Impatient

You would think that now that I have my thesis done I could concentrate on getting pregnant.  You’d be wrong.  I’m still trying to get my medications sorted out.  I can’t go off of them entirely (tried that in the fall and crashed), but I’m still hoping to get rid of one or two of them.  Specifically, I’ve been taking ativan to help me sleep so I’m trying to wean myself off of it because taking it would be like drinking a glass of wine every night which one shouldn’t do while pregnant.

But, I’m really tired of waiting.  I’ve been waiting and waiting for years now and I have this feeling like my fertility is slipping away while I wait for things to be right.  If I am lucky it will be only two more weeks until I am off of the ativan and then I’m not waiting anymore.

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Done

My thesis is done!  I made the required changes (after much wailing and gnashing of teeth and completely freaking out on Tues. but I blame that on too much caffeine) and my committee approved them and signed my little piece of paper last Thurs.  I then electronically submitted my thesis to the dissertation office.  Husband and I went out to eat to celebrate and I had a champagne cocktail and spent a lot of time saying, “You know what I’m going to do tomorrow?  Not work on my thesis!  Yay!”  Now all that’s left is graduation, at which Husband is going to hood me because Advisor is unavailable that day.  So, we’ll have pictures of both of us wearing academic robes and hoods and being all ivory tower.

So, now what?  I don’t know.

The plan is to quickly get pregnant and then stay home with the baby.  So, I’m not currently looking for a job.  But, if it takes awhile to get pregnant, I might have to look for a job because I’m going to get bored, I can feel it.  What that job would be, I don’t know.  Maybe working at a science museum?

At dinner last week, Husband asked me what I’m going to do with the blog.  I’m no longer a disgruntled grad student.  But, I want to keep the blog.  I’ll just blather along about my life.

Going hard-core

Thesis revisions have graduated from the realm of a cup of tea while working to a pot of tea while working (but on a separate table, I decided I was tired of flirting with disaster).

I’ve got my PLoS One t-shirt on, my adenine necklace on, and my yeast stufftie nearby.  I will finish this chapter of my thesis by this afternoon if it kills me!

Living Dangerously

Cup of tea next to laptop:  necessary evil or potentially computer- and thesis-destroying* accident waiting to happen?  You be the judge.

I’m still working on revisions to my thesis.  One of my committee members wanted me to rewrite my entire methods section to sound more like protocols so that they would be more useful to the lab.  Um, no.

The thing that’s really hanging me up is the intro chapter for which I need to read some papers so I can add a section to it that my advisor thinks would be good but which I think is completely tangential.  But, what I think doesn’t seem to matter much at this point (I thought I had a perfectly fine thesis, for example, but my committee disagreed).

*I do have everything backed up to an external hard drive.  And, I’ve been emailing myself revised versions of everything.  So, I would still have the back-ups should the computer be destroyed by an unfortunate tea incident.

Also

One of my committee members fell asleep during my defense.  For reals.  And, another one looked like he was text messaging the whole time, but supposedly was actually taking notes on his iPhone for questions to ask me.

It wasn’t that bad

I had horrible fears about my defense.  Visions of my prelim exam flashed through my head.  Of course, that happened on 9/11/01 so as long as there was no national disaster/tragedy/unthinkable horror  happening on the same day as my defense it couldn’t possibly be as bad as my prelim.  However, I still feared it like it would be this impossibly difficult thing to pass.  No matter that everyone else passes their defense.  I was sure I would be the only one who didn’t.

The truth is, it wasn’t that bad.  Imagine if you were very interested in a particular topic, you read a good paper about it, and now the first author was standing in front of you and you could ask any question you want.  That’s what it was like.  Not every committee is the same of course, and maybe others take this whole “private grilling” thing much more seriously.  But on the whole, I see why people told me not to worry.  Not that there was any way I could believe them beforehand.  And, I don’t expect other grad students to believe me right before their defense.  But, there was really no point to worrying.

Now, I have a whole bunch of changes to make to my thesis and they need to be done in the next two weeks.  But, if I can get through my defense without having a nervous breakdown, I can get through anything.