The Week #243

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  • 🌮 I managed to get out to dinner with just myself and Yumi. We ended up going to a nice Mexican restaurant where we had margaritas, guacamole, tacos, and picadillo chilaquiles, which were all really good. As is common when ordering guacamole in Japan, they rolled up a cart, let us pick an avocado, and made our guac at the table. Our seat, perhaps the best in the restaurant, was at the curve in a long J-shaped sofa and had large pillows to lean on so you could relax. Also, zero kids in the entire place.
  • 🏃‍♂️ The cold has made it hard for me to continue running consistently. Then I remembered some advise I watched (and probably wrote about) where in the lulls with a hobby to buy some gear to motivate you, so you switch between internal and external motivations. The gear I bought this week to help me get back into the swing of things are some running socks to replace my current pairs, which have developed some holes.

    Related, I was checking out some simple black pants from New Balance online. They cost about 10,000 yen. Happy surprise when I went to my local big-box sports store to buy some running socks, they had them in the clearance section for half-off! Sold!
  • 💸 As part of my Japanese taxes, each year I need to collect / report each trade I make in my brokerage accounts in the US, including exchange rates / price in yen. (Americans are effectively locked out of investing anywhere except the US due to onerous reporting and taxation rules whereby most things (besides single stocks?) are considered fall under PFIC (passive foreign investment company) rules. If this wasn't the case, I could sign up with a local broker and all of this work wouldn't be necessary, but I digress). 

    For the past few years I've had a nice excel sheet and a nice sheet of exchange rates, and I'd look it up and fill them in to do the calculations for me. This year I finally decided to automate it a bit more so my reporting sheet automatically finds  the correct exchange from a sheet that lists them all for each day of the year. Next year's prep should take me about 10, maybe 15 minutes and be mostly copy and pasting data.