As he sleepily sauntered through the frigid void that exists between the partition of the room where they sleep and the partition where the live, his tired eyes fell upon some clothing atop the chest of drawers.

The long John bottoms eyelessly peered back and nodded, motionlessly before, in a surprisingly gravelly non-voice suggested that “It is time”.

His legs though humbly grateful for the additional warmth knew that it was merely a marriage of necessity and stoicly resolved to endure the additional itch burden they would experience in the months to come.

Reaching out towards the marl grey thermo-regulated undergarments he returned the nod and ceded, “It is time, it IS time.”

We had maybe our last or at least second last design meeting with one of the construction companies we are in discussions with.. should find out how little they remember about our stated budget and how far our endless reconfigurations made that stated budget nonsensically inadequate.. fun times!

One of the (minor) contributors to my decision that I was ready to move to Japan was that Christmas is a lip-service only event here, not laden with the debt-ensuing pressure of buying mountains of gifts so that your kid isn’t bullied (mileage may vary, that’s what it was like for our neighbourhood when I was a kid).

As an example of how it’s not actually treated as a special event, just a low key commercial opportunity for retailers, my wife and I have been requested to attend health checks on the morning of the 25th. Pretty sure we had our annual check ups earlier in the year so don’t need to attend but regardless, it’s just another work day.

Finished reading a book about farmhouse ales today, completing a series of books on sour beers, wild beers and farmhouses.. and I now know my long game aged sour beer approach and have formulated a saison recipe (in my head) to add to my slowly evolving theoretical repertoire.. sure would be nice to have a location for our brewery sorted soon so that we can move towards a point where I can actually make these beers..

For the meantime moving onto a book which I have had for ages but wanted to read after the aftershock of intense studying for my postgraduate course had died down.. all about yeast, 50+ pages down this afternoon and mainly just revision at this point, interesting though.

I have a list of 18 brewing books I am awaiting subsidy approval on so I really should make efforts to get through the ones I previously bought through the subsidy.. probably about 70% done with them though.

My eldest daughter’s first milk tooth has broken free from its gummy domicile.. in this part of Japan there is seemingly an old tradition where you throw teeth from your lower jaw on to the roof of your house and those from the upper jaw, under the house.. for luck, I guess.. apparently it has been decided that this will be happening..

.. all the while I am silently sitting here, wondering how I can somehow switch it with something so I can keep my firstborn’s first tooth as a keepsake..

I just implemented auto-translations of my English notes using the DeepL API and now I can’t think of anything interesting to write! 😅

I have given my site a small overhaul, adding fediverse commentary, switching out an ever growing and ugly category cloud with a list of breweries we’ve visited here and manually updated the Japanese side of the site to bring it up to date..

As a result I have written a working script to query the DeepL API for auto-translate of short form messages.. I just need to scale the mountain that is the micropub server in order to integrate it.

I will start with only notes, and the process will be that when a new note is posted via micropub a duplicate Japane Hugo template will also be created and the content will be sent to the DeepL API for translation..

Eventually, I’d like to add photo posts but this will require translation of the alt tags too which is slightly more complex than I fancy for the initial phase.

I don’t blog often but long form posts will remain manually translated.

Today is a day of enigma unravelling as I try to find a suitable power and frequency converter to allow me to buy the fermentation control chillers that I want for our brewery.. there are 4 key requirements..

1. It must be able to convert the frequency from 60Hz to 50Hz
2. It must be able to step the power up from 100v to 230v
3. It must have the capacity to run 3 chillers (eventually) continuously, supplying each with 1380 watts
4. It must be able to handle up to 30 A output.. I am a little unclear on whether this is per cooler.

Finding sites selling transformers and sharing all of this information is challenging.. and most of the time they only satisfy 2 of the 4 requirements.. anyway, I’m not yet frustrated! 🙂

Made my 4th or 5th stew of the season and they are getting pretty good! Really fresh vegetables from the Kochi Sunday Market and the Kochi Organic Market contributed to a very colourful and tasty dish.

Lacking vegan convenience foods has really upped my cooking game!

I see a number of folk are using mastodon as a static blog commenting tool and I might have to look into that and see if it would work with the GoToSocial api (I think it would).. pretty sure that my syndication scripts already pull the relevant post URIs and would be easy enough to deploy as a replacement for cactus comments.

Not sure exactly when this will happen but I am intrigued..