• The Week #233

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    • ⏰ In an effort to return more balance intention to my daily life, I started leaving my phone downstairs (again). I've experimented with this a few times this year. Each time I've done it I sleep better and because when I got to bed I go to sleep and when I wake up I don't dive straight into social media and slack in bed. I have a calmer mind in the morning and throughout the day.
    • ⏲️ Without my phone next to my bed, I am unable to turn on the heater downstairs and warm it up before heading down. a) That was a manual thing I had to do with my cellphone b) After turning it on with my cellphone I'd have to lay around in bed for 15 minutes for it to actually warm up. This week I took advantage of the timer build in to my heat pump to turn it on automatically 20 minutes before I wake up. It's not a low tech way of solving the problem, but it's a better less tech way.
    • 🥐 I saw a post on Mastodon about kolaches (bread with sausage or other ingredients brought to Texas by Czech immigrants back in the day)  and breakfast tacos...and it made me miss Texas a bit. Wishing I could go to a donut shop at 5am and get freshly baked kolaches and donuts... but breakfast isn't a thing like that here. Alas. I did the next best thing and baked my own. They turned out pretty good. How lucky Leo is to have homemade koalches for breakfast. Definitely the only kid at his school doing so. Either way, it hit the spot.
      Sausage, Sausage and cheese, bacon, bacon and cheese kolaches
    • 🍡 Our neighborhood had its annual mochi making day at the association's building. On offer was 3 kinds of mochi: red bean, kinako, and plain, as well as large bowls of ton-jiru soup. All of it was super tasty. I imagine this event, with everything being cooked outside using propane tanks, is half-community event and half-disaster prep (ensure all the outdoor cooking equipment works and a group of people knows how to use it).
    • 🕹️ Leo's been getting into Minecraft. We keep it on creative mode but it's blowing my mind what he's making each day. Mostly building still. This week he made himself a nice house, then me and house next to it...and connected them (❤️) . The next day I comeback and he's built my wife a house and underground bunkers. Really tempting to get myself a switch so we can make things together.
    • 🎧 On my headphones this week has been No Obligation by The Linda Lindas. I really like the first 2 tracks, but the entire album rocks. The other, by way of a toot was Chappell Roan. I don't usually listen to pop music (or at least current pop), but she is great. Two polar opposite recommendations to end The Week at the start of the week.

  • The Week #232

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    • 🩺 I went in for my annual health check. Frequent readers might realize it's actually my second one this calendar year. But it's my first fiscal year (April - March). Good news is that it went well. All of my numbers were in within range. I even got a "wonderful" from the old doctor at the end. Since it was on offer, I finally got around to getting my flu vaccine as well.

      Unrelated to my health check above, I got a Garmin Index S2 smart scale. I wanted a way to automatically track my weight and bmi (and muscle mass, fat percentage is a bonus). A year or two(!) back I made a way to track my weight into Tanzawa, and while it was easier than a google sheet, it's still something I've got to manually type in.  I must say, it is really nice to be able to just hop on the scale, get off, and it goes into Garmin/Apple Health.
    • 🏝️ We went and saw Moana 2 over the weekend. The movie itself was good. I think I liked the music from the first one more, but the story itself was solid. It was our first evening movie together as a family and my first time seeing a movie at the new shopping center that opened near our house. We're close enough to the city center that kids movies are shown in English with subtitles and dubbed versions, rather than just dubbed.

      Leo seems to get confused about his English ability. He thinks he's like the rest of the kids in his class, when that isn't the case. He doesn't realize that all of his classmates could not just casually go and watch a movie in English and understand it all. Good news is, he spoke a few more words of English in the car after the movie. Really need to find a way for him to spend weeks abroad in an English environment...
    • 🦋 Last week I created an account on BlueSky. I'm still not certain if I like it yet. Discover feels full of the outrage posts I do not miss from Twitter. I am glad I can disable re-posts (like I do on Mastodon) to keep the most sensational stuff out my feeds. As I reckon I'll use it at least in the medium term, I felt like I should make it as easy to post to from my site as Mastodon is. So now Tanzawa has a button just below to the Send to Mastodon Button that Sends to Bluesky.

