Defense = Done

I cannot tell you how stressed I was for that damn defense.  It was Monday at 3, and I was wound up so tight that I could barely sit still.  The proof:  I've spent the two days since barely able to get up off the couch with a migraine that hasn't responded to any of the many pharmaceuticals I've thrown at it.  But.  It went pretty well.  Not perfectly-- apparently I got pretty far off topic-- but they didn't ask me anything I couldn't answer, and that was what I was worried about.  I suppose it is true of any subject, but especially with an enormous, complex work like Ulysses, they could easily have come up with two hours of questions that I would have had to answer:  I don't know.  I don't know.  I don't know. 

But they didn't.   They stayed pretty well within the bounds of my thesis, asked me to go into more detail on several points, and had a number of recommendations for revisions (the only major one is something I knew about before I went in).  So I've got several days of work left to do, but the defense is over, and went well enough that it won't need to be repeated.  And I'm still un-winding.  I suspect it may be several weeks before I truly relax-- we're headed to Florida the week after Christmas for our bi-annual family reunion with my sisters and their families, so maybe that will do the trick. 

Aside:  since we are almost all word freaks around here, I'll tell you I just googled bi-annual to make sure it meant "every other year" and apparently it can mean both "every other year" and "twice a year."  Unfortunately, we do not have family reunions twice a year, just every other year.  Weird, yes?  You would think there would be a term that meant every other year.

And that's it for me for today.  More soon.