daktar

ban geya finally and officially. Spent almost a week in Houston from 22-29 April to make the feat happen. A brief chronology:
1. had barely done office the previous few days frantically trying to tie up loose ends. boss in office had been very cool to give me unofficial time off for pretty much the whole of next week to wrap things up at rice.
2. landed up in Houston at midnight. yanjun was shocked to see 3 huge boxes with me. Nope, I was not moving back; just getting back my desktop to Rice.
3. So hot and humid in Houston. Glad to be in California now
4. Spent late nite catching up with anirban...woke up in the morning and started redoing presentation.
5. laptop conked off at nite. perfect timing. working with an attached external monitor.
6. Sunday: spent a Herculean 16 hr day with advisor mostly with content and powerpoint.
7. Gave one practice talk on monday. need to prepare more. defense at tuesday 9 am. also realized my signed title and thesis form from one of my committee members had not reached yet due to a guffaw by one of our dept secys. An additional thing to worry about now.
8. Had been sleeping 3-4 hours last few nites, so why not the same before defense. went to sleep finally at 3 only to wake up without alarm at 6.
9. Defense went pretty well. "speakers notes" of powerpoint is a nice feature for the first few fluff slides. no revisions. Committee happy. me utterly happy.
10. Nope, did not drink much. too tired. Albeit half a bottle of wine with apan.
11. wednesday. the coveted courier reached. with all signed forms. got signs from others in committee and had my big bottle of champagne from Valhalla in the evening. after a nice dinner treat from my advisor at my favorite Mi Luna - a tapas place - with our group, it was back to whole night of work for editing thesis.
12. thursday. submitted thesis finally in the morning at 10 am, making the customary rounds to graduate studies, library and registrar in order.
13. and thursday night was also a night out. and for all the right reasons... :-)
14. then took a early morning flight back to bay area straight to office. I must have been looking distraught.