That's called range, America

Cracked.com - Battle of the Jessicas. That's all I'm going to say about the title tonight.

Before I left for school this morning, Lee had already messaged me that Dr. Schulz was looking for me. Turns out, he needed someone to tie on a couple tourniquets (I spelled that right the first time, I am amazed) because he'd been bleeding all over my thesis all weekend. And, according to Dr. Moeller, he said it was well-written and a good thesis, overall. There are pages with more red ink (his) than black (mine). At least it was well-written. I hate to think about the school's red pen budget if it hasn't been. Most of his "recommendations" are little things, change a word here, a phrase there, the entire meaning of the thesis here, but they add up. He did catch a big problem within my figures. When I typed the legends, I spelled "Estimate" as "Estmate," and that got carried though to about 20 figures. He also likes repeating the same criticism over and over again. He didn't think I defined a quantity well, so any time that calculation popped up later in the paper, he has a note in the margin that it wasn't defined. Even a couple times where the calculation itself isn't mentioned, there's the note in the margin. I do love the note at one point where he makes a "recommendation" followed by "I quibble." He's as much as admitted his suggestion is just there because he felt like making a suggestion, not because it's really needed. A lot of his notes, I can't tell if it's something that I'm supposed to address in the paper better or just notes he was making to himself. He'll have notes off to the sides of figures: "seems noisier" when I know that I mention that myself in the paper. I'm going to try to make some notes and talk to him tomorrow, just to see what needs to be addressed and what doesn't. I do like the description I just came up with for Dr. Schulz: he like Londino on crack after a weekend doing speed. Yes, I went there.

As I approach the deadline, I'm not sure how much I really want this degree. Let me rephrase, I'm not sure how much I want to do this defense in order to earn the degree. It's not nerves. It's that this is a pain. I've got all these edits to do, a PowerPoint to finish (the only reason it's not done now is that I need to figure out what else I need to cover because of the comments Schulz made). I know I wasted some time while writing the thesis, so these edits are getting to me closer to the defense than they might could have, had I worked harder, but they wouldn't have been any less annoying. In fact, there may have been two rounds of edits from the committee if I'd been done sooner. Because none of us is as dumb as all of us.

I'm going to start putting a McDonald's wrapper around the food I cook myself (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/08/06/health/webmd/main3139085.shtml). Although, I don't guess I really need food to taste any better. It's a conundrum. More tomorrow.