In this experiment, Aya learned how to make a “volcano” erupt right at our own kitchen! For this experiment, you will need the following:

1. two small plastic drinks bottles (PET bottles will do just fine)
2. large piece of cardboard
3. vinegar
4. bicarbonate of soda (for those in Japan, look for 重曹 (juusou), which is Nihonggo for baking soda)
5. tablespoon and teaspoon
6. food coloring
7. washing-up liquid
8. large plate or tray
9. funnel
10. pen or pencil
11. scissors, tape

Aya cut out the shape drawn onto the cardboard. This should be big enough to fit around the bottle.

The cardboard will then be bent into a cone, and secured with tape. In this pic, we tried fitting the cardboard onto the mouth of the bottle just to check if it fits.

Using a funnel, the bottle was filled with vinegar until it is about one-third full. Add the food coloring (we used powdered coloring).

Add one tablespoon of washing-up liquid, and set aside.

Pour in three teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda into the other bottle. This should then be placed on a tray because this experiment will surely make a mess!

Place the card cone over the bottle with bicarbonate of soda. Using a funnel, pour in the vinegar and washing-up liquid mixture.

Whoa! A volcano eruption! Our experiment was a success! 🙂

Aya watched with fascination the last of the mixture still managing to ooze down the cone.

Explanation: When the vinegar and bicarbonate of soda mix together, they produce carbon dioxide gas. This, in turn, creates the bubles in the vinegar and the washing-up liquid. This mixture then expands and forces its way out of the top of the bottle.

This morning, we went to see a mini-concert sponsored by the music school that Aya has been attending for the past month. We thought it would be a sort of “happyoukai” or presentation to be performed by older kids at the school. We were wrong. It turned out to be a one-woman performance by one of their staffs. But fortunately, she was very good – and for 60 minutes or so we listened to her perform on the electronic keyboard. She gave us quite a show.

At one point, she mentioned that when she was a little girl, she was made to practice at home for at least 15 minutes by her mother. Since her mother went to work every day, her practice was scheduled every 8-8:15 pm, just after dinner. She stressed the value of practice, and how it was essential to improving her skills.

This brings to mind Baggy’s post about what it takes to be great. As a prime example, Tiger Woods became one of the greatest icons of golfing because he started very early. His father trained him to play golf at 18 months of age! It is thus very important for parents to devote time and effort into developing their children’s abilities and skills while they are young. Discipline is a must. Practice is gold.

In a way, I feel kind of guilty because I haven’t really taken Aya’s lessons that seriously (not yet anyway). Do I just want her to learn how to play the piano just because it’s cool? Or do I want her to excel in piano, or music in general? Do I envision her as becoming one of the greatest musicians of all time? If so, how much of myself would I be willing to sacrifice to achieve that? Attending the school will never be enough. Practice spells the difference between mastery and mediocrity.

I look at my daughter and see so much potential in her. I feel responsible for what she will become someday. I am sure than when she is old enough, she will be able to carve out her own place in the world, in her own time, at her own will.

The path to greatness is a long, arduous journey. As parents, we are responsible for showing our children where to begin.

The mercury has plunged to drastically low levels lately. Winter is finally here! I can wear my trench coat again, haha. My sister is already having fun with her first winter and has been quite taken with her new “kinky boots.” (Peace, Lai!) Winter is definitely one of the best seasons to be fashionable. How I wish I could also wear kinky boots to work (yeah right).

Winter clothes have relatively high price tags, though. Not unless you buy them sometime in February, because that would be the time when the stores are desperately trying to get rid of their old stocks in time for the new spring collection. But oh, wouldn’t it be so cool to pull off a Trinity look-alike, inspired by the movie, The Matrix? How many times a year can you do that, anyway? 😛

At home, we are trying our best to keep warm. Lucky for us, we have a propane gas heater that’s really quite efficient in heating up a large room like ours. Unfortunately, we don’t have any heaters installed in the bathroom area, so every time we get out of the shower, it’s like entering the freakin’ frigid zone.

I call this the V-cut futon! Hehehe.

