Professor Cosmo Pulsarton wakes up at 4:00AM to catch the Perseid meteor shower from the roof of his country home a ways outside of Columbus, Ohio. After hauling his sixty-pound home telescope up there, he's disappointed to find the view blocked by clouds. 

The weather channel seems to have made a fool of him yet again. Oh well, there's always next year. Disgruntled, Cosmo climbs back inside through the musty attic and crawls back into bed with his wife, Carol.

"How was it?" Carol asks sleepily.

"Total bust," Cosmo responds.

"That's nice," Carol snores.

Cosmo relishes the few more z's he's able to catch before rising again at 7:30AM. This is later than he would wake up during the school year, but this is summer—he's on Cosmo time. Leaving Carol snoozing, Cosmo grabs a light breakfast and heads out for a jog with Goofy, his collie.

 

"It's cool Dad, I'll just watch the meteor shower in my dreams." (Source)

The kids won't be up until well into the PM hours. Cosmo and Carol have two teenagers, Marvin and Antigone. In the old days they would have joined Cosmo on the roof for the shower at any time, but since those teenage sleep schedules set in, Cosmo doesn't even bother trying.

Arriving home from the morning run, Cosmo feeds Goofy and hops in the shower. His mind is racing over his latest project: an attempt to create a feasible source modeling for hard-to-explain cosmic rays that constantly rain down on our planet. Some of these rays are believed to come from active galactic nuclei; Cosmo and his team hypothesize that some of the rays are a result of a sequence of interrelated quantum events that have only just been discovered by a team of particle physicists.

It's complicated stuff. It doesn't exactly make great cocktail party conversation, which is fine by Cosmo because he's pretty shy (unless, of course, he's had a few cocktails himself).

Cosmo heads to the study to catch up on some emails, which takes about an hour. By the time he's finished, Carol is up, and they convene for coffee before Cosmo heads to the university at around 8:30AM.

 

"Doesn't that look cool? You should give me money to study it." (Source)

Cosmo works at Ohio State University. While he loves passing on his hard-earned knowledge, his favorite time is summer because that's when he's free to really buckle down and work. At the office, Cosmo greets those of his esteemed colleagues who aren't traveling or still sleeping, then heads into his private office to do some grant writing. 

The next two hours are spent coming up with creative ways to say, "Give my department more money so we can look at the sparkly things in the sky...you ingrates."

By 10:30AM, Cosmo's had enough. This grant isn't due until next Friday and it's summer vacation—time for some fun. Cosmo puts away the grant work and pulls out his team's latest spectrograph findings, returning to the age-old problem for scientists everywhere: finding a feasible and scientifically sound explanation for his team's findings.

At the tender age of fifty-four, Cosmo's a fully tenured professor and well on his way to "professor emeritus" status. He's well-respected in the biz and has spoken at some heavyweight conferences. None of that really seems to matter, though, when he's stuck on a frustrating problem.

Shortly before lunchtime, Cosmo's boss, Wanda Bozark, the head of the department, stops in. "Hey, Cosmo—workin' hard, or hardly workin'?"

"Can it be both?" Cosmo replies. "I feel like I'm getting nowhere."

"Oh, I'm sure that's not true. You're a clever fellow, I'm sure you and the post-docs can sort out this neutrino-galactic nonsense in no time. I mean, it's not like we're counting on you to bring the necessary esteem that'll allow us to pass up Pennsylvania in the rankings. No pressure, pal."

With a wink that gives Cosmo no comfort, Wanda breezes away. He knows that she knows the difficulty of the task ahead of him. She and the dean have expressed their full support. Of course, they don't say "publish or perish" for nothing. No pressure? Please. Academia can feel like being inside a neutron star, pressure-wise.

Luckily, Cosmo loves his job and can't imagine doing anything else. The pressure of a neutron star is nothing when you love what you do. That's especially the case when your current project is fully funded and there are no grants to write at the moment. 

In those circumstances, there's no reason you can't knock off early, grab lunch at home, and work from there the rest of the day. Which is what Cosmo does. If he's going to have a headache, it's going to be in the comfort of his own home office.

 

If only there were as many fish in this river as there are stars in the galaxy. (Source)

At home, Cosmo enjoys mashing leftovers of all sorts from the fridge into a sandwich befitting the complexity of miniature galaxy. He munches on it without a plate, with Goofy following him around to snap up crumbs. Then, around 2:00PM, it's back to work. Cosmo spends three hours puzzling over his problem (can the sequence of quantum events possibly conform to a mathematical equation?) and then, at 5:00PM, decides that enough is enough. Time to take Goofy down to the river for a little fresh air and fishing.

He doesn't catch anything, but that's okay. The important thing is his headache is gone. Cosmo heads home around 6:30PM, by which time the whole family is back. After dinner, a round of Scrabble, and a family movie the whole Pulsarton clan can agree on—Who Framed Roger Rabbit—it's time to turn in.

For Cosmo, summertime is the greatest. As he drifts off to sleep, he remembers that a few of those Perseids will still be visible tonight. He sets an alarm for 3:45AM.

Carol groans irritably. But hey, she knew what she was signing up for.

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