excitedI finished the chapter. I still am in shock. The LSC editor, Amy read the last 8 pages yesterday - a stretch because they are only supposed to read 5 per session. She was sweet to bend the rule for me. It's finished. All I have to do is have this Word 98 program read it back to me. The later versions of word don't have that "read selection" feature. I wonder why they took it away. Then on Monday I meet with my editor to go over the whole chapter, not just 5 page chunks. I got email from her and she sounds very up beat which is a layer of energy (upbeatness) I want to put into the whole dissertation just in case it isn't creeping in already. It's in this chapter more than the other two.
Last night I went to the big computer lab at the library and started scanning the mail art for the next chapter -- the non traditional data chapter. It was slow going but I got about 7 images through Photoshop and out into jpegs that I put on single word documents. The word pages range from 350K to 450K, of course the jpegs are much smaller, so a lot will fit on my 75MB webspace allotment that I just found out the school gave me for being a student. I'll have to move it all to mailartist.com when I graduate but for now it's convenient. So this morning I'm taking my alphabetized file box of mail art sent to the show to the long tables outside the library door and spread them out. The tables never have many people sitting at them and I think on Saturday morning there won't be anyone. I'm going to spread them all along the tables -- like maybe 30-40 feet of mail art to look at! What fun! Then I'm going to choose which pieces to scan for the chapter, which one's best address issues of the effects of the Internet on the Correspondence Art Network and I'll have the selected mail art in a discrete pile instead all filed together. Then maybe this afternoon, post pozole with Sandy I'll begin the scanning the sorted pile. If I have them all scanned by this weekend then I can take the whole lot on vacation and write little descriptions and analyses on the beach. I can print them out individually and even write by hand in a notebook, then type the stuff into the laptop. If I get this chapter done quickly then I'll only have intro and conclusions to go and then I could actually graduate in the spring. Oh I hope so.
Yeah!