Overview: I've been in Japan for over 12 years. This is my personal blog, covering a mixed bag of topics including Japan, my family, the web, programming, ESL and the occasional rant about politics and the media.


19
Jul 10

Inexperienced Gardener vs Tree Stump

If you follow me on Twitter, you’d know I’ve been trying to uproot a tree stump. Here are some pictures to show you what all the fuss was about.

First, an old one from 2008. I don’t have a picture of the tree itself, but I think it was 3 to 4 meters tall. We had a guy from Benry come round and cut it down, leaving just a harmless stump.

Since then, the garden had grown into a mini-jungle, with weeds 2ft high. Something had to be done about it, and with all the caterpillars and spiders in the surrounding hedge, I decided to dig up the whole lot and be done with nature.

Who would have thought such a little tree stump would require so much digging?

Tapping into the extensive experience of the real gardener in the family, I followed my dad’s advice and started cutting inwards rather than digging outwards, and with the help of a crowbar, I was able to pry off much of the rock-hard, clay-like mud that had cemented the stump in place.

A lot of pushing and pulling eventually broke the stump free…

… and left a crater in the garden.

An hour later and the job was done.

The next step will be to saw or hack the tree stump down to a size I can lift into my car to take to the incinerator.

Was it all worth it? I hope so. The goal is to cover everything with tiles or pebbles, and put out a garden table and some chairs so we can sit under a parasol and drink lemonade (or more likely, beer).


05
May 10

Butterflies in Love

Japanese butterflies caught in the act on our mosquito screen.


01
Mar 10

Ramsay Ramblings 2010-03-01

It’s just ticked over into March, which gets me one month closer to warmer weather. Actually we’ve had a pretty warm week anyway and I even splatted my first mosquito of the year. So what’s going on in the life of Nick Ramsay?

My Online Life
Most of my waking hours are spent on the internet, which is kind of ironic considering how rarely I update this blog now. The last few months have been crazy busy building Hotaru CMS, a fantastic Pligg alternative, and in any Pligg vs Hotaru CMS contest it would win hands down! Please excuse my blatant search engine tomfoolery, but it’s true! With its Wordpress-style themes, plugins and widgets, user-defined settings, individual user permissions, and barrage of anti-spam features, it really is the ants pants in completely free, open source social bookmarking scripts. :-D

Permanent Residency
I had my permanent residency application approved which was a nice relief because renewing my spouse visa every few years was a bit of a chore, and as an added bonus, I could stay in Japan if Mami ever left me (although I’d be a miserable old sod if that ever happened). Other than that, I’m not aware of any perks of having eijuken except that I could get a mortgage, but I already did that without it.

Parenting
My back is killing me right now. Probably from picking up Rikuto too often without bending my knees, but it could be because of the shrimp-crab-aerobics I had to do today at one of his nursery school events. Finding the event hall was almost as challenging, even with Mami’s car navigation system that tells you to turn left 700 meters before you need to, which inevitably leads you down some very narrow Japanese back alleys.

Ricky’s English is coming along, but he doesn’t say much. He likes to correct my English by telling me the real word, i.e. the Japanese equivalent, so I’ve got my work cut out for me if I expect him to be an English-speaker. My big plan is to insist he does his homework alongside me in my office when the time comes. That way he’ll be a captured audience and will have no choice but to use English, if he wants help with his homework, that is! Saying that, his Japanese homework might be way over my head…

And that’ll do for this episode of Ramsay Ramblings! If you can’t get enough of my updates, I’m on Twitter and I blog about Hotaru here.