THANKSGIVING BREAK

Apologies, first off, to family for not sharing this Thanksgiving with any of you this year. Last year it was with Tom and Chris in Wisconsin; the year before that in Michigan. This time, I'm afraid, I'll be hanging around Champaign-Urbana, eating the traditional turkey with church friends at our pastor Jim Linder's house in town.

Since I'm in the home stretch for finishing the dissertation and won't be in Illinois much longer - one month to go - I opted to stay and work over the break (for others, not me this year). I'm not sure I can finish 100% by the December 17 deadline, but I want to take advantage as much as possible of local resources - mainly the formatting offices for the College of Education and the Graduate College - the last people I have to satisfy before I can graduate.

Formatting is the last requirement - getting all my page margins, headings, paragraph structure, etc. to fit the very anal requirements of both my own college (Ed) and the Graduate College. This means multiple visits to each office to check on whether they like what I'm doing. The ultimate in form over content! (They have little interest in the CONTENT of what I've written, only in how it looks on the page.) If I can get everything formatted to their desires by the deadline, I will consider this time well spent.

Other fixes to the final dissertation I can do elsewhere, i.e. California.

So far, I have no firm plans aside from packing everything up, storing the excess here in town, and driving off towards the West Coast around December 20. I'll spend Christmas and New Year's with Ann and Cam. After that, it's up in the air. I'll need an affordable base for job hunting and finishing left-over dissertation stuff.

It feels a lot like my life 20 years ago in 1984, when I was finishing up in Washington, DC - stuck with another lingering project (a book on Arabic prepositions I was writing for a govt. language center in Maryland) that never seemed to die! I had already graduated with my MS in Linguistics from Georgetown earlier in '84 but couldn't leave town until the book project was written and type-set, so I was chomping at the bit to get out of there and on with my life back then, too. (The book was never published because they brought in another editor to edit my work after I'd left, and he had a completely different view on how the book should be done. They wasted quite a bit more money on him, and in the end decided not to publish ANYTHING.)

So, wishing all of you a very happy Thanksgiving wherever it might be!

(Diet tip from Weight Watchers: fill up on plain versions of Thanksgiving foods at the dinner table that day - plain beans, corn, potatoes, yams, etc. Their "points" are pretty low by themselves. Anything prepared more fancily - with sauces, in a casserole, mixed with butter, etc. - adds ridiculously more points. Green beans - good. Green beans in a creamy casserole with breaded onion rings - bad! Canned gravy is also extremely low in calories. Eat pumpkin pie FILLING and leave the crust.)

Btw, I've lost about 14 pounds since my birthday with Weight Watchers so far and am back in my correct weight "zone" - but I'm looking to lose about 5 more to be safe and start maintaining. I even bought a new belt to keep my pants up! (Always a good sign.)