  • The Week #231

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    • 🌊 For the first time in what feels like forever we went to Enoshima with Sophie and she was excited to get out of the neighborhood and sniff the salty air.

      When we got close to the beach she started pulling on her leash and when we finally let her off for a minute and out came the puppy zooms, great fun. Hard to believe she's 12. Leo had the time of his life getting his feet wet and running from the waves. Sunny days where we visit the beach always makes me feel grateful for my family and the life we've built together. Fitting given it was the week of Thanksgiving.
      Sophie at Mos Burger
    • 📺 I started watching The Diplomat on Netflix. Very good and recommended. Reminds me how I once considered working for the State Department when I was in college. The reason I didn't was I knew that, despite speaking Japanese, it would be unlikely I'd be put in Japan. How different life would have been...
    • 🦋 I've joined Bluesky. I'm not entirely sure how (if) I'll use it, but fomo strikes again. I have yet to post anything to it. That it seems to have a nice open API is interesting to me, but I can also lean on my existing Bridgy integration to quickly / easily add cross posting ability.

  • The Week #230

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    • 🚲 I rode my Brompton into work for the first time in about a month (a long gap because it was rainy or I was out of the country). It was really good. I had gotten in the habit of going to the same cafe each time I went to work, which doesn't quite live up to my original "the Brompton will enable me to explore a bit before work". Tokyo Tower is near my office, and I found a place that opens relatively soon after my train in Shinbashi arrives. So I went.

      While killing some time waiting for it to turn 7:30, I rode over to Tokyo Tower. It had rained the day prior, but the skies were brilliantly blue.
      Tokyo Tower

      While climbing the hill up to the tower, I'm not entirely sure what happened, but my foot slipped off a pedal...my foot landed on the ground, and I rolled the spiky metal pedals directly into Achilles tendon and bloodied up my leg a bit. Chocolate croissant was worth it.
    • 🏃 The previous incident occurring on a Friday made it so I couldn't go running on the weekend (in addition to rolling the bike into me, I also rolled my ankle slightly). Run debt + 1. Only 9 more runs required this year to hit 100, so I'm still positive on hitting my goal.
    • 🌎 I want to rely on my RSS reader more when reading things online. But, and I think I mentioned this some weeks ago, it feels like my Feedly integration is flakey. Every few months it requires that I remove / add the account back to NetNewsWire for it to start picking up feeds again. Enough. I've exported my feed list and imported them directly into NetNewsWire. If I ever want to change clients, I can always export my feeds to OPML and go from there. Open standards rule.
    • 🧑‍🍳 Warm thick soups are perfect for this time of year. These kinds of soups are not something you can easily find in my neck of the woods so, I made my own. I made creme of potato soup for the first time and it turned our really well. Leo even ate it up, so I was able to sneak a bunch of veg into him to boot.

  • The Week #229

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    • 🛬 I flew back to Japan. It's good to be home, to be with my family, to sleep in my bed, and to get back to familiar routines. As one would hope, everyone was excited upon my return. And everybody liked their souvenirs. Leo saw the Scratch coding book I bought him exclaimed "yattaaaaa!" (hooray) while raising his arms. 
    • 🕹️ We made our first game using Scratch. It was a simple game where you try to get a character to jump up the screen to reach a door. Scratch is too advanced for him as it requires being able to read, but maybe this will provide some motivation.