As for the bedroom, well, there’s the usual futon – quite efficient in keeping the warmth in, but is also quite bulky. And don’t you just hate it when the cold air manages to creep into those areas where it doesn’t quite bend around the contours of your neck? Some futons actually have extra flaps which are thin enough to bend and thus “close the gap.” And then there’s the V-shape futon, which has a cut in the middle, allowing you to expose your head in between. It really looks funny, but I bet it does a good job in keeping you warm in bed. Here’s the site which sells one of those. They even have a name for it, “Attaka-boa.” Attaka = short for atatakai, or warm. Boa = bore? boa (as in boa constrictor)? boar? I couldn’t figure it out. Somebody enlighten me please. Another word for synthetic wool, perhaps?

And if that still won’t do the trick, well, I’m afraid your only other strategy is to snuggle up to a heat source (read: another human being). Keep warm! 8)

Someone asked me recently, “So what do you do in your free time?”

I responded, “Well, we do the laundry, we go to the supermarket for groceries…”

“So it’s not free time after all,” the person replied.

“Well, it’s free in the sense that it’s not spent for work,” I hastily added. No sooner had the words left my mouth did I realize how funny it sounded. When we say free time, do we only mean that we’re not at work? But household work is still work, isn’t it?

After talking about this a bit, we both agreed that sometimes we really tend to be more tired during the weekends than during weekdays because of the tonloads of household chores that we have to do. In our case, for example, we never really get to do our laundry except for weekends, and even if there’s just three of us, that usually means a gigantic pile of stinking laundry by Friday. And that’s why you can find me cursing during the weekends when the weather is not cooperating. How else can I get the laundry to dry? That means more piles the following weekend. Ugh.

And it’s not just the laundry, mind you. Weekends also mean cleaning the house, cleaning up our toddler’s mess, sorting through the mails, going out for groceries, running for errands, and what-have-you. There is just so much to do; more often than not we wonder just where the heck our weekend goes. Unlike in the Philippines, we don’t have household help or relatives we can holler to for help. Sometimes I do envy my sister back home, who has a household helper and a nanny who looks after her own toddler. She also works full-time. Ah, the perks of living in the third world. Here, I join the ranks of women who epitomize the “working mother” – the work never ends even when I get home. There is no one else I can turn to for help, no one else to clean up after our mess (unless of course my Mom is visiting hehe). And like them, I have to make compromises, too. The house won’t always be clean, the dirty laundry basket won’t always be empty, and sometimes the mess will not be cleaned up for several days at a time. It just can’t be done, given the limited time. And admittedly, sometimes I would rather just blog here than bother with a few messy areas in the house. I can live with that; a little mess never hurt anybody. 🙂

Last weekend, the sun was out in full force, it really just seemed so cruel if we didn’t go out and at least enjoy it while it lasts (nowadays it gets pretty dark by 5 pm, what a bummer). So we just dropped everything that we were doing, packed the previous night’s leftover adobo into our lunch boxes, packed Aya’s bike into the car’s trunk, and headed off to the park. There, we brought out our hastily prepared picnic food, lounged lazily under the sun, enjoyed the cool afternoon breeze and watched the leaves from the trees fall. Aya rode her bike, and showed off how fast her little bike can go. Father and daughter frolicked on the grass like pups out in the sun for the first time. I stretched out my legs and closed my eyes, thought of how wonderful it is to just spend time without any hurries or any particular purpose in mind. When I opened my eyes, the sky was a little bluer, the sun a little bit brighter, and I swear that I felt a renewed vigor for everything that lies ahead (mga labada humanda kayo!).

Free time is not what’s left over after all our chores are done; it’s the time we simply have to make for ourselves, before anything else.

