• 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 (🥁)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 🤯.

GNUstep is a mature Framework, suited both for advanced GUI desktop applications as well as server applications. The framework closely follows Apple's Cocoa APIs and is portable to a variety of platforms and architectures.

• 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 ¥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.