June is usually when the dreaded hot-and-humid summer season kicks off here in Japan, but we’ve had a surprisingly stretch of cool days this year. Apparently it’s been the coldest June in 15 years (nice to have some climate-related records that swing in a positive direction, for a change). Last week we had two typhoons simultaneously come in towards Japan, so it’s been super rainy as well.
June is also my birthday month, and on the eve of my birthday I noticed - to my dismay - that my first white hair had sprouted. Old age is upon me.
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New hikes on the blog
In June I published 2 new hikes on the blog. First up was Mt Omuro, an extinct volcano down on the Izu Peninsula. Not so much of a proper hike (more of a scenic walk around the peak) but we had some great weather, views of Mt Fuji and overall it’s just a cute little mountain.
The second was Mt Houou, which was my first Alps hike for the year, and my first one done as a solo tent hike! Other than it being a bit too cold to sleep well, things went well so I’m looking forward to doing a couple more solo this year. Tent hikes can be great since you can be pretty flexible with the weather - no need to worry about making or cancelling hut bookings. Much cheaper too.
Going on a road trip around Izu
For those that are regular readers of my blog, you’ll know that I spent about two weeks spamming writing about a long weekend road trip I took down to the Izu Peninsula. Rather than writing one longer-form post, I chose to split up the trip into each of the individual locations we visited - which was quite a lot.
As a new convert to birding, one of the most exciting things for me was that we spotted 7 new bird species on our trip.
And generally got to check out a bunch of cool scenery, like Cape Tsumeki.
On one hand writing this many posts for a short trip feels a little excessive, I will admit, but benefit of this is that I can then display the locations as little icons on my map of Izu.
Trying my hand at ✨ art ✨
Speaking of maps, you might notice I had a little hand-drawn map of Izu on my road trip blog post.
Ever since I wrote my life list at the beginning of the year (and before that, really) I’ve always wanted to “get into art”. It’s kind of an intimidating thing to start at, because I know that you are going to have a very long learning curve where you are going to output a lot of shit stuff before you start enjoying what you produce.
My husband had an old iPad with an Apple Pencil lying around, so I decided buy and install the digital drawing app Procreate. And as a fairly low-stakes start to drawing I figured a good first goal would be to try and try a map of our driving route.
The general aesthetic might bring to mind a 12-year old using MS Paint but I think it’s kind of cute in an ugly way. Actually the hardest part was making some legible handwriting.
After that, I tried to draw a little egret using one of the photos I had previously taken on my blog.
Procreate is a pretty cool tool, and I’m still trying to get my head around it (and also drawing in general). I got to doing the long grass and I was like “how the heck do you even draw this?” and kind of gave up. I have a couple of YouTube tutorials bookmarked, so I might need to spend a bit more time figuring out the best way to use Procreate.
However then I got sidetracked (typical) into urban sketching and picked up these two books.
I do all my reading on my Kindle to save on space in my home, so it always feels super special to buy something physical.
The sketchbook on the left is by Taiwanese artist Mars Huang, and the one on the right is by Korean artist CaCol. Both were originally written in their respective languages, then translated into Japanese - but there are no English translations of them so this is kind of a cool benefit of getting to live here in Japan. I generally don’t like reading books in Japanese (I’m so slow) so with all the pretty pictures, it’s nice to be able to get a bit of Japanese reading practice in as well.
So far, I do find that using a real pen and paper is more fun, plus you can see the results of your progress a bit better - in Procreate, you can just erase a circle if you make a mistake. As convenient as Procreate is, it’s nice to also have a hobby that’s less digital as well. So far I’m just doodling with a black pen, but I’ll probably pick up a cheap watercolour kit in July.
Enjoying the fruits (vegetables?) of my labor
For an update on my cherry tomato plants which are now 2.5 months old:
We’ve started to get to enjoy our first cherry tomatoes! At first it was just 1 or 2 a day as we waited for each one to ripen (they all ripen at different times) but more recently they are giving anywhere between 5 - 15 a day between the two plants which is rather exciting.
However the plants themselves aren’t doing too well. They started off June rather thriving, but then a bunch of their leaves started to go yellow and dead so we had a bit of a panic. Google wasn’t too helpful, as it told me that that can be underwatering… or overwatering…
I think it was possibly a bit of both - I underwatered it, so it went droopy, and then I overwatered it in an attempt to self-correct. Also I’m realising that with tomatoes, you’re supposed to prune some of the lower branches at some point and we hadn’t been doing that at all, so maybe it was a bit too leafy and the plant couldn’t keep up? It seems like cherry tomatoes can also be finicky and don’t like if if they get too much sun either.
