Thermoelectric and Heat Flow Phenomena in Mesoscopic Systems...DONE.

Super duper crazy happy news!

JASON FINISHED WRITING HIS DISSERTATION. His thesis. His PhD paper. His ultimate Physics final.

Five years of post-grad schooling; countless nights stuck in his windowless laboratory; 215 pages of cold, hard physics.

So maybe this is a bit of preemptive celebration, because there are a few more hoops he has to jump through before he gets to call himself "Dr. Matthews." He has to have a Board of Really Smart People with Foreign Accents and Beards read it over this week, and then he has his "Doctoral Defense" next Thursday. Whoo!

Although he's been working his tail off on writing it all summer, these past two weeks were especially insaneinthemembrane. At first, he was averaging about 5 hours of sleep per night.

At that point he was completely nocturnal. He'd go lay down on the couch in the afternoon, and turn to me with pleading, bloodshot eyes. He'd beg, "April, no matter what I say, I want you to wake me up in THREE HOURS. No 'fifteen more minutes.' Do whatever you have to do... even ice-water. Get me up."

Sorry, buddy, there's no way I could throw ice-water on that.

I'd dutifully wake him up, and he'd open one sleepy eye with a look of desperate anguish. Then he'd lay down the Kryptonite in a cute, sleepy voice:

"Cuddle?"
"Sweetheart, you're supposed to get---"
"Just five minutes?"
"But--"
"I miss sleeping next to you."

aaaaaaand BAM I was in his arms, and he was instantly making happy little snoring sounds.

Oh, MERCY, our future offspring will get away with anything if they inherit those puppy eyes.

Soon, the five-hour sleep average turned into just two hours a night. I'd try to wake him up, and he'd sleep talk something about "anisotropic thermoelectrics in four-terminal ballistic junctions."

The last three days (or should I say day-nights), he really got in a crunch and enlisted me to proofread every. last. page. So I got to dig through THIS for missed apostrophe's and little typos.

(Bahaha I just had to torment all you grammar OCD-ers out there-- apostrophes!!^^ I feel like I need to go wash my hands or something now.)

Anyway, I got to dig through every last page--twice--for little things like this:

I wish you could've seen the look on his poor, sleep-deprived face while he tried to figure out why I was "writing in Russian."

For now, he sleeps all he wants. I no longer have to stress about my failings as a sleep Nazi. Then once he's caught up, it's Power-Point time! Go Jason, Go!


Want to read more about his research? I tried to sum it up in English-for-humans here.

Good news, bad news

First of all, HAPPY 5TH OF JULY!!! Today is the day when all the fireworks go on 75%-off clearance and I get to load up for the rest of the year. Yesssssssss.

& I hope you all had a happy 4th of July, as well. But I'm really mostly just glad that it leads to the 5th of July.

So, for the bad news today: I think I broke my toe at work Friday (lifeguarding). My friend says I should tell people that I kicked a naughty kid in the face, but alas... it's not quite that blog-worthy. I tripped, kicked a pole, & felt an ominous little snap in my foot (sound effect!).

I looked down & saw a crooked little toe, then my foot promptly swelled up & turned blue just like Violet Beauregard when she HAD to try that damn Willy Wonka gum. Time to take it to the juicer?

After hobbling around all weekend, I've never felt more grateful for being a (usually) able-bodied person who can walk faster than one mile an hour. I went to the grocery store last night, and was sorely tempted to steal a shopping cart to use as a walker for the rest of the week.

As for the good news? Thanks to moving our mattress to the living room, we've discovered Jason can do a stunning impression of Pepé Le Pew.

(Unfortunately I am terrible at editing videos, so you're going to have to put up with my creepy slo-mo laughing at around 0:25.)

Because my broken toe & Jason bounding gracefully across our living room are SUCH related topics.

*That foot photo was for YOU, Lauren Anderson ; ) ; ) 
(I told you I know a creepish amount about you.)

Social Media Monkey

The mister & I are pretty awful about keeping in touch with friends. We'd quickly wither away as creepy hermits if we didn't have such awesome (read: persistent) friends. In fact, we'd probably have our own creole language in about two years.

Some common phrases in the Matthews(er) household. (SO... maybe less than two years on that creole.)

Both Jason & I are those weirdos who initially seem shy-- and then friends get to know us, and they're like, "How do you manage to keep all this crazy bottled up all the time?"

As for Jason? I DON'T KNOW. (& in the meantime, the crazy just brews itself stronger & stronger every day like those percolating coffee gizmos.)*
*(It leaks out in the form of that wild curly hair, I guess.)

As for me? I DON'T keep it it bottled up-- at least not within the endless, uninhibiting funpark called the 'internet.' Friend me on Facebook and I might just overwhelm you with my prolific thumbs-upping voracity.

But today? Today... I hit a desperate new low of social media overload.

I'm trained. They trained me.

I hit [SHIFT]+[ENTER] to start a new line in an email.

