• The Week #246

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    • 🇬🇧 The week in the UK, as always, was over before I knew it. I'm glad to be home and with the fam, but London is growing on me. Maybe it's as I'm always quite central and it's possible to walk to work? Maybe it's all the Brommies around town makes me a bit jealous?

      I could see the cold/wet get annoying, but also I reckon one adapts by buying appropriate clothing? I'm looking forward to going back again sometime, maybe this summer?
    • 🚗 In 2016, wanting to be a part of the change I wanted to see in the world, I bought one share of TSLA. I would have bought more, but it was all I could afford. When I buy single stocks, I treat it as betting and if I sell it for anything over what I paid, it's a win. I got lucky on this one. 

      Through the years, I hadn't really considered selling my stock as they were still making good on their end of the electrification of cars and the grid. Sometimes I'd get annoyed, like when I found out that hyperloop existed solely to kill interest in public transit in favor of cars, but as a whole the good outweighed the bad. I could rationalize that away though, at least the end game was fewer fossil fuel cars on the road.

      The past few months I started to question if that was still the case. Rather than feeling like I was voting in favor of the change I wanted to see, I found myself feeling embarrassed and a bit of shame. Even if I didn't mention it to anyone, I knew.

      All of this to say, I sold it all. I considered keeping just 1 share, so that I was in the same position as when I started, but ultimately, buying it was purely emotional and selling was as well. Sure, I may lose out on some long term gains, but this stock was never about pure profit for me. Maybe at some point in the future I'll be able to buy a share again.

  • The Week #245

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    • 🇬🇧 I flew to the UK for work. I'll be here through the week. This is my 4th trip to this side of the globe in the past few years and it was the first time that Leo got upset when I left. Last time he moaned a bit and was fine, but this time he actually cried (😭). Maybe next time the timing will be such that I can bring the family along and we can stay a bit longer or just come for a visit generally....

      The weather this time around, or at least the first 2 days, were absolutely fantastic. 18 degrees with blue skies.
      View from the hotel
    • 🏃 Running around Hyde Park is my new favorite tradition. Land in the UK and go for a run early the next morning. It's such a large and beautiful park, it never gets old. When I'm back in Japan these parks are what I miss the most.
      IMG_1816.jpg 2.47 MB
    • 🥔 There's this stereotype that British food isn't great (I'm looking at you, beans on toast), but I'm not convinced. I had my first Sundays roast and it was fantastic. The chicken, the gravy, the Yorkshire pudding, the roasted potatoes. Sooo good. I need to introduce a semi-regular Sundays roast into my life.

  • The Week #244

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    • 🏝️ We had true spring weather over the weekend: clear blue skies and nearing 20 degrees. It's back to winter now. But we took full advantage of the weather and went to Enoshima, starting from the Monorail station.
      Looking over the harbor

      There were a lot of people, but manageable.  I was surprised by the number of foreign tourists there these days. Pre-covid, I'd only see a few here or there, but now they're everywhere. Which is good for the economy and explains how the offerings are changing. Slowly the old seafood houses are getting replaced with pizza and hip cafes. On one hand, the showa vibes are rapid disappearing makes me miss an era I never experienced in Japan, but it's for the best to remain relevant.
      Walking down the main drag

      On the island we found (definitely not showa!) a robot cotton candy machine where you can select amongst 6 different shapes with varying colors in a single candy. It was great and it memorized all the kids walking past.

      On the way back to get a coffee and head home we stopped by the beach for 20 minutes, letting Leo throw rocks into the ocean. Surprisingly he listened to us and did not wet, which is good as we did not have a change of clothes with us.
    • 🚶‍♂️When we got home from Enoshima, I realized this trip marked a huge milestone for Leo. He walked the entire 3~km there and back without me carrying him or putting him on my shoulders once. He didn't even mention it. It used to be we'd barely walk 100m and he'd want up on my shoulders. Or any crowd at all and up he'd climb. I was mentally prepared for it at some point going back, but nope. 👏 I'm proud, but also a little sad because I know the last shoulder ride is closer than I realized.
    • 🎥 I watched this video about this couple's low tech eco living apartment in Paris. It's incredible how they've made the entire place an ecosystem, from growing 120 different kinds of plants inside, harvesting mushrooms, to growing their own protein (🦗). It's all a bit too much for me, but I love their dedication. The way we make humans live in a more sustainable manner isn't through growing mushrooms in your shower, but though making sustainable choices cheaper and better. Solar, wind, batteries, EVs are a good first step because EVs and heatpumps are, even if you ignore how they're powered, a better experience than petrol cars and gas-based heaters. The future is solarpunk.

