• 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?)Β  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.

  • The Week #78

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    • This is the last "The Week" of the year. I finished work for the year and won't start back until the end of the first week of January. I'm really happy with what we've been able to accomplish in the last 3 months at Octopus and am looking forward to 2022.
    • I wrote another year in review ( Looking back on 2021 ) style post. It was nice to reflect at a different scale than my weekly posts and made me realize just how much I got done this year and how much life has changed.
    • Christmas was this week. Leo is finally starting to understand the joys of Christmas as a kid.
      This year he woke up an hour earlier than usual with a big grin on his face to see if Santa had come. And sure enough, he visited our house too. Leo's been wanting a Dr. Yellow train and some new trains for a couple of months.Β 

      He was expecting Santa to bring him some kind of bullet train. But instead Santa brought him a freight train that other train he mentioned sometimes: a "Momotaro" freight train. We got him the his favorite, Dr. Yellow.Β 

      It was my first time experiencing, as a parent, a kid getting so hyped and excited about what could possibly be downstairs under the tree. And it's a lot of fun. Much more fun than getting any gift.
    • After that we went to the grandparents to celebrate Yumi's birthday with some homemade lasagna, salad, roast chicken, and some cake. It was a lot of fun and a nice, slow Christmas.
    • We watched Don't Look Up, the new film with Leonardo DiCaprio about climate change, but not about climate change per se. In the film they discover a planet destroyer comet heading directly for earth in 6 months and when they alert the government, the powers that be see it as a political opportunity.

      What hit the hardest was just how distracted, by choice, the general population is in the film. Consumed with social media and 24-hour news cycles. It hits too close to home and the parallels the "debate" we see in regards to climate change. But just "don't look up".
    • A few members of family have been infected with this new variant of covid. Thankfully everyone appears to doing well so far as they were (all?) vaccinated. I feel like we're going to get a nice wave of infections here in the next couple of weeks as well. Hopefully it's as it is in seems to be in other counties: huge numbers but low/no hospitalization of the vaccinated.

  • The Week #77

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    • We took a day off of work to attend a Christmas play that Leo's school was performing. It was held at the local civic center, so it was on a stage and everything. The play itself was about Jesus and Mary and all the traditional Western Christmas "reason for the season". The older kids had speaking roles and Leo's class played the sheep. He did good and didn't appear to get nervous or anything. I think he was mostly distracted by the choir club mom's singing behind them.

      After the play, the kids sang a Christmas medley and Santa came to visit. Each kid in Leo's grade got a book, and Santa brought some new mats for when they play inside for everyone. When Leo's name was called he ran/walked as fast as he could to meet him and get his book.
    • When it was over we went out to Johnathan, an American style family restaurant as a treat. While driving there I thought how odd life is. It used to be me in the backseat, parents dressed up in the front, going to get lunch/dinner somewhere nice. But now it's my turn to be in the front. Getting old is weird like that, I suppose. Sidebar: their fried chicken sandwich and 'slaw was spot on. I could've been at a fried chicken joint in the US.
    • I switched my electricity to Octopus Energy and am finally On Supply. Excited to dog food what we're building at work. Also there's 1δΈ‡ ( $100) of credit if you sign up while we're in beta...so if you're in the Kanto area, you totally should.
    • Leo wanted to ride the monorail with all 3 of us, so we went to Enoshima. We actually went to the island this time, instead of just the beach. I was impressed as Leo walked most of the way from the monorail station to the island itself.Β  It's about a kilometer and a half apart and Leo walked about a kilo. Most impressive was him asking to be held, not because of the people, but because he grew tired.
    • Naturally we can't visit that area and not visit the Aquarium and see a dolphin show. Usually we're early and see the first show or so of the day. But this time we went in the afternoon. I wasn't expecting to see people dressed up in Dolphin suits out front protesting the show. I always felt bad watching the show, because I know their super intelligent and it doesn't seem like a fulfilling life experience. But at the same time, I wish my kid could be a kid and not have to hear about people killing dolphins as we go in and exit the place. Their go-pros recording their protest so you have look at them or look into their cameras to pass through was equally frustrating.
    • Leo and I went out to do a little bit of Christmas shopping for Mom. I told him the idea was we were going to buy a present, but we have to keep it a secret from mom. It'll be like "Leo Santa". He seemed on board and understood the concept. He picked out a PuiPui book he wanted, because "Mom likes PuiPui", which is true, you can't not like Puipui.Β  All seemed well and then as soon as we saw mom he told her what we bought. Maybe next year πŸ˜†.

