My THESIS defense is this afternoon from 1-3. That means that as I write this, I have approximately two hours and forty-five minutes in which to shower up, format a title page for people to sign, get something for lunch and hustle my butt in to campus. That translates into right around 9,900 seconds.

The latest draft of my THESIS, which incorporates many of the changes suggested to me by Henry and William so far, is 44,558 words. This translates into 174 double-spaced pages, with a few graphs and a table. I have no idea what my committee is going to tell me this afternoon; feedback so far has been positive, but I remain nervous. The last draft they'd seen, the one they reviewed, was somewhere around 4,000 words and 14 pages lighter, which I'm going to have to explain this afternoon. This means I probably won't get signatures from everyone today, which is okay. I fully expect to have to run this thing under Henry's nose at least once more before I can turn it in, which is too bad since I know he's swamped to the breaking point these days.

Anyway. Hopefully I'll have some good news to report here this afternoon. Wish me luck... Here we go!