Best way to format my dissertation ??

I thought I knew how I was going to put my dissertation together. Not anymore. I had a meeting with Kiwi on Friday and he seems to have changed his mind, but he hasn't convinced me yet that this is the best plan. So over the past 6 years my project has been rather all-over-the-board. Every committee meeting my third aim changed. That wouldn't be so bad but I've spent months and months (years) going in various directions, only to have either hit dead ends, or was stopped by Kiwi before I could finish a series of experiments. Thus, I have a lot of experiments (i.e., series of experiments) that were never finished.

I also have nopublication. Kiwi decided a long time ago he wanted my entire dissertation in one manuscript. I tried to change his mind several times but never succeeded. Now he has put me a hard situation. We are writing this manuscript and are leaving several pieces out as 'data not shown." Here's the tricky part, I want to show the DNS in my dissertation. I also have to divide my dissertation into chapters. The standard is to use publications as chapters, which kind of follow your aims. Well, I will have one manuscript which contains ALL of my aims. I can't just have one chapter. So we decided that we were going to break up the manuscript into three chapters, following my three aims and include everything we left out. Sounded good to me! But he's had a change of heart. Now he wants me to focus on my manuscript because of the committee, insert it as Chapter 1, which will encompass all my aims, add the DNS in the appendix, and "make-up" a fourth aim. Yes, you heard me right. That is why I'm here on a Sunday, instead of working comfortably from my apartment. I'm pouring through 5-6 years worth of lab work, a lot of which was never finished, trying to come up with a 4th aim. I was venting to FD and we both agree this is a colossal waste of my time. Kiwi said he hears me say how I've done a lot of work so why not include it in a fourth aim, which yeah, I have, but he's stopped most of it. Now my 'homework' for the weekend is to see if I can make my experiments that were 'not publishable' and didn't work as 'we wanted' fit coherently into another aim. And he said I'll have to figure out some way to explain 'around the data' during my defense as to why this should be included in the thesis since it isn't publishable.

Grrr.

So, I have three days total to 'make-up' a 4th aim, finish my manuscript figures, write figure legends, and finish my methods and results. My series of meetings with my committee members starts Tuesday afternoon and since my committee doesn't care about "aims" I'm only going to talk about my manuscript. But I need the fourth ready in case they want to know if there is 'anything else' besides the manuscript.

And I still need to figure out what the last component of the manuscript means. The data didn't turn as we expected. Which isn't a bad thing. Except now I have to explain it which I'm having trouble doing, and Kiwi doesn't know either. And since it's the last major part, I just know that's what the committee is going to question. When my dissertation became a 'cell biology' project it started being out of my element. I've never even had a cell biology class!!

Missing the weekend

I had a wonderful weekend at home. I didn't realize how much I missed everyone and everything until I was there. I've decided I need to go home at least once a month to "depressurize." It did me good because I'm even handling the craziness at work better, and things have not gone well over all this week. And it's only Tuesday!

I live in the countryside, a wonderful rural area off the main highway down a dirt road. It's so peaceful there. It reminded me how much I miss living in the country, and that I'm not a city girl. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, I could hear crickets outside my window at night. It was warm enough I could leave it open all night long. My drive there takes me through Amish country, right where I live. The Amish were plowing their fields with the horse hitches. It was a wonderful site. The drive home was even nice, I was driving directly into the setting sun and the sky was just ablaze with hues of red, yellow, and orange. It made me wish I had a camera to take a picture. It was so perfect.

We had a surprise birthday party for my sister over the weekend so I got to see most of my family on my mom's side. I miss them all.

However, now I'm back at work. Yesterday I talked LB into helping me with washing and autoclaving, which he then proceeded to start then NOT finish. I had a 20 min break to eat and while I stepped out, he left. He left the stuff in the autoclave room, not autoclaved. That wouldn't have been so bad but he didn't even bother to leave me a note. I didn't know he left and thought everything was getting done. I ended up doing it all this morning - and some of it twice! Some of the packets that were stacked didn't dry and were sopping wet. I had to do it over. I confronted him about leaving yesterday and he said he had to go home and write. He's working on a paper for someone in another lab and when he writes he like to do it at home. Bullshit. He doesn't write, never has and probably never will. Other people do it for him. I hate it when people lie. It's so juvenile and pointless.

I also got up early this morning so I could have blood processed before the faculty candidate seminar at noon. I overlayed the blood over histopaque then proceeded to knock all the 50 ml conicals on the floor, leaving myself with a nice homogeneous mixture of histopaque and blood. The extra setup and spin added an hour to the process. With everything I had planned for this afternoon I am still trying to finish it. I'm in another lab right now waiting to set up another experiment with one of my committee members.

One good thing though - last night I had an experiment finally work. Not much has worked in a long time. The bad part is that now kiwi has a lot of ideas based on what worked yesterday. In the span of a few hours he looked up literature, called another lab, and set-up a meeting with someone to collaborate with, without talking to me first. I need to make sure what he wants to do will even work. The right epitope may not be present on my cells. Not to mention we never optimized the T cell assay, I worked on it for over a year with another cell line and never got it to work, now he wants to try it again. I'm giving him until Friday and at our meeting I have to remind him that he says he can't fund me anymore, that the department will not pay for me indefinitely, and adding all these experiments isn't possible. Because what I did worked so well he wants me to use it as my model instead of the other cell I have - this means redoing every single experiment I have done up to this point. He's insane. He acts before he thinks. And he doesn't think very well.