Dissertation Mode: GO

I'm done teaching for the semester!  The only things I have left for the semester proper are two mountains of grading (the last assignment and the final for the class I was teaching).  My fellow teaching assistant and I did a final review session for our students this afternoon, so now it's time to switch gears entirely.  That is, I now intend to hang up my syntactician shoes for good and turn all of my academic energy toward writing a chapter or two of my dissertation over the next few months.

To that end, I have several thousand instances of /s/ and /ʃ/ sounds to analyze in the next two weeks, which means I will be sitting in front of my computer looking at displays like this for several hours a day:

Yes indeedy.  Baby babble all day long.

Also to that end, I attended a dissertation writing workshop the week before last, and they gave us a nice packet of tips and encouragement for writing a thesis.  I read through it over the weekend, and I found this gem of a quote:

"When you are actually writing, and working as hard as you should be if you want to succeed, you will feel inadequate, stupid, and tired.  If you don't feel like that, then you aren't working hard enough."

Huzzah!  Let the fun begin!