it is finished

Yeah, you heard it. I finished my dissertation.

...for some value of finished. I still have to upload it to the web so the long-suffering departmental secretary can print out copies for my committee (I'll send the link if you're interested in reading it...ha ha), and of course my defence isn't for six weeks yet...and after the defence there's sure to be changes to make before I actually submit it to the grad school. Still. Finished, even only approximately, feels...good. Very good.
...particularly after this weekend. It was a long weekend of frantic writing. Today my supervisor was literally standing over me in the control room where I was writing while I kept eye on the experiment. (Today it came in handy that I don't really know the set-up yet: when things went wrong I was able to claim ignorance and get someone else to do the debugging.)

I celebrated by buying myself flowers. They don't look like they'll last long, but for now they're making my room smell nice.

Other general updates:
I'm settled into Vancouver for now, after a weekend of enjoying being "of no fixed address". I have a cell phone that works nicely for short local calls, and I'm looking into Skype for long distance chatting.
I still haven't heard anything about the "real job" that I've applied for, but the more I hear about that department the less I want to work there anyway. They sound disorganized at best and possibly passive-aggressive.
I may start getting paid sometime soon. By my employer, I mean. My grad-school supervisor hasn't cut me loose yet, so I won't starve, but it's taking a while to figure out which hoops I have to jump through to get paid by the university in the UK. Apparently they want to deposit my cheques into a UK bank account, and I have yet to find a UK bank that will let me open an account from Canada. We'll see how that all works out....

I'm too sleepy now to tell you about my parents' adventures in Turkey. Maybe next time.