      One very cool thing I realized is with his iPad we can easily add his own drawings to his games. We can take a photo of his drawing, then in the photos app deep press the character, this will select just the drawing itself, giving us a buffer with a transparent background, which we can then and copy/paste into a new png.
      Jump Link featuring Dark Link

      One unfortunate thing I hadn't realized about Scratch was that Apple removed the app from the AppStore. So while the webapp works for making the game, he can only play the game on a proper computer with a keyboard because it requires arrow keys. Perhaps an excuse to get an iMac to act as a family computer?!
    • 🏃‍♂️ I ran my first 10km in a very long time, at least for this year. It wasn't entirely on purpose but my hotel happened to be about 5km to the Eiffel tower and I didn't want to visit Paris for the first time and not at least see it. So on my final day I went on a photo run there and back. Long slow runs are the way to see a city.
      Eiffel tower as seen from the Seine

      The tower itself is quite impressive. On the way back along the Seine I saw a fantastic eco-houseboat as well. It had a green roof, solar panels, heatpumps...the works!
      Eco houseboat

      Back in Japan and jetlagged, I went out for a run at 4am and unintentionally ran a personal best 5k at 3 seconds below 30 minutes. Compared with the last time I ran a 30 minute 5k back in August, it felt easier this time.

      Lastly, I've now got 90 runs this year in the bag. My goal of 100 runs in a year is well within my reach.  LFG.

  • The Week #228

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    • 🇫🇷 I took the chunnel to Paris. I've was gonna say I had never ridden a train that crossed borders before, but that's false. I once rode Amtrak from Everett, Washington to Vancouver and back. Besides the quality and speed differences (no match with the Eurostar), you go through both passport controls back-to-back and customs before boarding, so when you get off in Paris you just go.

      First impression of Paris: the buildings are mostly quite similar (6 story) and the store fronts are very cute (the flowers!).

      When walking from my station to my hotel they were also cleaning the streets. Was very good to see the entire operation: leaf blower, street scrubber, and pressure washer all fully electric. It's still loud, but not nearly as loud and zero local pollution.
      Cozy breakfast nook
    • 🏃 I don't have much time to actually be a tourist in Paris, so I decided to see cities my new favorite way: long slow runs. I ran for about an hour from my hotel around to Notre Dame, Sainte-Chapelle, and the Louvre. One day I will go inside the Louvre and enjoy its art, but that day is not today.
    • 🍽️ I also learned in detail the phrase why "you don't want to see how the sausage is made" is the way it is. I got it in theory. But it never crossed my mind that a sausage could be gamey and like...still having bits come out when served. I couldn't finish it. Not enough to make me a vegi forever, but I think my new strategy when traveling might be to order vegetarian until you get the lay of the land. The smell is seared into my nose.

      Besides that one sausage the food has been incredible. I've been absolutely ruined on bread, butter, and cheese. It's all so good here. The best one was served to me at a friend's flat...it's butter, but it has like pockets of intense salt, almost like instead pop-rocks. I'm ruined. Going to need a specific category in my monthly budget labeled butter and cheese when I get back.
      Croissant and Pan aux chocolat

  • The Week #227

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    • 🇬🇧 I flew to London. As with last time a couple of years ago the flight went over Canada. The flight itself was the best kind, uneventful. Arriving in London I'm always amazed at how you can just walk-in. After the e-gate to show your passport, there's no filling out customs forms or anything. Don't even need to talk to anybody. Having been once before everything is a bit easier. I know more what to expect and how things work, which is nice.
    • 🏃 Last time I stayed in London, my hotel was next to the British Museum, which isn't super near any parks. This time I'm staying closer to Hyde Park, which makes it easy to run about. I must say I'm a huge fan of these big public parks. I reckon similar things exist in Japan (Yoyogi park in Tokyo, Yamashita park in Yokohama), but they're not quite the scale.

      The weather is perfect autumn weather (which is apparently a bit warmer than usual, a common theme as of late). Heaps of people are out running and walking on the paths. But as good as the running is, my favorite thing about the parks are all of the dogs running about, not on a leash, with their owners. They find big sticks, sometimes bigger than themselves, and carry them. I wish I could do the same with Sophie, I know she'd love it.
    • 🐑 I met up with my long time friend Jacob. We hadn't seen each other since I lived in Houston probably 8 years ago. So good to meet old friends.
      Looking down Regent Street at Piccadilly Circus

      Classic London

      Buckingham Palace

      We met up in Piccadilly Circus and walked (most of the way) to Borough Market. Borough Market was really good (tootling about last visit, I missed it by a block). All of the food looked so good. We ended up settling on a nice piece of fish & chips...which must have been at least 1500 calories. Which was good was it then proceeded to walk back across London to Hyde Park. 

      I was quite happy I could see Buckingham Palace this time around. Last time I came it was blocked off in preparation for the Jubilee. Getting up close to these buildings and walking through the parks (that were private at some point in history) gives you a real sense of the power and absolute wealth the family had/has. While big modern glass skyscrapers are impressive in their own right, they don't project the same sense of power that these big stone buildings do.

      In total I made just above 33,000 steps that day. Perhaps a record?

  • The Week #226

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    • 🥐 We went to Mokichi in Chigasaki for lunch over the weekend. I've talked about it before, but they took an old brewery, did it and the immediately surrounding buildings up  real nice with great lighting and food, and every time I visit there I think "man, I wish my house was this cozy".  I try to de-construct why it is and I always reach the same conclusion: wood, warm yellow lighting, and not covered with kids things.

      I had a choco-corone (a bread filled with chocolate creme) from the bakery and it was incredible. It was the first time I've felt like I could really taste the quality of the ingredients in the creme. No xanthan gum up in there faking textures.
    • 🎌 The LDP got a shellacking in the snap election. I don't remember much from my Japanese politics classes in uni, but they aren't my favorite party (I don't follow closely enough to have a team (and I can't vote anyways)) , but I know who it's not.
    • 🎃 The cafe next to a park in our neighborhood had a small Halloween event. We stumbled upon it last year or year before. This time Leo came prepared with a vampire cape and a mask we made from a paper bowl (we cut eye and mouth holes from it). Kids are supposed to run around the park and find the passphrase (give me candy, not trick-or-treat) to get some treats. It feels wrong to forgo the threat of a trick and all demand...
    • 🎒 I've got a work trip coming up very soon. Beyond flying, it will involve some train travel, so I decided that rather than my huge duffel bag, I want to carry a backpack. I bought a proper backpacking backpack in 2009 for "myself", but the only person that's used it was my wife during a month long trip to India in grad school. Finally my turn to use it and...the water resistant coating on the inside has dried and is flaking off 🫠. I think I got it all off and washed. Excited to finally use it...even if it took me...15 years.

  • The Week #225

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    • 🗳️ I voted by mail. To date, since living in Japan, I've always gotten my ballot delivered by email. This way there's no chance of it getting lost in the mail (especially a worry during covid). But getting my actual ballot printed and ready mailed is always such a faff. Post office isn't open on the weekends etc... Next time I think I will ask for them to send me the paper ballot as I've learned I can drop them off without postage at the embassy and they'll mail it for me. As my office is right next to the embassy it seems like far much less hassle. I hope the candidates I vote for win. I imagine the rest of the world (minus a few bad dudes) are also hoping the same.
    • 🏃‍♂️ Leo had his first Sports Day at primary school. In the days of old it used to be an entire day event. You'd have to stake out a spot, bring some bento. These days they gotten with the times and it was over by 11:30am. Parents came and went depending on when their kid was doing activities. I stayed for everything except the closing ceremony.

      The first years had a dance and a 50m dash. The dance was partially to Creepy Nuts Bling-Bang-Bang-Born. At the end Leo and a few other kids got to do a special part where they did the main dance move in the video. He nailed it.

      Leo was in the second group of runners for the 50m dash. He got 3rd. The first time he had to run a race like this in pre-school he was well in last and as soon as the first person crossed he started walking. Each year since then he tries a bit harder and, most importantly, he doesn't let the results get him down. Kids growing up...
    • 🚲 Because sports day was on a Saturday, Monday is a day off for school. I took the day off so I could watch Leo, but on Sunday he decided he wanted to go the grandparents house, so I had Monday morning to do whatever I wanted.