One of my friends told me that even if the plant looks like its dying, it can still surprisingly keep producing tomatoes, so let’s see how these guys turn out (at the very least, if we can harvest that huge bunch on the photo above before it drops dead I will call that a win).
As for my adventures in baking (since I mentioned that in my last two newsletter editions) I did try bagels again for the third time, but without much improvement. Maybe I need to try it 10 times before I feel happy with it. (I dunno, bagel dough is just really finicky - maybe I need to try a different recipe, or use a Japanese one since I assume that will be better suited to a Japanese kitchen).
Exploring some more coffee shops
My blog is also now a fully-fledged coffee review blog, and I added a number of new coffee shops that I checked out in June. Notably I got to visit Leaves Coffee Roasters which is a rather famous spot, and I quite enjoyed the beans at the nearby Cross Coffee Roasters as well.
I have a bunch more spots on my list to check out, so I’m excited! I’ve also had a few lovely commenters give their coffee spot recommendations, which is so great. I feel like I’m building a little coffee community already. When picking up a new hobby, I have a bit of a habit of going all-in on it at first, so I suspect things will settle down eventually (or I will run out of coffee spots I want to visit).
Next up on the to-do list for me is to also write up some sort of coffee round-up post. I don’t really like making posts like “Best pourover coffee in Tokyo” since it feels clickbaity and I don’t really know what actually is the best, and who am I to say, right?
But my best hikes in Tokyo post drives quite a lot of traffic to my blog so I think I need to write those sort of posts sometimes to help with the discoverability of some of my blog content.
Books I read this month
This month I read a meagre two books:
- Say Nothing: on Ireland’s “The Troubles”. This was a rather dense non-fiction read, but a super interesting overview of some of Ireland’s more recent history
- Attention Span: a productivity book, which hooked me with its controversial take that Facebook doom-scrolling isn’t necessarily a bad thing (in small quantities). Not so sure I agreed with it, though.
I have a couple more on my list to read in July, so let’s see how we go!
Trying out time tracking
In my last two newsletter editions I mentioned that I had gotten my exercise routine and sleep under control - so the next step for me was to try and optimise things a bit more with a little bit of time tracking.
Recently I got into listening to some productivity podcasts by Cal Newport and Laura Vanderkam. In particular, Vanderkam advocates for logging where all of your time goes. Not necessarily to live a 100% productive life with no downtime, but more just to actually understand where your time is going. Similar to how you might want to track your finances to see what you’re spending your money on.
For me with this blog, I actually want to make sure I don’t do too much of it. Like I mentioned above in the coffee section, I’m quite guilty of hyper-focusing on hobbies, which I don’t think is really a good thing. It’s fun to spend ages fiddling on the blog’s code, and I genuinely really enjoy it - but at the same time I want to diversify into things like art too and be a bit more well-rounded.
I’ve been time tracking for about 2 - 3 weeks now. Nothing stands out as specifically worth mentioning, but I’m finding it quite useful to give myself goals like “spend 10 hours max a week on the blog” or “work on Hardcover at least 10 hours a week” to help myself get a bit more of a balance with all the things I’ve got going on.
Trying out Bubbles and Standard.site
In other technical news, I also hooked up my blog to the RSS feed aggregator Bubbles (think Reddit, but for blogs). Unfortunately you need a Fediverse (i.e. Mastodon) account to upvote things, so I think the amount of people who actually read my blog and also have a Mastodon account would be very few. Nonetheless, I make sure to upvote all my own posts (yes, very lame of me) and then it seems to bring in a tiny trickle of new viewers who find my blog via the Bubbles feed so it’s not been all bad.
Similarly ATProto (which if you are not familiar, is the tech that powers Twitter-competitor Bluesky) has started up something called Standard.site. Which is their attempt at re-building the technology that would power an RSS feed, but making it better.
… now the benefits of using Standard.site as it stands aren’t that great, it’s more of its future potential (if someone can use the tech to build something cool). Today there are some AtProto feed aggregators like Leaflet or Standard Reader, so I will continue to use it for the moment and see if I can bring in any viewership via that.
This all ties back into the concept called POSSE - “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”. Basically as a blogger sometimes it can pay to figure out new ways to drive new people to check out your site. The web is a huge place, and my blog can be hard to find sometimes.
What’s next in July
So I got to climb two hyakumeizans in June - the first was Mt Houou, and the second was Mt Takatsuma, which I’m yet to write the post for. My ambitions are bigger for July as I’d like to hike at least 4 hyakumeizans if I can. Of course, it can be kind of tiring doing the long drive to the trailhead, hiking 1 - 2 days and then driving home again, so it will be dependent on how many I actually have the energy for!
Outside of hiking, I’d love to see if I can keep the drawing practice going, so I’ll make it a goal to try and report back with my progress at the end of next month.
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