Exhausting

For the past three months I've been working on part of my project that is really the key to all other parts of my PhD...a spatial stock assessment model.  It's been particularly exhausting in the past three weeks, as I raced to get a working model done for a presentation I have to give next week.  I've spent 10-12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, working at my computer and trying to get this beast to run.  And finally, last week Thursday, it finally worked.  Wow.  Since then I've been writing code to automate the graphing of my model results and looking at those graphs to try to come to some conclusions .  By no means am I done with this model, or even done enough to give a great presentation next week, but I feel like a rock star in terms of how much I've gotten done.  And today, after painstakingly writing out a detailed, annotated, complete-with-figures, summary of my model results, I got this from my co-authors and mentors:

Mentor 1 - "Oh and good job, it seems to scale surprisingly well and doesn't seem like a bad start at all!" 
Mentor 2 - "Kari, you've made a lot of progress here and the results are promising!"

It is so nice to hear those words!  I feel like I could fly!

But, back to work...those presentations don't write themselves.