus side, advisor says I should schedule my prelims.
On the minus side, I want to do mid-Sept and defend in early Oct but one committee member is unavailable in Sept.
On the plus side, I got permission to go on vacation in late August.
On another plus side, I got fantastic new data for my old paper.
On the minus side, my advisor doesn't read my emails.
But on the plus side, she did read my email asking for vacation.

I will write again what I wrote yesterday. After I fix the fiasco that are my experiments. Is that grammatically correct?

Day 46

Crisis with my data. I'm still trying to get some good data for my Chapter 3 but I found out today that maybe I've misinterpreted a critical piece two years ago.... Everything I did counted on that.... Now what am I going to do?? Must. Manage. Crisis. GRRR.

Could I get a pity thesis and guaranteed graduation?

Day 45

I resized the y-axis of the graph. But, I would like to announce that I finished writing another chapter! Yeeehaw. I clink my scotch glass with my homemade donut.

What to tackle next? I'm still missing data for my other core chapter. :( I guess I could start word vomiting the last chapter, which is all fluff. Bleh.

Day 44

Darn. I wrote an entire subsection today and there's no change in the page length! If only I followed the suggestion for word count.... I guess it's about time that all those blank spaces from the oversized images not properly formatting should come back and get me.

I actually feel better now that I've written some more of the thesis. I think tomorrow, I should be able to finish the chapter! This is the intro chapter, so it shouldn't be hugely long. And I don't want to bore my reader or myself. Yeah right.

Day 40

Alright. I'm annoyed at myself. That flat line is ridiculously long. Today, I finished editing Chapter 4, which didn't change the length much. The file is a half page longer, though, because moving some paragraphs around affected the spacing around the images.

Anyhow, I think I need to start word vomiting again. Chapter 3 probably isn't ready to be vomited but why not give a shot at Chapter 1. Maybe it's also time to write some lame stuff like the Abstract and Acknowledgements. I kinda don't want to do acknowledgements because I'm so darn annoyed at my graduate career. Bleh.

Day 38

This is both depressing and embarrassing. It's not even day 40 and potential call-outs on my blog no longer motivate me. Well, I don't know, I guess. There haven't been that many call-outs. :P

The paper got over another step but is now languishing. No surprise. I'm too tired to fight that battle so I'm leaving it alone now.

On the plus side, the machines are all working again! I am collecting loads of data (it is what it is, I'll stop labelling data "good" and "bad") this week for my remaining data chapter of the thesis. And right, that second paper I'm supposed to write.

Although it may seem that I've not made progress on my thesis, I have in fact been editing Chapter 2. Gosh that was painfully slow. Surprisingly, I didn't end up cutting enough words to shorten the chapter. I guess I ended up adding them back to clarify statements.

Day 30

Flatlining on the thesis. Been

1. Taking holiday
2. Hacking out a lung
3. Working on finalizing my paper.
   

Day 26

Finally! I have word vomited two entire chapters of my planned five chapters. This is really amazing. Also, oddly, I have finally caught up in number of pages to the number of days since I began this thing. How sad. Only today I have reached 1 page per day.

Not to worry though. I'm going to take a break from writing new content to hopefully

1. get my darn paper submitted
2. edit the vomit of the 2 chapters

The page numbers will soon decrease....

Day 24

Today started horribly. I didn't even go to lab today because of a terrible headache. Ug. At least was able to continue moving forward.