Dissertation Alert! All that is standing between me and my dissertation (and, hence daily blog entries) are:

31 papers and final grades to taly!

Then, I'm on leave until January, 2008 and have from now until September 8, give or take a few days (weeks? God forbid) before I add another human to the world and thereby effectively cut off any hope I would ever have of finishing the dissertation as I drown in a sea of dirty diapers (cloth, thank you very much) and baby vomit.

So, this time, I'm really on the clock.

What's the state of the state with the D, you may ask?

1. Introduction -- Ready to be read by whole committee.
2. Chapter 1 -- unwritten, but synthetic chapter not requiring much research.
3. Chatper 2 -- 2/3rds written, needs revising, 1/3 needs composing, integrating into the chapter, some bit of research left.
4. Chapter 3 -- Ready to be read by the whole committee.
5. Chapter 4 -- Complete, needs revising (the de-po-mo-ification project: more on this later.)
6. Chatper 5 -- Same as chapter 4.

So, there it is. Here I am.

Uninterested baby readers, skip this:

What's the state of the state with the B, you may ask?

The daily unremitting nausea has mostly lifted (it only took 5 months -- first trimester my ass!), but about 1 day out of every 10 I am debilitated by nausea. (which I have correlated to the times that I guilt myself into taking the fucking prenatal vitamin. Before you freak out and send me hate mail for how I am abusing my unborn fetus, new vitamins that are supposed to be better are on the way.) I STILL have to eat every 2 hours no matter what or I'll get nauseated. I am rapidly gaining girth, although not much weight which I guess is OK. Plus, bonus points for how I thoroughly freaked out Spousal Unit the other night when I said, "hey, look at my belly -- you can actually see the kicks now--" as a particularly vigorous kick made my belly look as it it had been inhabited by an alien. That was pretty funny, but overall I'm not really enjoying being pregnant, and I swear on a daily basis to SU that this will absolutely be an only child. (yeah, yeah, I know everybody says this, but I MEAN it.)

So, there it is. Here I am.

And, here I go - back to the grading. I'll see you all (if anybody is still out there other than my mom) in a couple of days!

SG

P.S. Remind me to go on a rant sometime soon about The Gendering of American Infants.