(no subject)

Another five pages edited. It's not a great rate of progress, but I'm not exactly in a position to complain about any forward movement whatsoever. I should have time to work on it tomorrow while I'm waiting for research participants. I think it will help to work earlier in the day, before I'm exhausted.

We booked our travel arrangements for my defense today. We're staying at the same hotel which housed our wedding guests and the Weddingcon '99 consuite. It's a more-comfortable-than-average hotel with a pool and hot tubs and a truly goofy medieval theme, and at $65 it's only costing us about $25 a night more than a Motel 6. Worth it for the comfort, of course, but the true value of this place will be in the happy memories. The bathed-in-love feeling comes back just thinking about the last time I was there. I think I'm going to need that, come the 26th and 27th of August.

Sooooo sleeeeeeepy.

My two morning research participants didn't show up today. I spent the time plowing through the last twelve pages of editing my Discussion section. My afternoon subject obligingly showed up early, which meant that I could leave work early, so I came home and typed up the changes I'd made in the morning and shipped the Discussion off to John. That's a complete second draft done. Then I collapsed on the bed with curiousangel and took a two-hour nap. Mmmmm. I've now forced myself to wake up so that I won't throw my sleep schedule off completely, but I'm still feeling remarkably sleep-focused.

That's a complete second draft done.

Things left to do:
- Put the sections together and fix all the formatting - line spacing, page numbering, etc.
- Proofread tables and clean up table formatting.
- Clean up figure (graph) formatting.
- Come up with a better first sentence than "Don't call me Ishmael."
- Interleave figures and tables into the Results section, because John doesn't want them in appendices.
- Dig up the last few references I need.
- Make sure that all the references cited in the text appear in the reference list, and all the references on the reference list are cited in the text.
- Add a couple of lines each to the Introduction (citing more evidence for the effectiveness of analog research) and the Results (reporting the correlation between social isolation and family stress).
- Write up the acknowledgements, dedication, table of contents, and abstract.
- Read the whole thing straight through and see if any other changes need to be made. The Discussion in particular may need more tweaking.
- Incorporate any last-minute edits of John's after he gets the second draft back to me.
- Print dissertation, make copies, put them in a FedEx box, and send it to John.

Um. I think that's it.

I can do that.