• The Week #84

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    • I hoped we'd make it a week without Leo's school being closed, but we weren't so lucky. Thursday was canceled because of a close contact somewhere, but re-opened on Friday. It looks like we're in the clear, at least for now. That said, dropping Leo off in the mornings is noticeably quieter as about half of his class is taking off by choice.
    • Relatives in Tokyo managed to get Omicron and thankfully it was just a fever for a night.
    • We signed up Leo for swimming classes at the local Y and he had his first non-trial lesson. We can watch from outside the pool and he looked like he had a blast. I'm sure he'll be swimming like a fish in no time.

      I know I took swimming a swimming class as a kid, but only as my mom told me so. I must have been young enough when I took them as I have zero recollection of the class itself. Swimming has always felt like one of the things "everyone can do naturally", but that isn't the case.

      Basic swimming is such an important life skill. I'll breathe a bit easier when we go to the beach during summer once this is finished.
    • I'm trying not to blog about my runs every week, but this week was notable because I ran 3 times. Since I've been slowing down I've been switching my focus to time more than distance. But since I'm not slowing down that much, an extra 15 minutes adds another couple of kilos. Two of my runs were over  6km, 50% more than my usual 4km course.
    • In one of the episodes of Shinkarion (Leo's favorite train/mech show), they have the Evangelion Shinkansen (since retired) as a guest mech. When it's transforming from a train to a mech they play part of the opening song for the anime. Leo's constant singing of it inspired me to start watching Evangelion for the first time since high school. It's as intense as I remember.
    •  Like most Japanese front doors we have two locks. And for a while the bottom lock has been acting strange. In the mornings it would take a lot of force to unlock it from the inside. But it'd be fine some afternoons. I carry both the card for the autolock and the backup key, just incase the electrics stop working.

      After cycling back from Shonandai, we went to open the door and neither worked on the bottom lock. I got locked out of my house. It sounds like it's getting caught on something. We called our house maker because "that's what you're supposed to do" and they were, as anticipated, useless. You'd think they'd have, at a minimum, a local "lock guy" to recommend, but that's not the case.

      We find a locksmith he comes out about an hour later. I'm glad I didn't lock the car so we could at least sit inside of it where it was a touch warmer. While we're waiting I'm thinking about Sophie, hungry and may not get dinner tonight. I'm thinking about work and how funny it'd be to have to take leave because I can't physically reach my computer. 10 minutes after arriving he manages to jimmy the bottom lock open. I've never been more happy to get inside of my house.

      After he opened it, he took it apart to see if he could deduce what the issue was. It's not the lock itself. It appears to be the hole in the frame where the lock latches on to is slightly off. The lock itself appears to be fine. Who knows. Best Β₯5,500 I've spent in a while.

  • The Week #83

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    • The same as Michael, we had an outbreak of covid amongst family,  so Leo's school closed all week.  It's re-opened now, let's hope it stays that way. Winter break just never ends for this boy πŸ˜….
    • I finished watching Generation 56k, it was really enjoyable. I was disappointed it was only 6 episodes long to start. I'm looking forward to Season 2.
    • So far I'm keeping pace with my goal of 100 runs in 2022. In January I ran 9 times for a total of 40km. My recent focus has been to run slower and keep my heart rate down, which is proving more difficult than anticipated. But just letting myself slowdown has made running more enjoyable.
    • I've made some more small contributions to indieweb-utils this week. James and I seem to be in a bit of a groove timezone wise. I'll send my reviews/PRs in the morning before work while he's winding down/sleeping. And he typically responds / handles them while I'm winding/down sleeping. And still the project moves forward.
    • DHH wrote a good post about  We can't live without friction, about how the friction is a great filter. It's important to remember this because of the years of engineering frictionless reactions to things in social media is a large part why it can be such a cesspool (my words, not his).

      For a few days I was thinking it might be fun to add a comments form to Tanzawa posts, so I could perhaps replicate the communities that used to form around a given blog. Where your blog would connect not just you and a reader, but your readers, too. I think I'm going to let that stew for a bit longer, and perhaps add an email link in my footer for non-webmention responses.
    • I started looking at the quotes we got for solar panels and a battery again, mostly for two reasons:
      1. Disaster preparedness. We're overdue for a big quake in the Kanto area. Having a stable, rechargable power supply would be really nice if the power was cut because of it and remove a lot of stress. The battery is small enough (6.5kWh) that we'd still need to conserve electricity, but we wouldn't be in the dark or without heat.
      2. 2.6kWh is a small system. And based on the generation estimates it would only ever produce about half of our usage during fall/winter. We might get a few months in early summer where it can cover all of our usage. Post-lunch dishwasher runs would be "free". But it's more about the feeling I get when I come back from walking Sophie and the sun shines down on my house: that feeling of missed opportunity.
      I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but it's back on my radar. Again.

