A great breakfast of papaya and lime, blueberries, banana, grapes, donuts, coffee, and Oregon Chai tea with almond milk. I'm feeling alright. I've had some epic nightmares about nuclear war that would be blockbusters, but that's nothing new. I heard that the Twilight author came up with the idea from a dream she had. Well if that's the case, sign me up for turning-dreams-into-money! Lol. I don't even need to pay for Netflix for the horror movies -- I get free ones all night.
In all honesty, I enjoy remembering most of my dreams, even though sometimes it can be scary. It can also be very enlightening, curious, and can spark creativity and solve some of my problems. More than once I have solved a technical problem in my dream (such as figuring out how to manipulate data in Excel or Access) and it helped me the next day.
My advisor commented on my second draft. He said it's coming together pretty well. Of course, he had a big list of things to address, but that's expected. I feel better knowing he thinks it's getting to a decent place rather than a huge 80-page mess. It doesn't have to be perfect (more like how a journal article would have to be), but it has to be "dissertation perfect". I read through some recent dissertations of his other students who graduated in the past few years, and they had typos, bare bones descriptions of things, and were pretty matter-of-fact about many descriptions. That made me feel a little better in terms of knowing that this doesn't have to be a novel that gets edited to the point of a book before publishing -- the point is to clearly communicate all the details of your study and to make sure you did all the analyses correctly in order to be able to defend them.
I also finished confirming the replacement of my outside committee member and I confirmed the defense date. So things are real. I need to book a room and projector for the meeting, advertise my defense publicly (I guess that's required...unfortunately for me!), and get another draft sent to my advisor in the next week.
So I feel slight relief today. Baby steps are all you get in this business. I keep a huge checklist of items I need to do so that I can track those baby steps one-by-one. The list has something like 200 items on it. And I didn't even start tracking until I started collecting data! But at least this way, I can see my progress and appreciate steps forward such as getting confirmation for replacement of the outside member, booking a date, and getting feedback on draft 2. Those are all steps, even if outsiders don't think they are. The bad part about this is that people keep asking,
"Are you done yet?"
"Well no...but wait! I have finished 115 of the 200 steps toward finishing!"
Yeah, doesn't really mean much to anyone except those who have gone through it.
Next week (1 week from today) I begin my leave of absence at work. I will get to keep my benefits, saving me $600/month. I will move to get free rent for 2 months, saving about $2,500. I won't have to worry about finding a job until November, when I start looking again once I'm back at my current job. I will move into a cheaper place for a 6-month lease once I'm up here, and will aim to move to a new job around mid-June, after my month in Hawaii. :) I'd really like to see if I can get my Ireland and Scotland trip fit in next year, but that might have to wait. I need to figure that out still. But I definitely will be taking a month vacation -- it is my present to myself to be done with school forever.
Before then, I already have some plans for when I'm done with this in a couple months (I'll probably know by October 1st if I will graduate):
- 1 week of doing NOTHING but sleeping 10 hours a night, playing Skyrim, and listening to music
- Trip to Crater Lake for snowshoeing and other winter activities
- Visiting Leavenworth, the Bavarian town in Washington (http://www.leavenworth.org/)
- Santa pub crawl
Oh, time for work!
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