Baggy, that is. We’re not going with him. He actually didn’t think that he would be needed in this particular trip, not until late last month. One of those last-minute trips. Besides that, we had visited Singapore just last year, so this is a trip that we can pass off. Now why don’t they just organize meetings somewhere in Hawaii or Bali, for a change? Heck, why not even Boracay? We could use a free ticket home. 😛

Seriously, we’ll be missing the Christmas celebration in Pinas this year. We have decided to put off our homecoming until sometime early next year, just so we can avoid the travel season and the sky-high expenses that inevitably go with it. Sometimes it just seems too extravagant to go home in December, when the fares are more than twice their usual prices during off-season. I know, I wrote before that you can’t really put a price tag on spending vacation with your family and loved ones. But hey, I am not saying that we’re skipping on going home entirely. Hopefully we can go home sometime in March or April, right, Sister? 🙂

So when did I/we start blogging? Well, the truth is that I started blogging as early as 2001, when I became pregnant with Aya. Only at that time, blogging wasn’t as hot as it is nowadays. You can still access my pregnancy blogs in our website. We didn’t have a domain name then, and we were not even familiar with blogging softwares yet. The original entries were posted at geocities.com – and this was prior to Geocities being acquired by Yahoo! When we finally had our own domain and website hosting sometime in 2004, we created a subdomain for Aya and posted the pregnancy blogs there.

Ok, so that was then. After Aya was born, I found myself inevitably thrusted into the juggling act of caring for a baby and getting back to the treadmill of work, so I just became too busy to blog anymore. After about three years, though, I found my way back to blogging after my Dad died. Now that I think of it, it does seem as if personal circumstances have profoundly influenced my blogging activity!

My blog entries then were sporadic. I only wrote when I felt like writing. I would write maybe two or three entries a month. Sometimes even fewer. And then, just recently, after some accidental (or maybe fateful?) visits to some blogging sites, I found my inspiration again. I didn’t realize until now that whilst I was taking my blogging for granted, other people are blogging like crazy addicts. Some blog for profit, others for the mere fun of it, others for sharing their interests and connecting with other people who share the same interests – well, all sorts of reasons for blogging.

I got hooked. And maybe some of you have noticed the recent regularity of our entries. We have also found ways of increasing the exposure of our site to fellow bloggers, mostly Filipinos. Slowly but surely, we are establishing our connections in the blogosphere. It is such a thrill. I’ve even convinced Baggy to start contributing to this joint blog online. We both realized, much to our chagrin, that our writing skills have become poor because we haven’t had enough practice in years. Too busy learning Japanese, our English has stagnated! Sure, we write technical papers all the time, but it is still different from creative writing. Blogging, for us, has therefore become a tool to help us hone our writing skills once more, as well as to force us to think and reflect on life and other issues besides our research. And I tell you, it is so refreshing and liberating to write about things not related to work!

And so for now, this blogging binge will continue. We just hope that you guys would find something useful and thought-provoking among these posts. And thanks a lot for dropping by and posting your comments! 🙂

This is the title of an article I came across at CNNMoney.com written by Geoffrey Colvin, Fortune Magazine’s senior editor-at-large. According to the article, hard work and not natural talent is what will propel you to great success! "Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work," proclaims the summary.

It is good to be reminded that greatness is not something endowed at birth or reserved to a preordained few but something you can earn if you have the will. For an "ordinary" researcher like me, it’s encouraging to know that I don’t have to be an Einstein to become a great scientist. I only need to work hard, really hard, and do more "deliberate practice." In research, this translates to several extra hours in the lab, working on a challenging and important research problem, and publishing more quality scientific papers. Publish or perish, as Kathy wrote once. Although recently, it is shifting to "patents and profits." But this will be in another entry.

I believe important research findings do not just popup from nowhere. They are products of persevering minds working even at sleep, and relentless and passionate laboratory works. I read somewhere that Einstein started thinking about the effect of traveling close to the speed of light at 14 and was able to complete his theory of relativity only after several years. Edison tested thousands and thousands of different materials to improve the filament of his incandescent electric light bulb before he could make the filament’s life span last longer. As his famous saying goes, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." This has been my favorite quotation since high school and it still inspires me until now. 

When it comes to lessons on hard work, I don’t have to look very far. My father used to tell us to study very hard, give our best, and strive to excel. For him, education is the only way out of our difficulties and the only "wealth" he could leave behind. As I came to realize, education is indeed a treasure worth more than any material things on earth.

Still on greatness, Kathy shared with me once an advice she got from someone she admires. According to this person, "If you want to be great, don’t settle for the number 2 position. Either you are number one or you are nobody!"

For me, I have a Nobel prize to win! 🙂  What about you?