Remember when Facebook implemented this new commenting system? I didn't deal with it well at first:

Oh, the futile irony of ranting about Facebook... on Facebook.

The F-Book developers gave us a little grace period, when the [SHIFT]+[ENTER] instructions magically appeared below the comment form. And then, just as we were getting the hang of it, they disappeared.

I formed a far-fetched theory that I hoped would prove false. I logged onto Jason's semi-abandoned facebook account, and LO AND BEHOLD, the instructions were still there.

The F-Book was counting, on AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS, how many comments we left before they removed their little training-wheel instructions.


I'm tempted to go back to the sad little ghost town that is MySpace.

Just me & you, Tom.
Prepare yourself for the full brunt of the crazy.

Elevator Music

Happy weekend, amigos!

 [via]

I've had a fantastically busy week which has been terrible for blogging, but wonderful for, well, LIFE.

Here are a few links that have made me laugh, think, or do a double take:

• Whoa: Matthews(ers), tumblr style. Thanks, Google!
• Life's too short for the wrong job.  
• Jason watched every single one of these these little cat videos in one sitting.
• More than a little obsessed with tilt-shift photography.
• Aaand on the other end of the scale: microscopic views of everyday items. 
• One dog saves another dog's life! This brought tears to my eyes.
• Luckily for us, wildlife are curious about cameras.

And one random thought that's puzzled me this week*:

[via]

How the heck does Disney make us think one deer is a BOY deer and one deer is a GIRL deer? This fascinates me. Any ideas?
*picture me contemplating this as I stroke my silver chin hair. I named him Gandalf, FYI.

See you on Monday-- my talkative side has been bubbling up and is going to explode allll over this website next week. I have the most appealing way of phrasing things, I know.

I've got The Fever

I've got it bad. Just not for human babies.

But now I understand what baby fever feels like... because I've got FURBABY FEVER.   Every time I see a dog, I muffle myself from asking the stranger on the other end of the leash if they need a dogsitter. I slow my speed creepishly as I drive past the pound, telling myself it will only make things worse to "just go in and look." I'm even ready to raise some wild rat babies again... but that's a whole different blog post.

I'm starting to have weird dreams, too:

(Totally ridiculous, right? I mean, there's NO WAY my boobs will ever be that big.)

And then don't even get me started on Jason's obsession with cats. One night I was hanging out with a friend and her new baby kitten, and I called Jason to make him jealous. It started out as a normal conversation, and then I decided to drop the bomb:

"So guess what I'm doing right now, Jay? I get to play with Sara's brand-new little KITTEN!!" (Gosh, I can be really mean sometimes.)

"WhhHHAT??" he gasps, after the stunned silence required to wrap his mind around such a miracle.

"Yup! She's only a couple weeks old, and she's stripey with big blue eyes, and she's still got that really big, round, cute kitten belly."

"Awww..." (His voice is reduced to barely a whisper at the thought of this little furball.) And then he says, tenderly, his voice almost cracking with sincerity,
"Send her ALL my love."

To this day that is the funniest thing I have ever heard Jason say. I know, I'm lucky to have snagged such a sweet and caring guy-- but I have serious concerns that once we get a cat, it will get more cuddle-time than me. The man LOVES CATS.

For now, though, we can't have any pets in our apartment. We can only have stupid "aquarium fish," and to me, those might as well be houseplants. (So keep them away, because I quickly & efficiently kill everything in that category within a month. Our apartment is a sad collection of brown leaves.)

I can't wait until we can buy our very own, VERY fur-and-claw-and-bark-and-chew-and-poop-stain-friendly house. Because at this rate, I'll start hoarding mice in our bathtub within the month. And then they'll multiply. And then we'll get evicted, and we'll live under a bridge with 28 mice on leashes. And I need to STOP with this little story because I'm getting all warm-and-fuzzy-excited over the idea of 28 mice on leashes.

Eeexcellent procrastination tool.

Jason found this AWESOME website that lets you design your own ambient sound effects.

You combine different noises, like "waves crashing," "boat rowing," and..."lemur?!"
(Yeeesh, wouldn't wanna be in that boat.)

When the Hubster first discovered this website, he called me into the room.
I glanced at his computer screen:

--but before I could decipher the meaning of all these knobs on his screen, this is (a reenactment of) what I heard... and saw:

(Is your sound on?)



Living with this guy puts me into hysterics Every. Single. Day.

Soon we were coming up with stuff like, "Beach camping with Darth Vader who's out collecting firewood."

Alas, this website discovery is yet another reason I'm heartbroken to be missing my favorite holiday today. ...Anybody wanna make our day by sharing your own morbid concoction in the comments section? Or do you already have enough homework as it is?

(Use the "Save as Link" feature on the website.)
(Oh, here's the website.)
(PLEASE don't use the "Children Giggles" sound, that's so far past my WAY-TOO-CREEPY line it's not even funny.)
(I shouldn't have even said that, should I?)
(Happy Halloween, by the way!)