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Note from last night around 4:00 PM

I feel like I'm losing my mind a bit. The clouds are sporadically placed throughout the sky, passing in front of the sun every 10 minutes or so for about 1 minute. It kind of reflects my mood. I feel moments of sheer panic about too much to get done when I think about the faces of my committee members and them reading it, and then I make some progress and I feel relief because I feel that I may finish this tonight in time to get some sleep. Then I feel exhaustion set in and I feel that the next 10 hours are going to be very painful. Then I feel like, "Hey, I can only do so much and it's going to be at a decent place when I send it tonight, even if I don't happen to capture every little detail in there perfectly."

Note from this morning around 9:00 AM

I'm totally losing it! I worked until 2:30 AM and then took a 1.5-hour nap and got up to finish the draft. It's such a tremendous task to edit this document. I went through most of the feedback from advisor's 4 rounds of comments, added some of L's and B's comments, and now I'm going through it once myself. I hadn't actually sat down to edit it yet because I was so busy working on stuff behind the scenes. I've been editing sentences and things here and there as I've been going, but I haven't looked at the big picture yet. It's taking forever to edit. I'm only on page 7 out of 145! Lol. It's not even funny though. I'm out of my mind. Last night I laughed at this sentence that my advisor had asked me to clarify because he didn't know what it meant. Well, I reread it and I had no clue what I originally meant either, but then I COULD NOT stop laughing for 10 minutes because something just struck me as funny about it. I was laughing uncontrollably for a good 2-3 minutes and then I kept randomly giggling as I was trying to rephrase it, and I think R thought I was nuts!

"Trenton, Jones, and Smith (2011) found that both hindrance stressors and challenge stressors were appraised separately, but they were also appraised as both hindrance and challenge simultaneously to some degree."

As you can see, it's pretty much one of the LEAST funny sentences imaginable!! Hahahha. That's how you know when you've lost it, when you laugh hysterically at something as boring as that sentence!! Uh oh...just rereading it is still making me laugh...

I have no clue how I'm going to make it through the next 138 pages. Technically my writing ends on page 79, so post-page 79 it should be easy double-checking of tables and references. But still...that means I have 72 pages left. I need to work at a pretty fast pace because I need to send this by noon Pacific time so that the committee receives it before they leave for the day. It's due tomorrow but I had originally hoped to send it sooner. Well, it has proven to be a good idea that I decided to continue working on it for a few more days because I've improved it a lot since last weekend. Like maybe from a 70% grade to an 80% as of this moment. I think I'll have it at about 85% by the time I send it -- a solid B. I expect that the feedback from my meeting and the additional time to make one more round of revisions after my meeting would take the draft up to a 90% or 95%. I don't expect anything more than a 90%. Please just let me get it to a B grade in the next two hours...that's all I can think about.

P.S. - At 5:00 AM this morning when I was furiously calculating simple slopes for my moderated regression, a mouse ran by me and I screamed very loudly. It scared the h*** out of me. I couldn't stop working, so I kept solving my equations while the mouse was staring at me. It was actually kind of cute. It ended up running by me again about 20 minutes later on its way back down to the basement, at which point I screamed again and jumped because I'd forgotten about it. All I can say is, it's going to be a relief to send this, even if I don't feel great about it (which I'm anticipating, but I hope I can not have that anxiety after I send it--I'm going to work on that). I will watch Game of Thrones and sleep. What a day.