Kaifuku, in Japanese, means “Restoration”, and this is what I’m feeling right now.

For most of the month of October, specially the past two weeks, I have spend working on a Journal paper about my research. The cool thing about this paper is that it was a collaborative effort with Carlos Azevedo, from the University of Pernambuco, in Brazil, who I met during GECCO this year in Montreal.

Anyway, the past month, the past week, and specially the past 3-4 days were absolutely insane. During the whole week, I was sleeping less than 6 hours a day on average. Between Thursday and Friday, I slept 2 hours. And Saturday morning (after not sleeping) I had to face a horde of more than 200 of 4-8 year old kids, in a part-time job Carol got me. Talk about a hard core Halloween! I finally submitted the thing on midnight Saturday, after fighting for about 4 hours with Elsevier’s backwards submission system. (After losing a party at Chaminda’s place I really really wanted to go to)

(Of course, these journal articles should stop being such a “big deal” for me – If I really want to become a researcher, I need to get used to the rhythm of regularly producing those and not acting like the world is falling down when doing so – but since this time my PhD hangs on me getting one more journal paper published, I guess I’m entitled to.)

Anyway, now it is done! And the amazing thing is, today I actually did not slept a lot, and spend the whole day walking with two crazy and amazing people who are staying at my place from Couchsurfing. We walked all the way from home to Akihabara, and then to Asakusa, and then home again. My body is a wreck, but I feel mentally rested, specially knowing that I now have no deadline looming over my head (which is not technically true, but I can allow myself to think like that until Wednesday at least).

Some highlights from the recent days:

* The Halloween part time job was a blast. I danced Thriller in front of an audience of 200 kids, scared most of them
with my mask, and got zerg-rushed into the ground by 5 girls in princess costumes and 2 boys in ninja costumes who were fighting about who would get to be carried by me first. Also, the costumes of some (many?) of those kids were AMAZING.

* I got to DM Sword and Wizardry for the Daydream crew last thursday, and the game was amazing – the weak wizard who had more money than the rest of the party combined. The quirky allied NPCs, like Ed the unlucky fighter, and Timmy the overexcited luggage boy. The elvira-styled evil cleric who got hit by the wizard’s sleep spell and found herself naked, bounded, gagged and forced by the party to walk in front of the formation to trigger traps. Etc. Etc. Etc. I hope I get more chances to DM that for them :-)

See you tomorrow! (For reals, yo!)