The Continuing Slog

Just finished another thesis chapter this afternoon (results write-up for one of my two research sites); it's nice to see progress, even if it is slow. My remaining chapters are the other research site, computer modelling (potentially very large chapter), and conclusions. I guess I can kinda see the end point, but it's a lot like being on I-90 in Minnesota, and seeing signs saying "Seattle 1,657 mi."

Current page count is up to about 175--admittedly, there are a lot of graphs and graphics that take up space. But I have beating myself up a bit about this page creep--am I really incompetent at getting to the important core material, and insufferably self-important and long-winded? Then I thought about it some more, and realized that I just have a whole lot of data--much more than those ~150 page theses. Those guys were lab experiments, involving about a year's worth of test runs in one or two test walls. In contrast, I have one site with eight walls and three years of data; another with four walls and 1.5 years of data. It just takes a while to explain what was installed and demonstrated in the data for a project of that scope. In addition, my tests were in real houses, not lab conditions, so I had to spend a fair amount of time just talking about the boundary conditions, and whether or not these are representative of real houses.

Okay, time to change gears and start to run computer models--why yes, we actually use a computer model that lets us simulate watching walls dry. Yeah, I know, my life is really exciting.