Glad to hear it.
Thanks for this. Stories like this give me hope that there is indeed a future after all this. 
And thank you all for your good wishes. I sincerely appreciate them.
(Roll Tide, Oak!)
Given that I’m about to start a Ph.D program in the fall, I read through this thread with a lot of interest. I wish you the best of luck, Ogre, and am really happy that you’re at a point where you got some usable DNA. Cheers.
Hey, you could be getting a PhD in manga studies.
Hi folks. It’s with mod permission that I raise this zombie from the grave.
And it’s with considerable relief that I am able to report that I successfully defended my Ph.D. in biology last Wednesday.
It took me far, far longer than I thought it would, but I hung on to the end of that damn rope for three more years. I finally, with a lot of help and support, bulldogged my way through it.
I thought a few of you might be interested in the news.
Thanks very much for your help and kindness!
Congratulations, Ogre!
Congratulations! I’ve been wondering about the outcome and I’m glad to hear that it worked out in the end.
If I may ask, what are you currently considering for a next move?
Wahoo! Congratulations! 
Congratulations! This is wonderful news.
Congratulations! Hope you do something fun and relaxing to celebrate.
Great!
I read the first 7 or 8 posts, and then noticed it was a zombie. I was hoping it got resurrected by some good news.
Thanks for the update, Ogre - I’m so glad to hear that you’ve finally achieved your goal.
I have so much admiration for people like you, who do something so hard that takes so long. I did one year of university, and never went back to finish my degree (I have the equivalent of a degree’s worth of schooling with diplomas in various other fields, but no degree). I don’t have that perseverance, but you obviously do. 
I really don’t know. I have some temporary teaching/field work gigs lined up for the next few months. I’ll be continuing to apply for whatever jobs I can find. If it happens to be a postdoc for research, I’m open to that. If not, I’ll have to see where I can fit in.
WAHOO!!! Congrats Dr. Ogre! You have Piled Higher and Deeper and made it through it all.
Best of luck on a Postdoc or a faculty gig or whatever else you are looking for.
That is wonderful news, Ogre - a life-path type of achievement. Yay.
I hope you have found time to play a bit of guitar between your PhD’ing and Daddy duties. Even more important to stay sane with things get thick.
I just realized that we were getting into some fairly technical discussion earlier in the thread, and that I long ago promised to start a separate thread or blog about those details.
I apologize for never having done that. It slipped my mind in all the madness. I do appreciate the offers for help.
What ended up happening:
That “low point” in my life I referred to earlier and the resulting panic attacks, etc. came as many threads of stress were converging at once. I had a new baby. Said kiddo was getting sick a lot. My wife was having to go out of town for work quite often. I was falling further and further behind, and then, to top it all off, I had to throw 2 years worth of samples (HUNDREDS of them) in the garbage and start completely from scratch.
To keep the panic at bay, this became my mantra: “Just do it right.”
I would come into the lab every morning and just grind, grind, grind. I put in 12-15 hours a day for most of a year, and would alternate between lab work and field work.
I ended up dropping the population genetics component. The DNA extraction, even when I had refined it, was unreliable. I’d get 20 successful extractions from one locations, 8 from the next, and none from a third. And then half the time, I couldn’t get my AFLP pre-screening to work. The sample sizes just weren’t good enough, so I was forced to toss the idea. That really hurt. AFLP is a proprietary procedure, and is very expensive (at least for a small-timer like me). I had blown about half of the TOTAL money I had raised for my whole project on it.
I ended up doing more molecular phylogeography, and switching over to ecological/community analysis for my last chapter.
Thanks, sir! I was pretty good about playing, right up until the final stretch of analysis/writing/defending. During that period, I was at the computer for 18 hours a day, and I unfortunately didn’t touch a guitar for two months.
I’m happy to report, however, that I have just changed strings, and am working on rebuilding calluses. 
I do feel somewhat vindicated by this: a few days ago, a professor who is interested in doing some further molecular work with my plants called me up and exasperatedly opened with, “Jesus CHRIST, Tom. How the fuck did you ever manage to get DNA out of these things?!”
Made me feel…well, professional.
Yeah? Well…I guess there’s just one thing left to say, then…
ROLL TIDE, OGRE!
#16 this year?