You can now call me Dr. Phil

because I defended my dissertation on Tuesday. I don’t officially become a PhD until the university bigwigs put their stamp on it sometime in April, but I’ve now done everything *I* need to do.

The defense itself was a bit challenging because one of my official readers needed to Skype in and his microphone wasn’t working. So in order to ask questions he had to call my phone, and when I put it on speaker for everyone in the room to hear him we had to turn off the sound from the Skype connection to avoid godawful feedback noises. I swore a few times during the defense, which might have been a first, but I only swore about the technical problems, and I kept it to “shit” and “crap.”