  • The Week #82

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    • I added a proper favicon to my blog and Tanzawa. It's something I've thought about for a while but delayed doing because "doing it right" requires making heaps of files in different sizes. But then I saw a blog post by Adam about how to add a favicon to Django and it included a svg example. Using svg for my favicon means I forgo Safari support for now, but it would let me generate the icon from site settings . And since the code samples were plug and play, I decided to do it. Yay favicon.
    • We took Leo to the big park nearby to practice his cycling. We're still practicing the push start, but he's getting really good. He navigated through people, barricades, and dogs without hitting any of them. He's gaining for confidence too as he told me not to run after him. The best part, at least for me, was that he got to experience the joy of cycling while watching his favorite trains roll by.
    • Omicron has officially found its way into Leo's pre-school with a couple of kids getting diagnosed with it. We have no idea which class (or multiple classes?) the people infected with it are in, so we have no idea of our potential exposure. With how transmissible this variant is, my assumption that it doesn't matter who had it or which grade and we'll probably be testing positive in a week or so. Hopefully not, though. 

      For now school is closed for half a week, but I expect for that to be extended. The hardest part of the extensions/sudden closures is that winter vacation never ends. Each morning he wakes up and asks if he has to go to school, and if he does, he starts crying. This happened after summer break too, but after a week of school, he got into the routine and it wasn't an issue. This time we can't get back into the routine.
    • Since we're going to be staying home a lot more again, I caved and bought a Switch to play with Leo. I'm a bit conflicted about my decision. On one hand, almost 4 feels early to be playing video games. On the other hand, I seem to recall playing NES/playing on my 8088 and I turned out fine (or at least I think I did). It's not like he'll be playing by himself – we'll always play together. It's probably fine. 

      I picked up Mario Kart and Minecraft. Minecraft is probably too hard for his age, but it's similar to his Legos in that he can build stuff. Mario Kart's auto accelerate and steering assist is brilliant for young and old alike.
    • I started leading part of a new global team, the first of its kind, at work. While I can't talk about the details of what we're building, it is exciting to be shaping and developing new core functionality that the rest of the company will depend on.
    • I switched my electric from Octopus' initial offering (no longer available) to their new 100% renewable Green Octopus plan. While I liked being on a fixed tariff (where the price of each kWh doesn't change with usage), supporting renewables with my wallet, in even a small way, felt like the right thing to do. Especially when you consider the average kWh in Japan costing 500g~ of carbon. Compare this with the UK where it's closer to 10g of carbon/kWh... Green Octopus is also currently cheaper than Standard Octopus, which won't always be the case.

  • The Week #81

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    • I made a lot of good progress on Tanzawa this week, releasing 3 big features.

      First, and most apparent, is support for themes. In my release celebration post I decided to adopt the Platinum theme on my blog temporarily. But the platinum theme is growing on me. I may keep it active for longer than a couple of days.

      Second, I added support for rel-me. I closed this ticket exactly 364 days after creating it. rel-me support will allow new Tanzawa users who haven't already registered their domain with IndieWeb services like Brid.gy, to prove that their domain and the Twitter/GitHub profile are indeed, the same person.

      Lastly, I added settings to allow you to change the site icon (β›°) and to paste a custom HTML snippet in the footer. The footer snippet is mostly because I got sick of git stashing each time I did a deploy with changes to the base_public.html file. You'll notice my icon is now Mt. Fuji as a) I always post photos of it on my twitter and b) it's purple-ish like the platinum theme.
    • I also made some more contributions to the indeweb-utils library. The library is starting to take shape, too and get a solid foundation. It's also fun helping other developers write better Python.
    • My composting bag came in and I started adding our food scraps to it each night. The suggested amount (up to 300 - 400g / day) easily fits everything we produce in a day. The experience of composting vs tossing it in the bin is much better too. No more basket in corner of the sink with a wet/sometimes slimey bottom and then smelling it when I open the trash can while I wait for burnable day.
    • Belated Christmas presents arrived from my mom. Leo scored this cool spinning top that lights up when it spins. More than that, it has a handle and release system to help you get the perfect spin. You put in the handle, wind it 2 or 3 rotations, press the button to release it.

      It's funny he got the spinning top as the day prior, he brought back a Japanese Koma for a top spinning contest they'll be having at school. Using this top requires a bit if finesse and practice to get really going. Naturally he prefers the easy one with lights. Such an American. 🀣
    • I've been keeping on my running schedule. Setting my goal for 2-days a week (achievable) vs 3-days a week (achievable sometimes) seems like it was the right decision.

  • The Week #80

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    • 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 Β₯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 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?)  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. 

      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. 

      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.  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.  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.  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.
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