The Week #79

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  • It's a new year. I laid out some goals for 2022 in Looking Forward to 2022. This year we had the traditional "long life" soba for dinner on New Year's Eve and the traditional osechi breakfast on New Year's day at the in-law's house. It was good as usual. The only downer for me was that I ended 2021 and started 2022 with driving. On the other hand it was below zero and windy. "There is no such thing as bad weather, only inadequate clothing" – Guilty as charged.
  • I made some really good progress on theming in Tanzawa, but I'm a bit blocked at the moment as Postcss isn't recognizing the tailwind generated css classes as existing e.g. you define a color named "primary" and use the class "bg-primary" in your html to set the background of an element the primary color. The styles aren't generated and if you try to use it in a component with @apply, it errors because the class name is invalid.
  • We started doing more disaster preparation to get ready for any big earthquakes or such scenarios. We purchased goods for daily life, such as portable toilet bags (put it over a box, do your thing, and they've got something in it that'll solidify it all/help with smell?)  some more long-lasting provisions (rice, canned bread, just-add-water-pasta, curry), a portable gas burner (which can be used indoors), and some containers for water (non-drinking variety). It's easy to get carried away with it all, but I feel a bit better knowing that we've at least got a couple more days food and a place to do business in the worst case.
  • Unlike the US, food scraps in Japan aren't usually sent down the drain with the disposal. Most of it is sent out with the burnable trash. However, burnable trash only comes around twice a week. For us it's on Monday and Friday. But with the end of the year, they pause pickup for a couple of days for the holidays. This year it's...you guessed in: Monday and Friday. This means we'll have 2 weeks worth of food scraps (and other trash) to throw out. Yuck. The crows are going to love it.

    Not only does it smell, but burning food trash just releases more C02 into the air. I happened to stumble upon this episode of Rising on NHK World that talked about composting and introduced this Local Food Cycling composting bag/kit "that you can even use on your veranda in a Tokyo apartment" and decided to give it a try. It won't arrive for another week or two, but I'll be sure to keep you up to date in my composting adventures.
  • Speaking of NHK World, I also found a good new series called Zeroing In: Carbon Neutral 2050. Super interesting show. NHK World is the reason I don't mind paying my NHK dues like many people do. The amount of quality programming (in English!) they produce is well worth whatever I pay them each year.
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