      The weather has cooled off (for good this year? 🙏🏻), and I took the Brompton out on a long ride to Enoshima. When I arrived, rather than turning right like I usually do, I turned left towards Kamakura for a bit of an explore. This was 100% enabled by Brompton and that I can get it ready for the train in 2 minutes, so I don't need to worry at all about riding out and back.
      Brompton at the beach

      While in Kamakura an old man came up to me and started speaking to me in English. He has been living in Kamakura for 82 years and worked in America when he still did that (seems like he oversaw operations of things?). He has 7 grand-children and the oldest is studying near Chicago now.

      When I got back to my station, I popped into the konbini and got some lunch. I didn't notice a different old man watching me unfold my bike. He tried to guess at the price (off by an order of magnitude). In the end he told me it was really great (I agree!). I've heard that people talk to you when you have a Brompton, and that seems to be the case, even in Japan!
    • 📺 Shrinking Season 2 started and it's so good.  I watched the first 2 episodes and am looking forward to the remainder of the season. The fact that the first episode is called "Jimmying" makes it all the better.

  • The Week #224

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    • 🚲 I did my first commute by bicycle and it was everything I thought it would be. I posted a small tootstorm (?) with some photos of my commute on Mastodon. Time saving wise – it's not as much as I was expecting, but I felt way more energized and better when I arrived to work. I think it's not going down 2 levels to go up 3 levels just to to go down 4 and up 3 i.e. riding 2 subways and an commuter train.

      When I arrived in Shinbashi the FujiTV folks were milling about in front of the steam train. I purposefully tried to hide from their view. What I noticed takes longer than unfolding the bike is actually putting the bag back into its case and securing it to the seat.
      A matcha green Brompton in front of a steam train in Tokyo


      There aren't that many options for coffee / breakfast open at 7am in Tokyo that aren't Starbucks or a Tully's. But I found one . At first I was wondering how they'd react to me trying to bring the bike inside. But it was perfectly fine and they didn't say anything. Also the breakfast and coffee were really good, so I'll probably go back again this week as well.

      Finding my way from there my office was a bit tricky as near my office the roads curve around a lot and I haven't memorized them yet. I'll find the optimal route soon enough.
    • 💤 A major milestone, Leo stayed the night at the in-laws by himself without his cousins being there. Just jiji and baba. The boy wanted to watch YouTube that much. For better or worse that's kind of turning into our routine. After a busy school week and swimming on Fridays, he wants to spend a day laying around. If he does it at the in-laws' then it means we can go out and...get lunch and have a break.

      The next day it enabled me to have a second run at just bringing my folded bike into a cafe (komeda0 and turns out, they don't seem to care. It slid right under the table easy peasy, too
    • 🌳 One of the reasons I wanted the folding bike was so that Leo and I could ride bikes together away from the house. Both bikes fit in the back of my kei. When I went to pick up Leo from in the in-laws and I took our bikes so we could ride some place new. We rode down to the major park and played for a bit. On the way back we stopped for some ice cream 😋. It's so  easy to go out and explore (especially as it's flat), I'm tempted to leave a bike for Leo at their house.
    • 🚲 I recognize this week's post has mostly been "James and his Brompton". I'd be worried if, a week after new bike day it wasn't.  On Sports Day, I took the bike out for a long-ish ride. I rode down to Sakaigawa and headed inland towards Yamato. I used to ride this direction a year or two ago on my cross-bike for a while. Rides along the river are always fun because there's dedicated paths sandwiched between the river and farmland.
      Brommie near the river in front of a harvested rice field

      When I got back, Leo wanted to go out on bikes with the 3 of us. It was getting dark so we made a bike-train and rode over to the bike shop (to adjust Leo's brakes), Ito Yokado (for some shopping), then to Chai, (a local Indian joint) before bike-training back home. It was a lot of fun riding together as a family and I hope we can do more of it in the future.
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