- It's not everyday a man goes to war, but this week started my war with the crows. I usually try to keep on good terms with them because crows are smart, their beaks are ginormous and I stand out - they know where I live. They started razing the trash.
Like most trash areas in our neighborhood, ours is a collapsable green box made of green netting with an aluminum frame. Before we moved here a truck backend in to ours and broke / deformed our top. More over, most trash spots are on flat ground, our's is on a small decline. With the decline unless the sides are square crows and pick at the trash from the gap between the ground and the frame. Since the truck hit our trash, when the box is square there's a crow-size hole to let them come and go freely from the top.
The provisions that the neighborhood associated put on helped – the panels tied to the netting kept the crows at bay. But they were just thin styrofoam and degraded after a couple of months. Rather than get more thing styrofoam that looks temporary, I took matters into my own hands. I found some nice hard plastic (like you'd make a lawn sign out of, but thicker) and tie-wrapped it to the netting so that it extends a bit beyond the frame closing most of the gaps. I'm happy to report we won the first battle. Let's see how it continues to hold up.
I found Website Carbon Calculator and added their small bit of JS that calculates the carbon cost of each page load and displays it in a widget. It's down at the very bottom with my recent checkins / categories and such. Check it out.
It's almost Christmas. I've finished my shopping and everything that hasn't already arrived should arrive in the next day or two. As has become tradition, I send my dad a BBQ'd brisket from Salt Lick. Expressing the cold pack of meat to Washington costs almost as much as the meat itself. I wish they shipped to Japan.
The last time I went to the Salt Lick was with my dad. We got the all you can eat, which doesn't have any to gos. But somehow my dad managed to get a container of bbq to go, took it back with us to the hotel, put it in the freezer, and took it carry-on with him 5-hours back to Washington. Maybe this is where I get my sense of optimism, that anything's possible if you just give a go.
We went to the beach for the first time in what feels like forever. Didn't go in to the water, but just to enjoy the views. Winter Shonan is the best. The crowds from Tokyo are gone and it's just locals and surfers – it's great. We usually go with the entire family around the New Year. I think it's because when we used to live in the US, we'd visit for the new year, and the one place we always missed was Shonan and Enoshima, so we'd always visit.
I'm thinking of moving Past Projects to the wiki. Moving into the wiki would keep in line with my digital garden concept. All listy type stuff goes into the wiki. On the other hand, this could become a blog + profile style site in the future (really just moving the blog off the front page), and in such a case keeping past projects with a similar style as the rest of the site is desirable.
