No rest for the wicked

ABD, well, that means it's time to get back to work!

Actually I've gotten a fair amount done this week. I had a very helpful meeting about my dissertation topic, although it doesn't sound so helpful when I explain the upshot of it was ... to schedule another meeting. But really, it was useful. I've also been working on three, er, two proposals for ASHE. I'm submitting three; one is already out of my hands, the one with my advisor. Another one is a four-author paper that even if it doesn't get accepted at ASHE has another audience it will probably play to. And then the last one is my paper from my contemporary theory class. Tomorrow's goal is to submit those proposals (they're due at 10:59 p.m.) and to submit a dissertation fellowship application. Friday's goal is to eat pancakes. And, um, that probably won't take all day. Let's pull some things off my "long-term to do list" and my calendar:

• order new beaters for mixer
  
• buy peanut butter at Whole Foods
  
• buy summer foundation at Sephora
  
• avoid thunderstorms
  
• send some PPI emails
  
• go to the gym or yoga
  

ABD

After five years of graduate classes, I am finally done with taking classes forever. Technically, I suppose I could still flunk a class, since grades haven't been posted yet, but that's extremely unlikely. So - basically - I'm all done. To show for it, I have this pile of notebooks to figure out what to do with. All done but the sorting.

And I have a shelf almost full of books. There are still spaces, though - whoops. But I'm done! Whee! Happy dance! For tomorrow, we dissertate.

Random

• Terence posted some pictures from college. My first though was, wow, they look so young! Then I realized that just means that I am getting old. So I pulled out my college photo album and found something weird. The girls look dated (clothes, hair), but they don't look so young. The guys, they look like boys. I don't know what it is, if it's some sort of mental filter and a guy would see the opposite.
  
• Summer is in the air. The temperature is 80 and humid, and I'm already complaining. The graduation tents are going up. And I went to my last class as a graduate student today. Whee!
  
• Papers. Gotta focus on writing papers.

1/3 there

One paper down, two to go. So far my time allocation scheme seems to be working. I had through yesterday to finish my first paper; today, Thursday, and Friday to finish the next one; and the weekend for the final paper. It doesn't make for an exciting week, however.

Now don't think that I'm trying to do an entire paper from start to finish in three days. I've done all my research and written an outline. This is literally just the writing - getting what's in my head and in my references into the paper. As I start to fill in the outline, though, I'm finding that there are points that need to be eliminated, added, or rearranged. (This will be less true of my final paper, which does original data analysis, and thus follows the time-honored form of intro-lit review-data and methods-results-conclusion.) Eliminating points in particular worries me, because my papers always tend to run short.

3 days to write at least 25 doubled-spaced pages. Except I write single-spaced, so that's about 13 pages. Let's say five pages a day. I'm at 2, so back at it.

All circuits are busy

End of the semester
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken