• While I bookmarked a post about No Social Media Club, there are social media accounts that make me chuckle. One of my favorites is the World Bollard Association because it shows basic infrastructure protecting their city from dumb/reckless drivers.
• I made a few small PRs to indieweb-utils Python library. I haven't made any functional changes yet, mostly just laying groundwork for future development. I'm looking forward to pushing this library forward a bit, so I can adopt it and remove some code from Tanzawa.
• Covid cases are spiked like they have elsewhere in the world with the new variant. Two Saturdays ago, 20 cases, last Saturday 354 cases. Yikes. It was fun couple of months while it lasted, getting back to normal-ish.
• The street in front of my house at night is quite dark as I'm next to a field and it's a dead end. But people do walk along my street quite often as there's an "emergency only" path (also sans lights) that people use as a shortcut all the time. Basically, it's too dark. some day, there will be a small road connecting us to the houses across the small field. I'm happy to say that after 2 and a half years, and 2 applications (1 failed), the city finally installed a light on the utility pole on the edge of my property.
• We went for a short day trip to Hakone. It wasn't anything planned, we just decided to go and 20 minutes later we headed for the station. It was a fun ride a sbuway, commuter rain, another train that climbs a mountain (with it being the steepest tracks in Japan, 2nd steepest in the world), a cable car, and finally a ropeway over "the valley of hell" to Owakunidai.
  
  Owakunidai is an active volcanic valley, which sulfuric gasses venting all the time. It smells as nice as you'd imagine. Maybe because it smells like eggs, they also boil eggs in the sulfur/iron rich water, which turns the shells black. Eating one is supposed to extend your life 7-years. You can buy 5 with some salt for ¥500. Not bad for an extra 25 years of life! 
  
  Hopefully this trip should fill Leo's rail needs for the next few weeks while covid does its thing.

The first rule of no-social-media-club is that you shut your yap about no-social media club.

For years I’ve wondered why 99% of articles about quitting social media are written by people who haven’t quit social media. Sure, they “quit” for a week, a month, or in rare cases, a year.

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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.