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Forget your phone
by JamesWhen was the last time you left your phone at home? Or in the car? And how did it make you feel?
I went to dinner the other week with my family and I forgot my phone in the car. My first instinct was to get it...but this is Japan, not America, nobody is going to smash in my window to get a cellphone, so I left it. And I'm glad I did.
Maybe it was the warm light in the restaurant contrasting with the cool and clear autumn night, but, during dinner, I found I could relax and focus on conversation. After I finished eating when there's a lull in the conversation, there was no urge to cycle between the same 3 sites to check if anything had changed since the last time I checked 3 minutes ago.
It reminded me of when my wife and I were still dating and we'd grab a meal. We had phones and they were connected to the internet, but data was slow and expensive, the screens were tiny, there weren't push notifications from corporations selling their wares.ย
You could just be.
I think I'll forget my phone more often. -
by JamesLunch Run
Slow and easy4.2km
30.2min
24.4m climbed
149.8avg bpm
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The Week #172
by James- ๐ One for last week, I have no idea how I forgot to document this. While driving back from the station we saw an old lady walking slowly along the left side of the road...suddenly collapse. We stopped the car and checked on her. She banged her head up against the wall and was bleeding. A couple minutes later her neighbor walked by and noticed the situation and ran to get her grand-daughter...I think she'll be ok. Not sure why she suddenly collapsed or slipped, perhaps it was because she was using an umbrella as a cane...
- ๐ Two weeks in a row I've got to Mos burger...but this time I got the Yasai burger (which is basically a burger with lettuce / tomato / a sauce that's probably thousand island dressing). Thanks for the tip, Michael! Burgers with thousand island dressing remind me of my youth in California where it seems that most burger joints served burgers with thousand island. I can forsee many Yasai burgers (with a salad) in my future.
- ๐ On a whim I made pizza for lunch over the weekend. Usually I try to make it with an overnight dough to get a bit extra flavor in the dough. This time I just went with a quick pizza dough recipe. One of the pizzas was round and baked in one of our t-falls (on top of some oven paper). The other, I took the wooden handle off my cast iron tamago-yaki skillet, put some olive oil in the bottom, and baked it. It turned out sooo good. With the quick dough recipe,ย it's almost as easy as delivery...and certainly better for you (though I wouldn't go as far to call it health food).ย
- โฐ๏ธ I hacked a bit on Tanzawa. Since upgrading my Macbook I've been plagued by a local-dev incompatibility between versions of the Geo-libraries and Django...or something...this is the bug ticket. But it so I can't run database migrations. Running into these issues really hampers my motivation to work on Tanzawa. Even with these issues, I managed to make it so the svgs on my runs page are no longer generated dynamically and held in ram, but generated once and stored in the db. This should hopefully fix the out of memory server crashes I've been getting sporadically.ย
- ๐คง I got a cold or something. I haven't been sick in forever. Thankfully just a bit of a sore throat and a sinus headache. But it ate up my entire weekend as it spread to all members of the household. Thankfully now as I write this (Tuesday 5:30am-ish) I feel 99% recovered.
- โ๏ธ It's been exactly 1 year since we got solar installed. I haven't run all of the numbers but we generated almost 4 megawatt hours (4007kWh)! We sold 1 megawatt in total over the past year. In total this past year solar saved us about 10-man, which is about what I was expecting.
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Checkin to Komeda's Coffee (ใณใกใ็็ฒๅบ)
A bit of hacking on Tanzawa with an Americano. -
Checkin to Jonathan's (ใธใงใใตใณ)
A rare nighttime visit to Johnathanโs. Miss their fried chicken sandwiches. -
The Week #171
by James- ๐ This week had a 3-day weekend, thanks to Sports Day. That means we also had field day at Leo's pre-school.ย Like last year I helped hang the paintings that the kids painted above the field like flags. Blue badges had two blue-badge only events: a coordinated dance without the teachers also dancing to lead and a relay race.
Leo's been practicing the dance about once a day for the past while and he nailed it during the actual performance. For his lap around field during the relay he held his own and maintained his team's position. His team held on to the lead until the very last straight away where they got passed at the last second.
Looking back over the years of field day it's clear to see his growth as a little human. His first time running during the 30 yard dash (or whatever the length was) and he stopped running as soon as he knew he wasn't going to win and walked nonchalantly. This time, he ran his hardest the entire way, though he didn't win.
