I'm closing in on the end of my third round of hand-edits and hope to have finished transcribing them before I got to bed tonight (though since I've been changing and adding so much, writing all down the margins of each page and in messy riders on legal pads, it may take longer than I expect). I'm hoping to be able to do one more round of revisions before Tuesday morning . . . when I'll be shipping it off to Fearsome Advisor!

So yeah, my Independence Day will be all about getting myself free from the tyranny of this final chapter. However briefly.

Because what happens on Tuesday? Tuesday, I begin a month-long research grant at a nearby university library. On a subject only peripherally related to my dissertation. Yeah: not such great timing, but it's my only real income for the summer, and the project is one that's important to me. Moreover, I'm pretty sure the library portion of this project won't actually take a month. In fact, I'm hopeful that I can do everything I need to do (basically, transcribing some really elaborate handwritten annotations, changes, and comments to a short printed work, and comparing them with a different work) in about a week of very hard work, while I spend the rest of my time surreptitiously working on the revisions to my first chapter. Which is the real project of July.

Sigh. Well, at least I have a couple of weeks out in Northwest, visiting my folks, to look forward to in August—even if that, too, will be a working vacation.