Is there a sweeter phrase

than to hear a grad student say to your daughter at a poster session, "As predicted* in your mommy's PhD thesis..."?

We are back home after attending the JILA 50th celebration.  On the last day, we attended a poster session of recent graduate student work held in the new JILA X wing.  Here's the complex of old and new buildings.

Here's another view of the new X wing.

When Iris toured the labs, she observed that TV shows, such as Eureka, depict laboratories all wrong.  Real labs, she observed, are not as sleek and much more messy than the ones in Eureka.  I had to suppress a laugh because the X-wing labs are very shiny, new and tidy compared to the old ones.

Here's a YouTube video showing the difference between the old and new labs.

Even the old labs were more spacious than the one where I met Bad Dad.  

When I mentioned to a mom I met at daycare (who told me that she studied optical physics at U of Rochester) that I met Bad Dad in lab, she nodded and asked, "aligning optics?"

"How did you know?" I asked.

She smiled and laughed.  "I know so many couples who met that way."

Hmm, many hours spent in close quarters in semi-darkness and reaching over one another to reach apparatus and tweak knobs.  The danger of high voltage equipment, high-temperature plasmas and lasers coupled with the roar of vacuum pumps...

This September, we will have been married 22 years.

* I can't remember her exact word choice. She might have said, "As explained in your mommy's PhD thesis..." I was just thrilled that someone had even read my PhD thesis recently and is still doing related work.