  • The Week #243

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    • 🌮 I managed to get out to dinner with just myself and Yumi. We ended up going to a nice Mexican restaurant where we had margaritas, guacamole, tacos, and picadillo chilaquiles, which were all really good. As is common when ordering guacamole in Japan, they rolled up a cart, let us pick an avocado, and made our guac at the table. Our seat, perhaps the best in the restaurant, was at the curve in a long J-shaped sofa and had large pillows to lean on so you could relax. Also, zero kids in the entire place.
    • 🏃‍♂️ The cold has made it hard for me to continue running consistently. Then I remembered some advise I watched (and probably wrote about) where in the lulls with a hobby to buy some gear to motivate you, so you switch between internal and external motivations. The gear I bought this week to help me get back into the swing of things are some running socks to replace my current pairs, which have developed some holes.

      Related, I was checking out some simple black pants from New Balance online. They cost about 10,000 yen. Happy surprise when I went to my local big-box sports store to buy some running socks, they had them in the clearance section for half-off! Sold!
    • 💸 As part of my Japanese taxes, each year I need to collect / report each trade I make in my brokerage accounts in the US, including exchange rates / price in yen. (Americans are effectively locked out of investing anywhere except the US due to onerous reporting and taxation rules whereby most things (besides single stocks?) are considered fall under PFIC (passive foreign investment company) rules. If this wasn't the case, I could sign up with a local broker and all of this work wouldn't be necessary, but I digress). 

      For the past few years I've had a nice excel sheet and a nice sheet of exchange rates, and I'd look it up and fill them in to do the calculations for me. This year I finally decided to automate it a bit more so my reporting sheet automatically finds  the correct exchange from a sheet that lists them all for each day of the year. Next year's prep should take me about 10, maybe 15 minutes and be mostly copy and pasting data.

  • The Week #242

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    • 🥳 Boyo turned 7 years old. It amazes me how quick he's growing up. It feels like just yesterday we were in the US celebrating his 5th birthday and here he is closing in on the end of his first year of primary school.

      Looking back on this past year for Leo and he's really starting to mature. He's getting better about eating various things, he's having fewer meltdowns, he's trying his best in all of his endeavors, his thinking is becoming sharper. It's exciting.

      He was adamant about not having a cake and instead had a scoop of his favorite flavor of ice-cream with whip and sprinkles. Yumi picked us up a slice of cake each. For dinner we had hamburg, fries, and steamed veg.
    • 🥘 For the first time (I think?) we went out for dinner with a neighbor/friend/Leo's friend. As the emoji suggests, we got Indian. I can't remember the last time I spent 2 hours in any restaurant, but it was a lot of fun. I hope we can do it again.

      Even better, we all rode bikes to the restaurant. I always enjoy a night ride and I should do them more.
    • 🐓 On Sunday we took advantage of the warm-ish weather and barbequed in the front of the house. After having the grill for a long time, this was the first time we've used it at our house (I've always been a bit cautious because I don't want to make my neighbors laundry smell like smoke). Food turned out good and I think I will start using it on a more regular basis. It is quite nice to just sit outside, cook, and eat. Or at least use it one more time before the weather turns 30 degrees from 6am hot.
    • 📒 8 months ago I started writing down all of my work in a notebook (Leuchtturm 1917, dot grid, blue) that I'd had for years and never got into the habit of writing in. I ordered a replacement a couple of months ago (same, but yellow), unsure if I'd start it in January and stop my blue notebook at 2024. I continued to use my blue notebook (continuity work for the week is easier), and while it's nearing full, my yellow notebook remained unused, until this week.

      After watching this video, I decided to give a go at building a daily tracker. I backfilled best I could from memory from the start of Feb. I'm still undecided if this will remain a purely personal notebook, in which I journal, or if it will be an everything notebook where I journal and also track my notes for work. I reckon it will remain separate until I finished my blue notebook, at which point my work notes will start becoming interspersed.

  • The Week #241

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    • 🇬🇧 Leo went to his first English class over the weekend...and he had a good time. The first lesson was centered around "What's wrong?" and being able to respond with "I have a fever/cold/tummyache" etc... Leo was able to also notice the teacher speaks with a different accent than I do e.g. no hard r sound when saying "fever" and instead pronouncing it more like "fevah".