During the tug-of-war his class came in second place. And I could really see him putting in all of his strength and effort into the matches. I'm a proud papa. - ๐งโ๐ณ With the 3-day weekend we spent a lot of time at the in-laws house as the cousins in Tokyo came to visit. When everybody's in town, I like to cook for the family because I enjoy cooking (just hate the cleanup), and cooking for 8 people is a lot of work in addition to watching kids. I made lasanga for dinner one night and potofu soup with ham & cheese melts for lunch the next day.
- ๐ถ I watched the latest Beau video, a real treat about the making of the episode of How Other Dads Dad that Beau was on. Watching Beau take his kid out for adventures like that makes me want to take Leo out on more adventures. It also made me think about how often I fail to plug-in at Leo's level and just embrace being curious about the world because we got places to be or things that need doing. Both the video and the podcast are worth your time.
- ๐ Speaking of watching things, Leo watched the final Lord of the Rings movie...by himself! I would have liked to watch it with him (as well as finish the 2nd!)....I'm almost certain he fast forwarded through all of the "boring" parts so he could get to the fighting and final scenes.ย
- ๐ This week had a 3-day weekend, thanks to Sports Day. That means we also had field day at Leo's pre-school.ย Like last year I helped hang the paintings that the kids painted above the field like flags. Blue badges had two blue-badge only events: a coordinated dance without the teachers also dancing to lead and a relay race.
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by Jamesโ๏ธ Cloudy Autumn Run ๐
Starting a Fitness+ run from your phone, pausing midway through on your watch, and taking a photo (from the home screen?) seems to end the workout because the watch can't communicate with Fitness app has been in the background / terminated on your phone. Kinda messed with the second half of this run.4.7km
34.6min
38.5m climbed
154avg bpm
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by JamesOh neat - the price doesn't change in Strava between currencies. Subscribe via my phone (where I have a US iTunes account) it's $78 / year. Subscribe via the web, where it knows I'm in Japan it's ยฅ7,800 / year, which isย $52.
33% cheaper. Probably doesn't even cost Strava much because of the AppStore cut, too. -
by JamesMorning Run
Head wasnโt into todayโs run, but you shouldnโt listen to that guy.4.4km
30.2min
23m climbed
151.7avg bpm
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The Week #170
by James- ๐ I watched Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring with Leo over two sittings. Perhaps not the wisest parenting decision, as there is a fair bit of violence, but no worse than him playing Zelda, I reckon. I figured he'd get bored sooner than he did, but as it reminded him of Zelda, he was able to get stuck in. The last time I watched this was during the pandemic when I needed a bit of an escape. It still holds up all these years later.
- ๐ Looking to read a book that isn't non-fiction, I bought the the Fellowship of the Ring book, so I can read it on my kindle. It was less than ยฅ1,000 on Kobo, so why not? I'm horrible at reading fiction, so we'll see if I can get through it.
- ๐ I mentioned it in other posts this week, but I turned 38. I took the day off work, which was my first one in far too long. They're usually a "day off" (day off in quotes because they're usually me taking the day so I can watch Leo because pre-school is closed, which is far more work than actually working).ย
For my birthday dinner, I made some fajitas, some killer guacamole, and some pico de gallo. Cake-wise, we've taken to getting 3 individual slices of cake rather than a whole small cake as most people do. That way we can can all get the flavor that we want and there's no left overs tempting you. I went with chocolate mouse, Leo with the usual strawberry short cake, where he eats the cake and I eat the strawberries, and Yumi got a pumpkin tart. - ๐ฎโโ๏ธ During the day on my birthday I went th to the police station to renew my license. Before submitting my application, I went to the building next door and got my photo taken and paid for the renewal. Upon submitting my application with the fresh photo, the police officer look at my photo and asked me twice when I took it as it looked nearly identical to my previous one. We both had a good laugh. He says that sometimes people have a nice photo that they try to re-use, but I'm no so vain. Though I did make an effort to shave that morning.
- โ๏ธ After that I went to Kita-Kamakura and went to Verve Coffee Roasters for coffee and lunch. I ate a hummus and eggplant pressed-sandwich which was killer. It reminded me that I need more hummus in my life. While there I made up and wrote my ode to overnight oats.ย
- ๐ซ Speaking of hummus, on Sunday I didn't eat any meat, which I'd like to do more of. Breakfast was (you guessed it) overnight oats. For lunch I whipped up some couscous, a ratatouille-like dish with eggplant (including the last one from the garden), red/green bell pepper, onion, and garlic, some pita and a quick hummus. Dinner was rice, miso soup, salad, and atsu-age (fried tofu). I need more days like this. It makes me feel better.
