I received a call coming from an unknown handphone number 2 days ago. I normally don’t pick up calls from numbers I don’t recognise, but since it was a handphone number, I just decided to pick it up for once. Suddenly “もしもし” came from the other line, and for a moment I was stunned. No one I know calls me and speaks in Japanese! I thought it someone had dialed the wrong number, but in the end it was 伊藤先生 calling to ask about JLPT. So it seems like most of us will be taking the test in December? But we can only take level 4 right now, since level 3 might be too far a reach for us. I do wish to take level 3 some day though!

For the past 2 weeks we have been observing C.elegans in the lab. It’s a transparent worm (about 1mm long) commonly used as an model organism for various studies. It looks like this:

You can see the ooctytes in the hermaphrodite. Somehow I think it looks a bit like a snake in the picture…

This is a rol-1 mutant, if you look closely you can see that its body rolls when it’s moving:

(Err… commentary by Sherry and yours truly. I think Serene’s voice was caught too. )

Took me quite a while to spot it. When you have to look at so many worms with different mutations, sometimes it’s not that easy to spot what the mutation is. But poor worms… some of those we saw had blisters while others couldn’t move properly.

It’s only Wednesday and I’m tired already. An average of 6 hours of sleep a day is certainly not enough for someone who sleeps at least 8 hours whenever possible. And the number of things I need to read is increasing by the day. Good thing there’s no lab report to write this week. Gives me time to do my stuff before the 6-day school week kicks in next week.

I guess I need to get used to doing stuff in the teaching lab again. I felt so lazy to move from my seat today. I just wanted to sit there and do my stuff without having to go to the front to make more agar plates or filter papers. But from now on, there’s no more doing things at my own leisurely pace, because the experiments have to be completed within 3 hours. No more having most of my stuff within an arm’s reach, and being to keep repeating something whenever a mistake has been made. It’s back to the days of trying to do the experiment as fast as possible, especially when you have to share equipment with others, so that you don’t have to wait so long to get your stuff done. But the good thing about having lab sessions as a student is that all (or almost all) the preparation work has already been done beforehand by the lab technicians. So there’s no need to prepare media or solutions, no need to cast your own gel, etc. Usually there’s no need to wash any glassware either, since most of the stuff we use is disposable. So that means no need to autoclave stuff either. (Lucky folks at places like IMCB don’t have to do most of these, but if you’re in a school lab then it’s different.)

After thinking about it, I don’t think I’ll take up URECA after all. When I first received the email, I thought that it was a very good opportunity, and something worth taking up. But then it would mean that I’ll be in the lab during the December holidays, and I won’t get the opportunity to go for an attachment out of school during the summer vacation. Even though an outside attachment is not a guaranteed thing, I really want to have that opportunity to be able to see how different the labs outside are like from the ones in school. And of course there’s the concern of not being able to cope as well, since the workload is pretty heavy this semester, and the fact that I have no idea what’s going on in certain lectures really doesn’t help at all. Plus rather than being a weekly affair, some lab sessions are now going to be done a few days in a row, meaning that extra time needs to be spent in the lab. I don’t want to take up more things than I can handle, and end up being stressed and unhappy. I don’t think I’ll be at a very big disadvantage should I not take it up anyway. Plus if things go my way, I’ll be working in a lab for some time after graduation. Wonder if I’ll get really sick of lab life then? I hope that one day I won’t kick myself for passing this up. But given a choice between taking Japanese and URECA, assuming that I’ve cleared all my electives and this is an extra, I’m still quite determined to stick to Japanese, and that says enough I guess.

So tired.

Went to celebrate Lin Jin and Jasmine’s birthdays on Friday. Everyone managed to go for once! The food at Bento Box was a bit of a hit-and-miss, but I think that generally speaking, the food was better when they first started out. At least that’s what I seem to remember.

Just when I had set my heart on doing Japanese this semester, and email came yesterday saying that I was invited for URECA. It’s some undergrad research thing, where you work on a project for around 8 months. The thing is, if I take Japanese I’ll have fulfilled what I need to do for my general electives, and so I won’t have a need for the 3 AUs from URECA. But taking this programme will be a good experience for me to see how working on my own project is like, and I probably won’t be so lost when I do my final year project (more like final semester project actually). And of course there’s the money. $10 per hour isn’t bad at all, especially when it’s something very related to what I’m studying. Ahh… I’m not sure what to do now. But if I do join, I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to manage everything without killing my GPA. 10 hours a week in the lab is quite a lot of time.

If only I can count Japanese as a prescribed electives, then all my problems will be solved! I don’t have another humanities subject that I really want to do anyway, other than those that are nearly impossible to get. But too bad it doesn’t work this way.

How now, brown cow? Should I forget that I’ve ever seen that invitation in the first place?

日本語３ゲット！嬉しいです。

Tried to add the subject into STARS at 9.30am, only to realise that access to the system was based on least year’s year of study, which meant that I could only get into the system at 2pm. Thankfully I managed to get a slot! Same for Serene too, just that Wan’e missed the chance to add the last one. I still think that there was another slot rather than the system being slow to update! But anyway she’s given permission to come for class, so she should be able to get registered. I’m just glad that now I don’t have to spend days refreshing STARS to see if anyone dropped the subject (like last semester). Now to start revising the level one and two stuff… it’s been more than a year already.

Why is edventure down so often?

Today was En Yi and his sister’s (En Ning) last day with us in church. They’re going to leave for Canada this week, and even though I’m not close to them, I just have this feeling that I’ll sort of miss them. More so for En Yi, because I taught him in sunday school last year. He was one of those quiet ones in class, but very cooperative and nice to have around. Is this how teachers feel when they see their students leave or graduate? In any case, I hope that they’ll settle well in their new environment, and perhaps we’ll meet again someday.

Having taught sunday school for one and a half years, I feel that my students have a special place in my heart. It makes me happy when I see them growing in God’s words. When I see them willing to participate in class and being cooperative. Especially this year’s class. I think this sec one batch is quite different from the previous ones, and I’m really glad to see them participating and contributing. Even though they can get rowdy at times and they do get distracted easily. It’s such a blessing to be able to teach them this year.

I don’t know why, but my burden so far has been with the youths. I guess it has a lot to do with the fact that my days in the youth fellowship were some the happiest and most memorable ones I’ve had to far. To be able to meet a group of people, get to know them and serve together with them… even though we had to manage our studies (especially during the O and A level years), I was really happy while working together. I’ve learnt and gained a lot during those years, and I just hope that the younger ones will be able to have this sort of experience too. 6 years, when you look back, is really really short, and once gone, you can never have this period of your life back again. I know, that at least for now, this is where I’d like to serve, and as long as I’m given an opportunity to, I’ll gladly do it. It’s so much a part of my life that I think I’ll feel empty if I’m not teaching.

You know, someone once said that being a teacher isn’t all that great. No matter how much you care for your students, one day they’ll leave, and you’ll never know if you’ll see them again. You’re just left behind with those memories of them. (Ok, that was from Hachikuro.) “Are teachers like school ghosts who can’t even graduate?” I wonder.