The end of the rope

How does the saying go? Give a person just enough rope to hang themselves? Well I definitely feel hanged. It’s been a stressful week and that’s saying something given the level of stress generally floating around here these days. Frankly, if it weren’t for the fact that I’m barely updating my blog as it is, I probably wouldn’t be spending this time writing, but I figure there are a lot of people out there who are waiting to hear how the progress is coming. So that said, let’s give a bit of a progress update and then it’s back to work for me.

The schedule already warned me that this week was going to be horrid and next week, or rather starting tomorrow, it will be even worse. Last Friday and this upcoming Friday are LOOOOOOOOOONG experiments. How long you ask? Well long enough that I usually spend the night the day before getting things ready, so ~36ish hours? Maybe I’m exaggerating, it’s a ~9am the day before to ~6-7pm the day of kind of event so maybe you can do the math on that one and get back to me. In any case, yesterday I found that I could barely move without being in pain and even when I didn’t move everything hurt, so I’m really looking forward to the repeat this Friday /sarcasm. But do it all over again we will my friends, so I’m preparing myself for that one.

On the non-work side.. wait it’s all work, right? Okay on the school side then, if we assume 100 pages is my Dissertation length, I’m currently 102% done. Which is to say we’re going over the 100 pages or less I expected to hit. Apparently I had a lot to say. Thankfully almost everything is finished at this point. I’m currently doing some last minute model building (which is why I even am taking the time to write this), but all the chapters are written with the exception of the last, or rather the second to last. That would be aim 3 and since it’s still to be determined, there’s a bit of a gap. But I can write around it (mostly) and that’s what I’ve been spending the day doing. It’s going to be a long night though because I still have a significant amount of work to do to finalize everything but the last bit of testing we need to do.

Speaking of which, last update school-PI dropped the biggest, “oh no” he could possible drop. I was told I absolutely need to perform one final test for my aim 3 and it must work. He casually reminded me that it was cool to just take another month to make it happen and I would still be a PhD after I defended, I wouldn’t need to wait until the end of fall to claim the title so to speak. Well, how about no. I really didn’t want to do that and more importantly I had several people (including all of you!) who were waiting for the big event. People who already put time off of work to be there to support me. I may not have blood family that I care for, but I am thankful for the small, but mighty family I’ve formed over the years. Some of them are coming to visit since it’s been roughly 1268904332 years since we’ve seen each other.

All that to say, we have a deadline that I really need to hit. Thankfully I have a small hope that this will be accomplished…. Tuesday. Yeah, talk about cutting it close. According to school-PI it’s okay if I send my dissertation off to the committee the week prior to my defense. That’s great news for me and it gives me the chance to get this last bit of data and processes it faster than I have ever processed data before! But thankfully the software I spent years (literally) writing will do the work for me if all goes well so I really just need to save the outputs, pop it into my dissertation and call it done.

If it weren’t for the long experiment coming this week I wouldn’t even be worried about that part (although I’m honestly losing sleep over my participant canceling at the last minute or something). However, if I can get my data on Tuesday, I will happily forgo sleep that day to finish the last bit of the dissertation and send it off to my committee. For those interested, if that happens I will be making a post that day or the day after letting you all know that it’s time to send me an email reminder to send you a link to my defense. I will do my best to make sure I get the people who already expressed interest in attending, but as you can probably tell AHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! So a gentle reminder would be helpful and by the end of next weekend you should have a link if all goes well for the big day, which is currently scheduled for the 28th.

Now, I am trying to have hope. I really am, because that’s all I get these days, but it could just as easily go downhill very fast. So no promises that we’ll make it unfortunately, it’s not in my power. This week will be super stressful on both ends of the equation, school and work are very demanding at the moment, but I’m determined to finish if I have the opportunity. So please keep your fingers crossed that my participant doesn’t cancel and that I can make it to the end without a stumble at the last minute. Either way I will finish, but it would be a shame if it had to happen later than I expected.

As always, thank you all for following along on this journey. It’s been five years, four since I started documenting, and it’s been a very interesting ride. I don’t know that I would do it the same way twice, but hindsight is 20/20 and you do the best with what you have. The support I’ve gotten from all of you has kept me going and I will be forever grateful for it. I only got two pages in my dissertation to acknowledge the people I felt needed to be thanked and I did my best to even include some of you despite hitting the two pages pretty much right away! Basically this is my way of saying that, one day, should you ever stumble upon my dissertation and don’t see your name explicitly, just know that I appreciate you and you mattered to me, even if I couldn’t squeeze your name into the long list of people I owe my success to.

Maybe all the stress is just making me extra thankful, but I mean it when I say, thank you all!