      Making English class part of his routine will definitely get him speaking more – already it's made some small differences. Maybe it's seeing/being with other kids his age having fun with English? Thank you to everyone who suggested it.
    • 🥟 We picked up a bamboo steaming basket from Muji and it's changed my life. Ok, maybe not that drastic, but I'm loving it. Cooking using a steamer is quick and easy. Bop some pork buns, or some veg, or whatever in there, let it sit for a few minutes and it comes out perfect. No hassle, no oil no nothing.
    • 🎥 Not really a movie, but the vibes of this video from hokuou-gurashi, a Scandinavian goods shop are exactly the vibes I'm aiming for with my steamer. Instead of rushing through to prep a breakfast or meal where you're constantly in front of the stove...use your steamer to not only cook some veg, but also warm up side-dishes. So much more relaxed.

  • The Week #240

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    • 🪟 I moved my desk to the opposing wall where it has been for 5 years, in front of a sliding glass door that we never go through. The room feels larger, I can look outside while working, and it encourages me to keep the shelves organized (as they now appear in the background-ish). Why did I spend 5 years looking at a wall when I could have been looking outside?! Which is to say, it's been a good change.
    • 💩 TFG continues to do shady, illegal, and wildly unpopular things. I want to say that nobody deserve this, but also he's doing exactly what he said he would and they voted for him, so perhaps they do. Very glad we left just before his first term.
    • 🇬🇧 I think we found a good English school for Leo nearby. It's not with one of the big eikaiwa chains, but direct with a teacher. We're going to go for his first lesson on Saturday and he's excited. I'm excited too.
    • 📧 I've sent more email in the past 2 weeks than I have in the past 2 years connecting with readers of my blog. It's been kinda nice. I like how personal an email feels compared to, say, a DM on <social media>. I wanted to share a sentence I wrote in one of my replies that I think is worth keeping in mind as we're tempted to doom scroll our days away.

      > When I quit smoking in college the hardest part wasn’t the nicotine,  it was figuring out what to do with my hands when I had 7 minutes between class. Smartphones (and by extension streaming music and AirPods) are the same. We use them not because we want to listen to a song, we just need something to do between class…and it expands to fill the gap.

      Don't let the news cycle and the noise expand to fill every gap. Read a book. Bake some bread. Go for a walk. Create that space and protect your mental health.

  • The Week #239

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    • 🇬🇧 Thank you everyone who reached out last week about improving Leo's English. As you suggest he needs to play with kids his age in that language and if he has a teacher, it needs to be not me. I found an English/Japanese Minecraft pictorial guide that he's opening everyday and reading. It also has a practical use – when he wants to search for an item that he doesn't know how to spell, he can use the index in Japanese to find the page that has the corresponding English word.
    • 🍕 I went to Eatly for a quiet lunch with my wife. We split a pasta and a pizza. While eating the (delicious) pizza I noted, you can tell the quality of the product and simple ingredients because when you chew it, it doesn't just dissolve in your mouth like a slice of dominos. That in turn slows you down, which in turn gives your body time to signal that it's satiated before you've eaten an entire pie.
    •  🏋 I find myself enjoying lifting weights more than running this past week. Perhaps because it's warm and I don't really need to change if it's just for a quick 20 or 30 minutes. I should probably find a program to follow, but I'd rather do something than do nothing while geting stuck trying to find the "perfect" routine. 
    • 🗃️ After 5 years of feeling like we don't have enough "proper storage", despite having 2 nice tall (reaches to the ceiling) anchored into the wall steel racks from Muji, it finally clicked how to use them better so we have a "proper" amount of storage. When buying the racks, I also needed to buy storage cases (with drawers) that could be stacked in a uniform manner across the shelving. Starting to organize stuff into storage cases has made the house feel so much less cluttered... unfortunately I need to buy another zillion to fill the shelves.

