Busy weekend ahead bartending as this is apparently the taproom’s (expected) busiest weekend of the year.. but to maximise my utility I also volunteered to come in a couple of hours early to vacuum-pack a big bag of hops.. no point in half-assing the brewery experience, if the brewer is going to be exhausted then so am I.

Just spent 3 hours manually weeding “our” garden whilst my wife’s parents wielded powered machinery to tackle the big stuff.. rural living is just a constant battle against the super-fast growing foliage..

If it was down to me I’d just let it win.. fucking knackered!

In the mountains of Towa (where I accidentally left my phone last week and picked up today) doing a spot of river swimming.. I love this place, so isolated and the water is crystal clear!

Unfortunately a rockslide closed the road to the brewery yesterday and is still not cleared so instead I’ve built my wife’s office desk, finished a book about IPA, updated my brewing database a bit, started a book on water (from a brewing perspective) and started giving the shadowing method of learning Japanese a go. Busy day.

My wife should be picking our dog up from the airport in about 1 hour!

Would have liked to have been there but I need to pick up my daughter from nursery, it’s been a while since we’ve been able to have dedicated time to ourselves so I’m looking forward to it.

One of the many things I find pretty amazing here in Japan is that if you miss a courier (normally Yamato) or even a normal postal delivery attempt, you can scan a QR code and request re-delivery the same day.. even if you only just miss them in the evening, they will still come out later in the same evening! I presume this service is time limited but so far we’ve not had to wait until the next day for missed deliveries.

Ordered some more piney boards this morning, one to replace the SBC hosting my GtS instance as it’s turning off on a daily basis now.. and the other to upgrade my nextcloud instance to a whopping 8GB.. I probably could have just used the existing nextcloud SBC to home GtS post-upgrade but where is the fun in that?

Currently living in a house full of boxes now that our stuff arrived from Scotland! Noticed that an inconsequential part of the electric piano I bought for my wife is damaged.. now going to have to check everything, especially my brewing kit.. they ramped the price up on us after they had our stuff so I guess we’ll be claiming some of that back!

It’s hard to accurately convey just how much I have learned in this past week but a fuck tonne is a pretty close estimate!

The more I work at the brewery the guiltier I feel for leaving before jobs are done!

I left today at the agreed time and shouldn’t really work more than necessary but the brewer still had another 4 or 5 hours of work ahead of him.

Would love to stay and help but I have to get home at a reasonable time just now to help look after the kids and house etc.