• On Sunday I went for my first ride in about a week. This was an easy paced 20km, just exploring a bit. On the cycle routes it's so easy to get into the zone – just you and the machine, cranking faster and faster until...it's you've reached your exit and it's time to slow down.
• The same day, Leo also decided he wanted to go to Baba's house – back on (a different) bike and cranked out another 15km round-trip. Which is to say, my legs are a bit tired on Monday. Not sore, just tired.
• Speaking of being tired, Leo's starting to speak a lot more English to me. The first words he says to his mom, who is expecting Japanese first thing, are "I'm Tired". Focusing these past few months speaking as much English as possible seems to be paying off. Or maybe it's the Netflix Teen Taitan's Go! subscription (so, so good).
• I found this fantastic series on Arte called When Bread Becomes Art. It documents different bakers in different parts of Europe. My favorite episode so far The Power of Fermentation, mostly because of this scene where they're in Denmark where he's teaching a sourdough baking class at this marina and :chef-kiss:, it just seemed so nice. It reminded me of our visit to Gustavsberg (though that's Sweden, not Denmark). Nice cool summer weather, ocean near by, sourdough bread – sign me up.
• It looks like Japan is finally going to open its borders back up to vaccinated / negative PCR travelers and reinstate  visa waivers. After over 2.5 years of being closed it will be nice – maybe my parents or siblings can visit? I'd love to visit the US, but with flights being about $4,000 round-trip per person, ¥144/USD exchange rate, and all the other costs, it's not happening. Hopefully opening the borders will increase the availability of flights and reduce the prices to realistic levels.
• We did this fun thing at work during summer where we'd try to get customers to reduce electricity usage during peak demand hours and in exchange they could win some prizes (as an employee, no prizes for me 😀). Since it ended the team made a nice summary page where you can see how much electric you saved and how that translates into CO2 / Trees. I managed to save 3.5kWh or about 2kg of CO2, which is about the same amount of CO2 as 13.5 trees would absorb in a month. Yes, we need systemic change, but it's neat to see the impact you can make by turning up the AC a degree here or there.

From Georgia to Brittany via Austria and Denmark, we meet with passionate craftspeople obsessed with producing better bread. Between tradition and modernity, some strive to produce excellent sourdough, others use ancestral wheat, but all aim to make the best possible bread while respecting local, ecological and sustainable production.

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Journeys around Britain by bus and train

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• The variety of places we can eat / order from with Leo is slowly increasing. He's been on a curry kick as of late, which is great as we can get veg into him easily, but we also took this chance to grab some Indian takeaway. He ate up the butter-chicken curry. I was hoping to have him try some of my mixed vegetable curry, but they only heard "mixed" when taking our order and gave me the mixed seafood curry.
• We had a company BBQ at Kasai Rinkai Park in Tokyo. The park is one stop from Disneyland (which you can see from the top of the Ferris wheel). I took Leo with me to meet my "work friends" and he was super excited. The setup is quite nice – basically if you have a reservation, you just need to show up. They have all of the BBQs, give you the charcoal, fire starters, tongs and food to grill. You just need to start the fire and grill. We let one of the Australians on the team man the barbie – it's in their blood. (yes, there were some huge shrimp included and no, I didn't ask him to "put another shrimp on the barbie", but mostly as I didn't think to do that until just now...next time).
• I went out for a couple of rides along Sakai-gawa and I'm really enjoying it. It's a bit easier now as it's cooled off a bit from the summer highs. While I enjoy riding along the river (nice scenery, no cars) it does make me wish I could incorporate more longer-ish riding into daily life. The usual way people do that is to commute by bike, but that's not feasible as the office is 50km / 3 hour ride away. I guess what I'm getting at is that it would be nice to have a destination, other than just out and back.

Japan is one of the world's biggest plastic waste producers, thanks to its love of packaging - but a week of going plastic-free in Tokyo reveals surprising solutions.

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