Wednesday is gone now. I have 8 weeks to go before Christmas break. Time flies so fast and gets busier and busier toward the end of the year. One reason is that the lockdown was lifted and now, we are going back to the experiment on-site. I am happy about it but it also makes me busy. And we have so many online conferences and meetings.
Now I am trying to plan something for a break. One thing I would like to try is a staycation. Maybe a few days in the city and hotel. The price is pretty high especially the hotel we want to try. We have to be careful how we spend money. But anyway, we can do something here in Sydney. I hope international travel restrictions will be lifted soon and will get easier to travel internationally. I have many places I want to go while I don’t like the aeroplane so I am a bit scared if we travel again especially long flight.
During the break, I would like to read and write. If I were retired, maybe these are what I will be doing. What else? Maybe travelling. Was travelling to a new place fun? I thought so, but I almost forgot how to travel. For me, it does not matter international or local, I like to go to a new town I have never been to. Just I can imagine what life would be like if I were living there.
I like working as a scientist so I can’t imagine if I am retired so soon. I guess I would like to write more papers as always. For that, I always want to have time to read and write. Actually, it sounds the same. But, writing a paper is more serious, you need to energy to do it. I don’t think I can do it while I am retired.
I am reading a book about “Proposals” in Japanese. It seems that book I was looking for these days. As a scientist or any professional, writing a proposal is an important part of the job. Maybe grant proposal, experimental proposal, and so on. That involves writing skills but more importantly, I have desired to do, motivated enough to convince other people. Where are these proposals coming from? I think that is curiosity. I want to know or I want to give it a try. To have curiosity, I believe that we have to know the current situations. So we do the literature research, do calculations or do test experiments. By doing these, I can see what I know but also what I don’t know yet. We need to know what we know so we can’t start investigating what we don’t know.