Happy leap day everyone! God gave us an extra day this year, hopefully you were able to spend it wisely 🙂 I made good use of my day by sleeping in until 9:30 am. Then Ray picked me up we could go to some recycle shops to look for Q Posket collectibles. He also took me to play at some arcades (I mentioned in a previous entry that recently this was how I prefer to unwind from the work week). We also ran some errands like going grocery shopping and cleaning my house. I was even able to give Ray a haircut and myself a DIY facial once we got home. And now I’m sitting here writing another blog entry while Ray is watching some anime that I don’t know. It may not sound like a very exciting day for some, but I’m very happy because these are things I don’t normally get to do on regular days. These kind of days are extremely rare for me, and I treasure every one of them.
Today was great, but for now let’s take a quick trip back to June 2019 for this entry. June was probably my most stressful month of 2019, but it was also one of my best ones. It was a crucial month for me, PhD-wise, a turning point of some sort. In my past entries I kept mentioning how stressed I was because of a conference I was preparing for. That conference actually took place this month, so all the pressure from the previous months lead up to this moment. On top of that, I was scheduled to give *another* seminar right before my conference (literally the week before my conference). These seminars are done to update our professors and colleagues on the progress of our research. If you recall, my last seminar was around the end of April. After that we had a 10-day break because of Golden Week. This meant that for this seminar, I only had roughly a month’s worth of data, which wasn’t very much considering the many times I failed in my experiments. Fortunately, I was able to pull it off by coming in early and staying late at the lab. I also gave up a few weekends even though I really didn’t want to since Amie was actually in Japan this month as a visiting researcher in Kobe University. I wanted to spend my weekends catching up with her, but a lot of times I didn’t really have a choice. I’ll get to that later, for now let’s get started on this month’s IG posts.
On the first weekend of the month, Amie visited me in Kyoto. Ray and I took her to some famous locations around the area.
Of course we had to show her Fushimi Inari
And Kinkakuji (Golden Pavillon)
(I already took her to see the Bamboo Forest and Kimono Forest in Arashiyama when she visited me in Febraury)
Here’s a nice shot Ray took of me at the view point at Mt. Inari
The following weekend, Amie and I both did overtime work at the lab on Saturday, but she was able to visit me again on Sunday. This time we took her to explore Kawaramachi (downtown Kyoto).
We found this milk tea place while we were walking around. During the time this was taken, there weren’t a lot of milk tea places in Kyoto yet, so we were pretty excited to try it. However, they’ve recently started popping up and I’ve been seeing more of them around. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to try most of them.
The third week of June was when things started to really heat up. I had my seminar that week, which was a huge success (praise God), however I still wasn’t able to prepare the samples I needed for my conference. This meant I had to work overtime at the lab and I had no choice but to sacrifice part of my weekend again. I don’t have a problem with working on weekends, I’ve done it willingly many times before since I started my PhD, I just really didn’t want to do it this time because I wanted to make the most of Amie’s visit. However, I also knew that this was a crucial period, and sometimes we need to make sacrifices. If only you could graph my emotions that week – you would see two huge spikes : one rising up after my successful presentation, and one pointing down because I was so scared that I wouldn’t be ready for my conference.
If you noticed, in the paragraph above I said I sacrificed only “part of my weekend”. It was a very difficult decision because this was the last weekend before my conference, but it was also the weekend that Amie and I reserved to go to Universal Studios. We thought of cancelling because my conference was in 3 days, but this was our last chance, since my year pass would expire that weekend. In the end we decided to push through with our plans. I made up for it by staying super late at the lab on Friday night, and even coming in to finish my experiments after we returned from USJ on Saturday night. And of course I worked all Sunday, only leaving the lab for a short period to attend our church’s Sunday service. I probably got a total of 9 hours of sleep that entire weekend. (All of us actually … since Ray and Amie stayed with me at my building while I finished up my experiments. I told them to go home and rest so they would have energy for our USJ adventure, but of course being the supportive friends that they are, they didn’t want me to be alone in my suffering.) My body hated me during this time, but it was worth it in the end because we all had a great time at USJ.
In case you need photo proof:
The three of us at Hogsmeade
Amie and I at Minion Park
We tried to dress up as minions too