  • The Week #238

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    • 🏃‍♂️ Close followers of the blog may have noticed, I did not run 2 times this week. I only ran once. I still closed my rings each day (often doubling), but it's hard to convince myself to go out in the cold.
    • 🦋 I realized I don't really enjoy posting on short form social media any longer. I think because the way Twitter went, the trolls, and AI ingesting all the things, I don't trust it like I used to, which bleeds over into not posting. Even replies, I'll find myself composing something and stop more often than not. 
    • 💪 We setup a home gym in Leo's room since he's not using it. I should have done this ages ago. Currently we have my kettle bells (existing), a bench (new) and two adjustable dumbbells (new). We put some some thick 2cm mats in the floor. Now with Leo's playing Minecraft, I can sneak upstairs of pump some iron.
    • 🇬🇧 I've grown a bit concerned about Leo's English levels. His listening is native, vocabulary is good, pronunciation of individual words is good, but producing sentences remains a challenge. When we read books, I've started to (try) to get him to shadow me, and that seemed to help, but he needs more. Often bi-lingual kids go back one parent's country for the summer and that's how they level up...but that's not really an option for us. International school, while expensive (💸), for the time being isn't an option because the daily commute length and base-levels not being enough to study.... maybe we just need to move for a couple of years? I'm not sure if Sophie (🐶) could do another long flight at her age...and we can't just leave her, she's a member of the family.... Open to ideas 🙏🏻

  • The Week #237

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    • 🚀 Visiting Tsukuba and the JAXA Space Center has been on our list of things to do since we moved back to Japan and as of this week we can tick that item off. We took Leo out of school on Friday, as it was the only time we could get a reservation for a tour of the JAXA campus, and drove to Tsukuba.
      Me in front of a rocket with Leo running around being silly

      Tsukuba is so different from Yokohama. It feels like I'm back in Clear Lake with wide, 3-lane, straight roads in most directions (at least in the center). There's distance between buildings and ample parking. You can even see the sky and look off into the distance without your view being blocked by buildings.

      Whenever I visit some place I always imagine what it would be like to live there. On one hand, I think I would love living in Tsukuba (at least in the immediate vicinity of the station). It's quieter, there's heaps of green around, surprisingly international (it's was designed in the 60's to be a town for research and development), and there's a direct line into Tokyo, which would get me into the office is roughly the same amount of time as now. On the other hand, I imagine needing a car to go a lot of places would probably wear on me over time.
    • 🔭 We went to a the planetarium and spent 4 hours(!) at the Tsukuba Expo Center and it was brilliant. The activity room that had a lot different displays on electricity, wind, gravity, light, and more really enables kids to learn about the world while having fun. My favorite was a Dance-Dance-Revolution style game that had you "dance" to the fuel mix on the grid over time, with each direction being an energy source (coal, nuclear, gas, wind, solar). It got really hard towards the end more generation sources came into the mix.
    • 🏃‍♂️ A wide tree line cycle and walking path stretches through downtown Tsukuba connecting various parks called Tsukuba Park Drive that's a story above ground. At large crossings you can walk right over traffic. It was fantastic. I went for a 5km run along it and it was great. So many other runners and people walking their dogs. Easy to imagine oneself doing it on the regular.
      A Map of Tsukuba Park Drive
    • 🤖 Tsukuba is a science city, designed from the start to be the ideal city for academics and research & development. The entire park drive is also designated as a "robot zone" and there are signs posted saying that you might occasionally see robots out and about on the park, so please watch out. I, unfortunately, did not happen across any robots 😢.
      Robot Zone
    • 🚗 This trip to Tsukuba was my first long trip with our Sakura in the 18 months since we got it. Even with the small 20kWh battery, we were able to make it all the way there without charging. I used a fast charger for the first time, but my first attempt wasn't a success.

      You see, chargers in Japan all have some special card that's used to authenticate (and bill) you for your charge. Most of these cost anywhere from ¥1,100 to ¥4,100 per month and offset parts of that cost with free minutes or charging (charging outside your home is done on minutes instead of actual kWh usage, which a) makes no sense and b) means small battery cars, which slow down charging as they fill up sooner cost more to charge than big battery cars...)

      As I never charge outside I didn't get a card as the terminals also have a QR code that let you use a smartphone to start charging. Except the first charger at a Lexus dealership I rolled up to did not have any QR code...so I had to drive to the next closest one, which thankfully did. After that charging went without a hitch. The only downside to the next charger was that it was in a parking lot with only a 15 minute grace period, so I also had to pay ¥220 for 30 minutes of parking as well.

      I've since ordered a charging card from EcoQ-den, the company that supplied the QR codes, as there's no monthly fee, just a small fee to get the card. Having dealt with the charging networks and driven across Tokyo (instead of just to the edge) going out on adventure by car seems less daunting now.
    • 📖 I finished reading "Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility" by Patty McCord, about how they built / ran / run the teams at Netflix. Really good book with a lot of smart ideas in it. I also started In The Weeds: Around the world and behind the scenes with Anthony Bourdain, as Maique was raving about it on socials and he is right. It just sucks you in.
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