A Dissertation, a House, a Graduation

I just have to say "Yeah", because I turned in a draft of my dissertation to one of the professors on my committee. I have been working very hard to get it ready to give to him before he left for Peru yesterday morning. He will be gone until the day before I defend my dissertation, so I had to get it to him. I have been staying on campus writing until late in the night for a while. On Saturday and Sunday I stayed until 5:00 in the morning! Even though I was a little worried for my safety while I was driving to my professor's house after my second all-nighter in a row, it did feel good to leave it under his front door mat and go home to sleep.


Just in case you're wondering, no I'm not done. I still have a lot of work to do (those 30 pages that I wrote in the middle of the night aren't of the highest quality). But I do feel somewhat relieved. Now I just have to get a better version ready to give to my sponsor from Sandia National Labs this Friday.

For your enjoyment I posted one of my favorite graphs from the dissertation. Isn't it pretty?

Now I'll mention a couple other big things that normally would have been on the top of my mind under other circumstances, but have been relegated to lower status because of the "Big Paper". First of all we are now the proud owners of a mortgage - I mean of a house! We signed all the papers and handed over a huge check last Wednesday, while the official closing was on Friday. The week before that we transferred all our savings from our high-interest online savings accounts (that haven't been so high-interest of late with all the rate-cutting the Fed has done - but at least the rates were high while we had money). It's amazing how you can not even having miss tens of thousands of dollars! Of course, all that money was only in our checking account where we would actually pay attention to it for a couple of days. Now, instead of having money that doesn't seem real to us, we have a house that doesn't seem real to us. Hopefully it will seem more real when we actually move to Oklahoma in a couple weeks and get the keys from our realtor. And luckily we will start getting a real paycheck by the time we have our first real mortgage payment due.

The other big thing was that I graduated. Well, at least I walked at graduation. It was fun to wear all those big, heavy robes that come along with getting a Ph.D. For a couple minutes I felt proud of myself - until I remembered that I had to go back to writing as soon as I took the robes off and turned them back in to the rental company. (It was a quick reminder that we shouldn't be "lifted up in the pride of [our] hearts, and wear stiff necks and high heads because of the costliness of [our] apparel", especially when the costly apparel is just being rented.)

Well, I guess I'd better stop since my lunch break is over. I have to get back to writing.