Status report on Henry and Henriette

NOTE: The last post may have sounded exactly as high-horsed as I feared it did when I hit the 'Publish' button, so I felt some edits were in order... I hope for some non-judgment or at least leniency from anyone who was bothered by the attitude, but I think I needed to write it out of me. Look at it as a bad day-log.


To the point!

Since many of my friends have asked for a progress report on Henry and Henriette, here comes a short one.

The three-week-period prior to the 7th of November saw me working 8 + 5 hour days non-stop daily to finish Henriette (and then Henry) to meet a deadline allowing me to present my halfway thesis in the end of December. I got to the point where my sleep hedged on 3 - 4 hours per night and my eyesight dropped - 1.00 and -0.75 diopters (Translation: VERY dramatic degeneration) because of all the work in front of the computer monitor. I also developed a propensity for not being able to hear people speaking to me on my cell phone (and even though I could blame the speaker being kaputt, I won't).

Also, the material that constitutes Henriette started to become more and more complicated, swelling to the point where I could use it for three (!) instead of two articles.

All in all, I went to my professor and said that I probably wouldn't be able to make the deadline of presenting before Xmas. After some discussions he convinced me (because he's been skeptical to my self-proclaimed deadlines all along) that I should let the quality I want on my article to determine the time it may take, rather than rush things.

So the status from then-on was:

1) No more deadline panic - I started sleeping normally, eating (at regular intervals, rather than remembering at 2 a.m. that I'd forgotten again) and resuming a social life.
2) Unexpectedly, relief.
3) Unfortunately, a total DROP DEAD of my motivation and speed-of-work.

So at the mo, both Henry and H-ette are in a kind of writing coma. I'm really just waiting for some second wave of panic to kick in so that I get going.

In the meantime, I have been smashingly constructive! I have applied for stipends, written an essay about "Paradigmatic Considerations in the Research Field of Industrial Ergonomics", updated the homepage of a Master's course I manage, and started reading plenty of General Systems Theory and in my free time some philosophy / theology. (Yep, pretentiosity warning right there, but I enjoy it like crazy so I refuse to be concerned. Booyah!)

So as soon as I get enough distance to things, I can initiate a running start and get back up on the swing of writing again.

Just gonna build a few more sandcastles...