I received a nice, unprompted email from a brewer friend in Japan this morning just asking how we’re going etc. and it’s given me a wee lift.

It seems that his brewery is doing well and he is looking forward to me joining the community. I too am very much looking forward to joining the community!

Apparently there will be another brewery opening soon in the prefecture with an Australian brewer, the Shikoku brewing community is becoming a very international affair.

For now though I may need a second giant mug of coffee and try to get stuck in to my studies.

I wonder if there will be a clothing return amnesty at any point at my daughter’s nursery school. It’s like some kind of laundry swapshop..

Time to crank up zotero for the first time in a while and get this semester started!

I have so much to learn to make this a reality but I had an idea, which I’ve mentioned sort of before..

relating to future life in Japan and what I want my eventual meishi (business card) to say..

Small Batch Brewer - Mushroom Grower - Vegan Pie-maker

Spent grains from brewing used for growing mushrooms in, mushrooms (and sometimes beer) made into pies and pies eaten with my beer.. If I can split my working life between these pursuits, I will be an exceptionally happy soul.

We had a chat this morning with the village govt. (of our future home in Japan hopefully) with regards to our application and timelines.

They were initially planning to interview us in January or February but we explained the timelines around applying for my visa and needing to no well ahead of that for putting our house on the market etc. and they are going to try and arrange interview(s) with the mayor and deputy mayor early to mid-October instead..

My next course started today and first assignment will be due around then.. and hopefully I’ll have some intensive driving lessons next month too..

October looking very busy but hopefully some pressure will be relieved with an official contract offer.

I made my favourite tofu dish this evening (Vegan Richa’s Black Pepper Tofu) and I think it might be the first time that I ate it with non-oxidated, home-brewed beer on draught.. it was a pretty special experience. Added sugar snap peas into the tofu dish for the first time and they turned out to be little jewels of sweetness in a fairly relentlessly spicy dish.. big props the the kale too, very pleasant cameo!

Geez, I wish my fingers and thumbs would stop “autocorrecting” what I’m trying to type when I’ve been drinking..

Thinking of rejigging my micropub endpoint so that I can post articles using an indieweb writer.. relatively straightforward change, just need to search categories for blog name and assign to the relevant custom property for Hugo to correctly sort. Should probably have done this a long time ago..

I’ll also update my syndication script to post articles to GtS too.. not that I have or expect to have a large readership but I wondered what people would prefer..

1. Full article but collapsed behind a content warning\subject, or
2. A summary and link to blog post

Not sure which is the preferred etiquette.. I quite like reading full blog posts directly in my timeline but I have previously (manually) posted summaries with links before.. thoughts?

Today so far I’ve transferred my last brew ( a dry-hopped Amarillo single malt and single hop IPA) to keg and the aroma that filled the room was exquisite 👌. I’ve tapped my previous (mosaic) SMaSH and samples it (tasty) and am part way through brewing a Citra dry-hopped SMaSH.. good times!

Development of GoToSocial is powering on, I really should try to find the time to write the “pull” scripts to syndicate fediverse posts back to my site.. soooon. I think there are still a few API dependencies which aren’t yet in place but at this place it won’t be long until I’m out of excuses :)