  • The Week #76

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    • For a while it's felt like we don't have enough hands at the house to both do the daily routine and do cleaning beyond the basics. There's always something that needs to be done (dishes, laundry, dog walking, teeth brushing...) and we're basically just treading water, or so it feels like.

      We've made an effort to automate where we can already. We installed a (tiny) dishwasher when we bought our house a few years back. We use the dryer built into our washing machine for ~half of the loads of laundry (the rest hang outside, as you do). They help a lot. But the one thing we haven't done is automate our vacuuming. I've probably ranted on this blog about our vacuum before, it sucks (πŸ₯)1.

      We bought a Roomba i3+, named Wall-E, to see he can help us remove one task most of the time.Β  I'll still need to move him about sometimes (stairs), but we should be ok without vacuuming nearly as often. At least in theory.
    • Last week I said I'd try to get Leo to double or triple his time pedaling while riding his bike from 0.5 seconds. I vastly underestimated him as he can ride his bike! I'm amazed. He was so proud of himself he had to tell all the parents in his vicinity. Now the big kids rode bikes like him.

      Splitting learning a bike into two stages: learning balance, then learning pedaling is a much quicker way to learn to ride a bike.
    • We had a Christmas social at work. It was the first time to us (or at least me) to go out as an entire group and it was great fun. It was good to get to know my co-workers better and share some laughs.
    • I'm not usually a huge fan of listicles, but Jacob shared this 52 things I learned in 2021 list and there's a couple of gems. The most mind-blowing for me was:

      "Until 1873, Japanese hours varied by season. There were six hours between sunrise and sunset, so a daylight hour in summer was 1/3rd longer than an hour in winter. [Sara J. Schechner]"

      Completely 🀯.

  • The Week #75

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    • There must've been 3 or 4 earthquakes last week. I was jamming to The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour and, right as my train was about to pull up, I thought I felt something. Then a few seconds later the metal roof covering the platform started to creak and groan. Yikes. All was fine. Hope the big one doesn't hit anytime soon, but glad we anchored the fridge.
    • Speaking of the Beatles, Leo's really liking them. When I put on I'm Looking Through You on Rubber Soul reaction was immediate and he said "this song is good" (in Japanese).
    • Leo's begun to take more interest in the small bicycle he's borrowing from his cousin. He can keep his balance easily on his little pedal-less bike and this week we started practicing pedaling more. He's starting to get the hang of it and I was able to let go for about half a second. Going to see if I can double / triple that over the next week.
    • With super-low numbers of covid (average 101 nation wide / day and less than 1 death average) Japan feels like it's returning to the before times. This may be short lived with the new variant, but for now I'm trying to enjoy it.
    • Mentions from micro.blog seem to be working again (from other people). I didn't change anything, so it must've been a bug on their end not sending them. Either way, glad to see them going through again.
    • I think we've decided to hold off on getting a solar system on the roof for the time being. We'd be able to fit at most only 2.6Kwh on our roof, not the almost 4Kwh from our initial discussions. With a system that small we could augment our electricity usage, but there's no way we'd be able to generate what we use, let alone fill up a battery for nighttime usage. And with the FIT down to Β₯17 /Kwh, the hope of making money on excess seems unlikely.

      Where it does makes sense to me still is that the cost of electricity is likely to continue going up. Having some panels would take the sting off during the day and having a battery would let me "fill up" when the electricity is cheap overnight.

  • The Week #74

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    • This is really an update from last week, but I forgot to add it, so I'm putting it first week. After a bunch of small earthquakes we finally got around to anchoring our fridge to the wall so when the big one comes our fridge hopefully doesn't fall over and smash us.
    • I finished the first iteration of Tanzawa Plugins. But while it's merged, it's not quite ready for general usage, yet. Some of trickery I do to dynamically enable plugins works on the development server, but errors when run via gunicorn. I'm not sure if it's the fiddling with migrations, fiddling with INSTALLED_APPS,Β  fiddling with url routes, or a combination of all the above, but it causes internal server errors and doesn't recover until I restart the process. Such is life when you're playing with fire internals. Maybe my next plugin will be a Sentry plugin πŸ˜†.Β 
    • Plugins still aren't feature complete, though. I'd still like to be able to do things add cron jobs or have plugins schedule tasks, but that will require moving from gunicorn to uWSGI so I can keep inline with my "single process" goal. Oh, and I wrote some documentation about how to make custom plugins.
    • All of this to say my site now has a /now. It's still a rough draft of what I wrote during my lunch break, but really happy to see it live and working.
    • I've run habit and ran 3 times last week. Running 2 short runs during the week at lunch (when it's warmer outside) has made it easier to hit my goal. It takes a lot more gumption to go out and run when it's dark and 2c outside.
    • My Darn Tough warranty replacement socks came! Due to stock issues they're not the same ones I sent in, but they're close (my replacement is a full calf, instead of a half-calf). The process was smooth, no questions asked, no fiddling.
    • We were out at the park on the weekend and decided to take the train to the grandparents and pick something up. As the grandparents were on their way home from shopping right as we arrived at their station, so they offered to picked us up. And when we peered into the car we saw Leo's cousins in the car. We had no clue they were visiting (again). So naturally Leo decided he was staying at their house. Was nice to have another kid-free night ☺️.

