This is so my child. I'm not sure what it is, but she is super into wearing big people shoes. Like, she got Rick's big ol' stompin' boots and was clompin' around the house in 'em like a little crazy person.

Anyway, it occurs to me that I haven't talked at all about my absence from my life here, or the outcome of anything. So, well, first of all: I passed.

Let me just say that again. I passed.

I only found out yesterday, because yesterday was the oral defense, which was really scary to contemplate beforehand, but not actually so scary in real life. It turns out that when you spend three weeks locked in an attic doing nothing but read stuff about a set of topics, you actually have opinions and thoughts about those topics afterwards. Who knew?

Let me just take a quick break to show you my daughter, in a shirt I made for her. Well, Janessa dyed the shirt, but I put the TARDIS on it. This was not staged, by the by. She went and got the Doctor to play with all on her own.

Anyhow, so I was locked in an attic*. I planned to stay with R&B for a week, and stayed for two. Lovely people that they are, they fed me lunch and breakfast and dinner and let me put enormous stacks of books on their dining table and play my 82-song "work" playlist over and over again. And they let me talk at them- at length- about analogy and grammaticalization and theories of contact-induced change. They even went "uh huh" and "yeah" and "bitch is crazy!" at the appropriate moments, and didn't complain when I seemed like I might just be staying indefinitely.

It was this huge, crazy thing, of me coming face to face with the work. Do or die, moment, right? No excuses, no putting it off. In theory.

So, my exam was due the 27th (a Wednesday) and it became clear by Monday that I just wasn't going to make that deadline. Brian told me I had to have it in by the morning of Monday the 3rd at the absolute latest. And there I am, on Sunday morning. I had 8 pages of question 1 and 5 pages of question 2 and 4 pages of question 3 and no pages at all of my dissertation proposal. At all.

After three weeks of not being able to write much at all, I suddenly went into overdrive. The final version of the exam was in the vicinity of 30 pages, and the proposal (written in about 4 hours straight on Sunday) was 28 pages long. It's been years since I wrote that much in one place. Hopefully it bodes well for the future. I've certainly been in a funk as far as work is concerned.

Anyway, I turned in the exam at about 3:30 in the morning on Monday. Then I went to bed around 5, and got up at 8 and taught. Thank god, I wasn't lecturing- it was presentations from the students.

Then, I didn't think about the exam for a solid week. Didn't read over my answers, didn't even look at a book. I moved back into my own house again. Then, after months and months of not feeling motivated to do anything except mess around on the internet, I suddenly felt like making stuff. So, I did that shirt applique, and started making myself costume pieces for Unhallowed Metropolis, and cooked a five course gourmet Victorian dinner for game night, and planned all kinds of fun stuff for upcoming days. Like Friday, when we're going to play Sheherezade and have a delicious Middle Eastern dinner that I've planned. There will be pastry involved.

Then, it was time for the defense, and I hadn't looked at or thought about my exam for a week. I ended up just reading over my answers in the morning. And, shockingly enough, when they asked me questions, I knew the answers- or at least, I knew things to say. I had ideas and responses. The exam was two hours long, and it was 15 minutes shy of over before I even noticed the time.

I turned my paper in to the Graduate School yesterday afternoon, so it's official. I swear, I didn't know whether or not I was going to finish the exam until that Sunday morning. It was that close, and there were moments when I thought it might well kill me. But here I am, and I passed.

There's the dissertation, now, of course, but I refuse to think about that for a while now. I have creative food to cook, and Victorian clothing to sew.
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*To be fair, it was a lovely attic. It had a nice desk, and shelves, and a comfy chair next to the window where I did part of my reading. It also had an enormous bathroom with a gorgeous clawfooted tub, which is where I did most of my reading- with my sonic screwdriver and my postit notes balanced on the edge of the tub.