Well, I seem to have gotten some of my brain cells back from this afternoon’s writing marathon, at least enough to be able to spend the better part of this evening typing up chapter three and an additional appendix. Woot! Chapter three is practically done; I just want to do some cleaning up tomorrow and get some page numbers from an article sitting on my desk in the office. I should be able to get it out to my committee tomorrow morning then. How exciting! The only drawback is that it’s relatively short, and I’m not sure I’ve sufficiently covered it all, but they’ll let me know one way or the other. Chapter four, the brunt and beast of this study, will take me the longest, ultimately, and it is for that reason that I’m not as concerned at the puniness of chapter three at the moment. It can be fleshed out and expanded later; for now, I want to get chapter four underway.

Of course, the problem with chapter four is that it’s the research-heavy one. That equates to needing all of my sources at hand when typing, an impossibility because there’s no way in bloody hell that I’m going to haul around three fat binders, Buster, four large dictionaries, several notebooks, and twenty-some-odd books which range from reasonably small to what-the-fuck large. I mean, if I used a suitcase or something in addition to the backpack and two totebags, I might be able to manage, but WTF?! NO! There’s no way I’d manage all that shit at one time! I’m resigning myself to the fact that I’m going to have to work on it a suffix at a time, either keeping all the sources for that suffix on me at a time or make tons of notes to myself to look up specific pages and quotes when I have the resource at hand.

I am suddenly reminded of crafting in EQ. Half the time, I want to craft something and get underway with it for a while, only to realize that one resource I need is still in the bank or I have to go find a merchant who sells it or I have to run to some obscure zone to forage for the resources. My thesis is suddenly starting to feel like that: I either have the particular books I need on-hand and can keep working merrily away or I have to wait until I go to another location (home or the office) to get that resource and then incorporate it into what I’m doing. Wow. I’ve been both playing EQ too much and working on this thesis too long; I’m going quite mad. Oh well, it happens.

Speaking of EQ, I told myself that I wasn’t going to touch it until after nine and I had gotten some work done on chapter three, and now that it’s nearly ten o’clock here and I’ve gotten said chapter nearly complete, I feel I deserve some EQ time. I think I’ll go kill some more spiders in East Karana–I’ve gotten to level 24 off of those buggers. 🙂

Thesis counter: 42/55       Insult of the day: salauderies ‘filthy language’