Things I feel good about

• My thesis is seriously shaping up. I seem to be able to keep the February 20th deadline nicely.
  
• All the rest of the things I need to do in order to get the final run on my PhD work done are already sorted out.
  
• I'm about to finish my PhD. Hot DAMN. I mean ... seriously ... I've been here some 22 months and I'm handing in my THESIS!
  
• People want to hear me talk about my research. Enough to pay for flights and hotels and stuff.
  
• People me to talk to them about THEIR research. Enough to pay for flights and hotels and stuff. And these people do Really Damn COOL research too.
  
• I landed a grant of $500 for that Quite Cool Conference at MSRI, Berkeley. So I'm going there too.
  
• The grant proposal I plan to write while in Stockholm has some damn sexy keywords in it. I think I might even get money for it.
  
• I'm pushing 35 job applications now. I filed with Wolfram Research (their application has some REALLY nifty puzzles you get to solve too), with Ohio State - where a doctoral uncle of mine works, and my advisor will put in a good word for me, with Oakland U - where they do a lot of computational and combinatorial algebraic geometry and topology, and with Toledo, which lies Really Close to where Susanne'll end up.
  
• John Palmieri thinks my program is cool and wants to use it for his own research. Seriously! Palmieri wrote a few of the papers I -learned- this stuff from!
  
• My Really Old Rum tastes Really Good.
  

Oh - and I don't have to get out of bed tomorrow morning. This is especially good since I've been drinking a bit (2 pints Staropramen black, 2x2cl Becherovka and 2-3cl of the Really Old Rum) and it's already past 2am.

ETA: I also am going to get money for that second topology conference at UIUC. While I'm at it. I really will be doing nothing but talk about my research nonstop the entire US tour.