PHC folks are just now getting back to school from spring break. Good for them; I didn't have a break this week. I've been spending my evenings all week at Borders, studying busily and trying to organize my thoughts. My outline still isn't written, but I have faith that it will be completed by my deadline on the 29th. Then the real fun begins. Frankly, I am intimidated. I'm sure I can write this thing, but I have only so much time in which to do it. There's still so much I could research, besides. I don't want to stop data-gathering in order to write the project. Some parts will be more vague and less well-informed than I, a writing perfectionist, prefer. I suppose that is the way of it, however. I cannot expect perfection in my first time doing something.

To make life more special, the troubles in my right leg have not gone away. I can reliably expect a loud click of knee items rubbing past each other as I stand up from a sitting position. Something is very much not right in there. The chiropractor says that it may be loose bits of cartilage. I did a bit of online research (hey, I'm in practice!), and that seems the most likely prognosis. It was probably my running. Apparently, I have several counts against me:
- Wide hips (i.e., female)
- One leg a little longer than the other
- Running shoes that were already doing strange things to my arches
- Running on a small, indoor, circular track, which exacerbates the problem of leg length discrepancy
- Increasing running intensity all at once
- Allowing quadriceps to become weaker than hamstrings, because both TKD and running use hamstrings much more.
So tomorrow, I am making an appointment with sports health people. They can do an MRI of my knee and find out exactly what I have done to myself. Once they have told me, I will know what must be done to make me better. Then I will be much happier.

An interesting event of the past few days is that I have learned how to run a microfilm machine. My mom happened to have a large folder of homeschooling articles from the '90s, and I found a bunch more from online databases. For the '80s, however, the databases only contain abstracts. So I had to visit the STL library system yet again and explore the wilds of the periodicals area. It was quite fun, but I discovered that the whirring left-to-right motion gives me a headache. I don't think my brain knows what to do with visual information delivered in such a way.

April looks to be busy. My mom moved her book deadline to the end of April, because we haven't even started laying it out yet. She's been too busy with other stuff, and besides, I think she's just as frightened of it as I am of my own project. This means, of course, a frenzied last-minute rush at the end of the month. My own project deadline is April 24th, but I'll be in Indiana for my last ISI conference as an Honors Fellow that very same weekend. Therefore, my real deadline is April 20th, with touching up on the 24th. As of now, I am also planning to fly in to PHC for Liberty Ball, which is the weekend of the 28th. I have a hunch that April will be gone before I know it.

Only four and a half months, and I'll be back to learning someone else's program of study. Back to rules, Honor Code debates, faculty worries. In short, back to battle. Hopefully, by then I will be ready. Meanwhile, I am satisfied to pray.  ¶ 6:07 PM