  • The Week #73

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    • The covid numbers have been low for about a month now. Low enough that I felt comfortable to go out for brews with the old beer club. It's probably been around 2+ years since I last went out with them and it was a lot of fun.Β 
    • I made some good progress on the Tanzawa plugin proof of concept. It's still a ways from being mergable, but progress is progress. While I initially thought I'd made the plugin something simple like a widget to display time, I've change my mind. It needs to be a plugin that has custom urls, models, and public/admin views to really force me hit the mark. It needs to be either an about or now page plugin.
    • Leo and I did our loop to Enoshima and back riding every train/monorail we can. Since we both have yearly passes it makes it easy to go to the aquarium, see the sharks and the dolphin show, and leave.

      Since he first played in the ocean a couple months ago and realize how fun it is, we also had to drop by the beach. I didn't bring him swimsuit, but he had a full change of clothes πŸ˜€, so he was able to get in and stomp around in the water.

      Riding the Odakyu line back, we waited in front near the driver's cab. When we boarded the drive went into his cab and waved at Leo. Then he rolled down the window and chatted for a minute. Leo was a bit shy to reply. He has a son the same age as Leo. The driver had a bunch of cards and let Leo pick the one he wanted (naturally he picked the Romance Car). Finally, when we parted ways at the next stop, the driver rolled down his window again, and told us "take care!". It's always nice when Leo can interact with the rockstars of his world.
    • I watched half of Home Alone with Leo. At first he didn't want to watch it, but once I told him it's about a kid who tricks some house robbers, he agreed. We would have made it through the rest of it, but he fell asleep on the couch.

  • The Week #72

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    • I watched Finch, a new movie with just Tom Hanks. It's kind of like Cast Away, but instead of being stuck on an island, he's on earth after a solar flare, which made huge holes in the atmosphere all over and killed the plants. It was really good. Though I'm not sure on the re-watch value.Β 
    • Leo's cousins came to visit grandma's house. We took them all out Chigasaki Satoyama park, as we needed to pick up the bicycle we left last week. His cousin, an elementary school student, gave the glowing reviews of that big slide I had hoped he would.

      I'mΒ  grateful the cousins are all close enough in age that they can play well together. We can mostly sit and enjoy a cup of coffee and watch while they run around.

      As we predicted, Leo decided he wanted to also stay the night at grandma's. Thankfully Yumi's sister was fine with another kid, so we could have a night with just us.We don't get many kid-free nights for both Yumi and me (this is probably the 2nd time since Leo was born?), but it sure is nice to be able to go out to eat where we want and just talk.

      Sometimes I find myself wondering, "Didn't we walk more about the world, and travel? What happened? Did we change?", and the answer is no, we didn't change, but that we can't talk more than 2 minutes before there's one interruption or another or we're exhausted and asleep. That's reassuring.
    • I went running 3 times last week. Each run gets slightly easier than the previous. I think I need to make it routine to go every-other-day or every-third day. Anything less consistent than that and it's too easy to skip runs. And now that I've written this, I'll probably have an off week. πŸ™ƒ
    • The Christmas tree came out of storage a bit earlier than anticipated. I used my trial of Apple Music to put on some classic Christmas music while we decorated it and it was good fun. I thought Leo wanted to take out the tree because he wanted hang ornaments, but the next morning he looked at the tree and said "Santa didn't come" – the boy just wants some trains!🀣 Either way, happy that it's up. I posted some photos of my favorite ornaments on Twitter.

