• 🏊‍♂️ After missing 3 weeks of swimming beause of being sick or not 100% better, Leo's started to make up for it. He had swimming twice this week. I took him on the weekend and got to watch his progress...and he's progressing quite well! He's currently using the paddle board, kicking down about 60% of the school. This is helping him get more leg strength while also letting him practice taking breaths while swimming.
• 🦵 My right leg is healing up nicely. There isn't any pain except for the plastic covers they put to cover the entry points while I heal sometimes feel like they're pulling my skin when I walk. I've already noticed when walking Sophie up / down the hills what a huge difference this has made...before my leg would feel quite heavy. But not any longer! I'm curious how no longer having a backward flow of blood in my leg with affect my running...when I can do that again.
• 🍫 Leo and I watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I really do like the older version much more than the newer one. Perhaps beause Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay (something I didn't realize until this viewing). Also, the music is much better and Gene Wilder is class. I hope this primes him for seeing the new Wonka prequel coming out next week here in Japan.
• 💴 The yen looks like it finally might start strengthening up a bit. With the usual exchange rate of ¥100 - ¥108 / USD, this past year with it about ¥150 / USD has been a pain. Most all of my expenses are in yen, so it doesn't affect me directly on a daily basis, but prices have been rising because imports are now more expensive. It's been at ¥147 and strengthening the past few days...I hope this trend continues.
• 🪟 The sliding glass door in my bed room cracked again. This first happened about a year after we bought our house and the house maker came out and replaced it for free because of a defect in manufacturing ...I reckon this is the same defect, but feel like they're gonna stick me with the bill. As it occurred at a similar time of year last time as well, best I can tell is the sudden temperate change is causing too much stress on the glass?

City council calls for an increase of the urban forest – currently comprising 5.2m trees – even as the mayor demands cuts in spending

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Markdown Annotations embed authorship in text while preserving its readability and portability.

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Kishida said Japan will terminate the construction of new coal-fired power plants that have no emission-reducing measures in place, without specifying the timeline or mentioning the scrapping of existing plants.

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An Energy Department program designed to create jobs and manufacturing in communities reliant on fossil fuels is backing projects in West Virginia, Colorado and elsewhere.

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This past summer I had longer vacations than usual. We made sure they coincided with the girls’ so we could spend more time together and hopefully explore somewhere new. We mulled over a bunc…

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• ⛰️ It only took me about 2.5 years to get around to it, but I made some basic Brid.gy integration into Tanzawa. Right now it only supports posting to Mastodon, but that's all I use it for right now. I had considered doing a native integration with Mastodon (and indeed, there's an open issue for it), but decided against it because I didn't want to faff around with figuring out ActivityPub...especially when my site already marks things up using microformats.
  
  The integration manifests itself as a new button that says "🐘 Send to Mastodon". When clicked the elephant starts spinning, the backend sends a webmention to Brid.gy, and if successful, the button transforms to say "View on Mastodon". The button jumps around a bit during the whole process, but I'll sort the fine details "later".
• 🇸🇪 We went to Idea to pick up another Eket cabinet, bringing our total to three, as well as some frozen meatballs and so forth. Ikea used to be one of the places we could take Leo to and he would not have a meltdown...you'll notice the past tense in this sentence.
  
  After we ate lunch and did some browsing on the second floor, when we got downstairs where all the small things are, Leo noticed the play area...and had a melt down because he couldn't play there...it's not like we didn't try, but there were 50 kids ahead of him, we would've been waiting 2 hours... how I would like to be able to go anywhere without one meltdown or another.
• 🏥 I went to the hospital to remove some varicose veins on my right leg. I've had them most of my life (they're from (I presume) from damage done when I was first born and the doctors were poking around to give me a feed for whatever they gave me) and the past couple of years they've been getting worse...and visible when wearing shorts.
  
  This is notable because it was my first time being hospitalized in Japan, so the entire experience is new. I found over during check in that they decided to move me from a shared room on the 2nd floor to a private room on the 4th floor. I'm no sure why they decided that, but I'm glad they did.
  
  The surgery itself was smooth and I was awake for half of it. I've never been awake for any surgery, so it was an interesting sensation to feel the pressure of tugging(?) without actually feeling anything. For the second half they put me to sleep and apparently they had to use more / it took longer than expected to knock me out.
  
  Dinner was really good – though perhaps that was as I hadn't eaten in 24 hours by the time surgery was finished and I was awake. Rice, fish, steamed spinach, and some carrots and peas with ground chicken.
  
  I shouldn't be surprised but there's no WiFi in the hospital, so I'm finishing this post tethered to my phone. I can walk fine, except my leg is wrapped in a bandage and it hurts a bit. I'm glad it's over and without any issues...and I look forward to being able to run again (perhaps a week per the doctor).
  
  Cost wise I think my total out of pocket is supposed to be around 14-man (940 usd at current exchange rates)... I don't think I would have gotten this done if I was living in America as I can imagine it being easily 5 - 10x, even with insurance.
  
  Update: Total cost was 7.2man or about 470 usd.