A May Update

It is the end of May and my PhD thesis is progressing at a good
pace. I finished a draft of the ninth chapter, the last one, near-
ly two weeks ago. Just the other day I met with my supervi-
sor to go over the chapter. He was pleased with my progress
and identified some things for me to work on.

During the past two weeks I have been preparing to give a
fairly good draft of nine chapters and the introduction to my
supervisor in the first week of June. Both my supervisor and
I need to read the whole thing through (minus the conclusion)
in order to see how the argument flows.

Depending on his observations and suggestions I plan to spend
most of June and all of July (while my supervisor is on vacation)
preparing the thesis for submission sometime in August. We
have set September 1 as the latest date for submitting my thesis.
At this point we both don't see any major problems with my work.

The oral defense of my thesis has been set for some time in No-
vember. It is composed of one professor from the university and
another professor from outside St. Andrews. The latter profes-
or, Andrew Kirk from Birmingham, is not available until then. I
had hoped for an earlier date, but that was not possible.

I will be narrowly focused on my thesis until I submit. I don't
spend all day working on my thesis, but it does seem that I
spend the whole day thinking about it. I can imagine that
other people see me as being being rather boring. There still
is a considerable amount of hard work to be done in order to
make the thesis flow smoothly and make sense. I have been
like this since last February, and I expect I will be this way for
three more months. But the end is now in sight.

I would appreciate you remembering me in your thoughts and
prayers.