  • The Week #71

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    • This week marks 1 month being at Octopus. I've been enjoying my time at the company so far and I'm learning a lot. I know I'm working more hours than at BP. I think it's a combination of things, but mostly as there isn't a time sheet to worry about, just start and end whenever, it's easier to get into a late afternoon groove.
    • With the covid numbers down, after family dinner on Friday, I went out for a quick beer with a couple of co-workers. Another first in about 2 years (the last time I went out was 2019, after the last working day of the year). It was a lot of fun getting to know them better and being able chat without thinking "I should be working" in the back of my head.
    • One of the solar installers came out to measure our roof to see if the QCells 3.5KWh system would actually fit and turns out, it wouldn't. The south side could fit 9 panels, but the east/west sides can't fit 3 panels each. I'm having see if they can the smaller 185w panel on the east/west.

      Since we've now missed the deadline for a Β₯19/KWh feed in tariff, the most we'll is Β₯17/KWh. This is for the best though. As with the pressure off, we can better look into subsidies, and it looks like there may be city, prefecture, and national subsidies available to help purchase the battery and HEMS (Home Energy Management System).
    • Leo and I went to the Yokohama Tram Museum. I'd been wanting to go since I first heard about it after seeing a special on TV-Kanagawa about 2021 being 100 years of public transit in the city. I've been delaying going as it's a 20 minute bus ride from Kamiooka station (I like trains, not a huge fan of buses ( though they're better than cars)).Β  You also get a discount if you go via public transit, which was nice. I think it was Β₯250 or Β₯350 for both of us to get in.

      In addition to having a collection of trams, they have some dioramas you can drive and a tram simulator you can play. Leo just kept the tram going full tilt until it ran into the boundaries and was forcefully stopped ( about 5 meters after stop).

      The museum also had a separate building where they had a huge set of pura-rail setup and if you wait your turn you actually drive them! Leo drove Dr. Yellow once, and Hayabusa twice. Paradise for any young rail fan!
      Leo driving Hayabusa
    • We went to Satoyama Park in Chigasaki to play on the big bouncy things and ride the roller slide. This time we brought a tent we got specifically for these purposes (bringing tents to the beach / big parks where you're going to be for a while seems to be a thing in Japan).

      Small milestone on this trip was Leo finally decided to take of a proper sized rice-ball, rather than having bite-sized mini-rice balls. After he took a first bite he said "Oh, taking a bite of onigiri is delicious!", and beyond being relieved that he's eating his lunch was thinking "That's what we've been saying, dude!!".Β 

      We're likely going there again this weekend as we seem to have forgotten his little blue-bicycle in the rush packing and getting back to the car πŸ™ƒ.

  • The Week #70

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    • This week was Halloween. For Halloween Leo dressed up as Woody and we had a friend over for lunch. I made a quick chili (although they wouldn't call it chili in Texas, as I put beans in it). Leo ate it up as we called it curry and put a little cheddar cheese on top.
    • Friday was a day off for all the Kraken devs in Japan. Leo's been wanting to take Yumi to the Romance Car Museum since we went together last month. So after kindergarten finished we took our bikes to the station and rode the train to Ebina.

      Despite there not being very many people at the museum, we lost the lottery the ride the simulator. Maybe third time's a charm and we can drive it next time we visit the museuem. Leo and I also spent 30 minutes in the play area, which was a lot of fun. There's a latter and nets that go across the roof, with a ball pit. There's also a big window where you can watch the Odakyu line and we got a good look at a train getting washed.
    • I want to start running more regularly (a regular theme on the week it seems...). But one thing that "stops" me is a lack of music. When I got my Airpods years ago it sustainedΒ  a solid 6 months of running regularly and doing long (~14km) runs.

      The battery started failing about a year ago. 20-ish minutes into a run they'd just die, taking with it my tunes and my beats to power on. With the cold in winter they'd last about...30 seconds. They can't even handle my commute to the office.

      I bought a pair of AirPod Pros to replace my old AirPods with my first check from the new job.
    • My first run with them was great. I'm trying a new strategy this go around; rather than always looking for scenic routes, which usually means hills, I'm going to try and keep my runs as flat as possible. This basically means running along a big road near my house.

      Before when I ran along this road, even a single truck going by would drown out my music unless I had them near max volume, which can't be good for my ears. With the Pros I enabled noise canceling and they sound like EVs going by (but they still smell like the stinky trucks they are). So far so good.
    • We had two more meetings with some installers for solar panels/a battery for the house. Their prices weren't too dissimilar, but they both recommended Sharp panels/battery and a 2.6Kwh system. An earlier quote 2 weeks ago recommendedΒ  Q-cells panels/different battery, which would let us get a bigger 3.5KWh system. While I like idea of having the same manufacturer for panels and battery, giving up a KWh of generation for the lifetime of the panels is a lot of electricity to forgo...
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