the unbearable lightness of handing in the dissertation

OOOOOOOOOh I should be such a happy little camper, I have finally finished the thing-which-must-not-be-mentioned, I have sent it off special delivery and I should be soooo.... But I am not, I feel naked and as tho' there is a bit missing (actually, thats a dumb thing to type as my husband would swear there has always been a bit missing). I never thought I would say it, but I do not feel blythe and frolicky or any of that stuff, I feel sad, deflated and orange (too many late-night packets of wotsits, which send me orbital - a very cheap way into space if NASA ever ask you).

Still there are oodles of things I can now concentrate on (yup, I am reduced to just managing to think of one thing at a time after the all-consuming thing-which-must-not-be-mentioned, this must be what it is like to be a man, a certain kind of man) knitting, reading (for pleasure - yikes), gardening, walking, family bonding (hmm -move that one lower down the list) and loosing weight, patchwork...

I shall start tomorrow by feeding the family something wholesome and nutritious and not flung together. What is more, I intend to not-use-chicken, this will be a big shock to the household as for the last few weeks as I have been in the throes of writing up, that is pretty much all they have eaten - chicken and pasta thing or pasta and chicken thing or pasta and chicken and other ends of a bag pasta thing or even chicken and whoops I have almost run out of pasta thing... Just how much chicken can you feed offspring before they grow feathers and start to cluck - some people would call this bad parenting (and who am I to argue, it is not my strongest point I admit) but I like to think of it as an experiment and furthering the bounds of science is a noble thing.

Work is doing my head in (not hard these days), I had a little puppy of a doctor that appearred in the library from somewhere overseas today and he just followed me around in a kind of hopeless way as he asked for this and that and the next thing, finally he wanted to be logged on a computer, which I did. As I got up to walk away, he queried in a tone of suprise "but, now you type..." - how the heck do these guys manage on the wards and why the hell don't they bring their flipping mothers???

Still a good nights sleep and a spot of therapeutic knitting and I can track him down tomorrow and be extraspecially nice to him. This may be making a rod for my own back as sometimes they latch on like a second skin seeing they get such a rough ride every where else, being the bottom of the pile.