Sandwiches and work

Cedar Park, 2016
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/3.6, 1/100 sec, ISO2500
Cedar Park, 2016

こんばんは! Good evening!

Today’s weather was so warm and humid, but it felt nice to be outside. I went outside at lunch to buy some lunch at the food truck, and I was wearing a jacket even though it was in the 80s. I am not sure if my office is cold, but I feel like I am freezing while I work so I usually have a jacket on and then I just wore it outside and tried to warm up… and it helped for an hour or so, but then it was back to freezing. ❄️

Today’s photo is of a Vietnamese-style sandwich on a homemade baguette that Mariko made. It was super delicious, and the jalapeños were spicy! I love the heat. The hotter the better! 🔥

Well, tomorrow is Friday and I am looking forward to getting a lot done! I don’t have any meetings scheduled so I need to put my head down and crank out a lot of tasks. By the way, I am still using Toggl to track my work and that is going well. Once I got used to clicking on the task as soon as I start new work, it is second-nature now. I often switch between things, like I am gathering graphics files, and then I see an email come into my inbox. Before I check the mail, I click on the task in Toggl, and then check the email. When I am done with the email, I click on the task I was doing before that, then continue with the task. By doing this, I get a very accurate representation of where I spend most of my time. Yesterday, for instance, I spent 2h 36m responding to and writing email… which to me is astonishing. I would have never thought I spend so much time doing that! But I can’t argue with the data.

I guess I was getting overwhelmed with work for a while there, and I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t seem to finish certain projects… I knew I was working hard, but I kept thinking that I was doing something wrong. But now I have the visibility into exactly where my time goes… and I can see that I simply have too many things on my plate right now. Although that is a problem, at least I can pinpoint what it is and not worry that I am doing something wrong. It’s a big step in improving my daily workload and estimating time!

Alright, it’s now getting late and I am going to read. Take care!

おやすみなさい!

– バロン Barron Fujimoto

Sunday

Cedar Park, 2016
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/4, 1/100 sec, ISO1250
Cedar Park, 2016

こんばんは! Good evening!

Did you have a nice Easter? Our was nice and relaxing… now that the kids are getting bigger, they aren’t interested in egg hunting but they did enjoy receiving an Easter gift bag this morning. It was filled with candy and customized rubber stamps with their names on them. I remember when they were little, they would enjoy looking for the Easter baskets as soon as they woke up! This morning, Koa wasn’t even at home! He spent the night at a friends house and I picked him up at 10am. Apparently they stayed up until 3am, which is to be expected, but what was a surprise to me was that Koa was able to stay awake all day today.

Before I picked him up, though, I woke up at my usual time (before 6am), and was on my laptop deleting old bookmarks when I came across an old link to a pizza recipe. This one calls for tortillas in a cast-iron skilled for quick and easy quasi-pizza. So I made a couple little pizzas for myself, actually putting an egg on one of them to make a breakfast-style pizza. It was yummy! These were pretty small pizzas, using the smallest sized flour tortillas you can find in the supermarket. Later, when Mariko and the kids were hungry, I made them some more pizzas and they gobbled them up. The pizzas were a huge hit! I must have made about 6 pizzas for them. 🍕

This afternoon cleaned our aquarium, did some laundry, and then had a beer and watched a few episodes of an anime that I was interested in called “The Pilot’s Love Song”. I enjoyed the first 4 episodes a lot and am looking forward to watching the rest of them. I am not a huge anime fan, but maybe that will change… there are some really cool shows out there!

For dinner, we didn’t have a traditional Easter meal (we’re not big on ham), but rather a dim-sum inspired feast as you can see in the photo. It was delicious! No chance for leftovers either, it was so tasty. Then after dinner, we watched Zoolander for the first time. It was so bad but good and fun. We enjoyed it a lot!

I hope you had a nice weekend. Let’s have a great week!

おやすみなさい!

-バロン Barron Fujimoto

Kaiju Nite 6

Cedar Park, 2016
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/5, 1/30 sec, ISO3200
Cedar Park, 2016

こんばんは!

Hi everyone. It’s late… 11:45 PM here, and I will write this quickly because I am so sleepy. Tonight we had some good friends over for “Kaiju Nite 6”. We like to watch Kaiju (giant monster) movies every half-year or so, and this was our sixth get-together. Previous themes have been Godzilla, Gamera, Mothra, etc, but tonight’s theme was Tokusatsu TV, with television episodes ranging from 1966-1973. We watched Ultraman, Iron King, Kikaida, Kamen Rider, and others, plus Mikey brought over toys and lyrics sheets so we could sing along to all the tv show themes. It was a lot of fun! And as always, the food and drink selections were delicious.

But, I am fading fast so I will end this here…

おやすみなさい!

-B Barron Fujimoto

Eat more fish

Cedar Park, 2016
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/4, 1/125 sec, ISO2500
Cedar Park, 2016

こんばんは! Hello, everyone! How was your Tuesday?

Mine was pretty good. On the work front, I am finally catching up with all my tasks and can now start working on projects that have kept getting pushed back. This feels good! ☺️

Today’s photo is of my dinner this evening. It’s spicy salmon bowl, with avocado… and it was delicious! For lunch I had a tuna sandwich which was also yummy, so today was an all-fish day. And a few days this past week, I didn’t have any meat whatsoever. I think this is a good thing too. (although on Sunday we did have a full rack of baby-back ribs at home) I kind of want to eat more fresh vegetables and fruits, and for breakfast I’ve been having a healthy mix of dried fruit and nuts. Plus lots of water! I guess what I am trying to say (badly, apparently) is that I am starting to eat healthier!

I’m pretty tired right now, though, since I woke up pretty early today. So I’ll say goodnight and get some rest! おやすみなさい!

-B Barron Fujimoto

🍛 Double curry day

USA. Texas. Cedar Park. 2016.
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/6.4, 1/120 sec, ISO6400
USA. Texas. Cedar Park. 2016.

こんばんは!Hi everyone, how’s it going? How was your Monday?

Mine was pretty good, although I ate way too many sweets today. As you may or may not know, I don’t usually eat sweets or sugary things like sodas. I don’t have too much of a sweet tooth to begin with, but since I don’t eat candy regularly I don’t crave it either. But today I had a lot of sweets!

A coworker is visiting from Sweden this week and he brought some chocolates so of course I had to try a couple of them 🍫 (they were delicious) and then there was some dessert in the breakroom after lunch. I didn’t partake in the chocolate or carrot cake, but I did have some Bluebell Dutch Chocolate ice cream 🍦 (also delicious). Then this evening we had some cookies. 🍪 That’s way too much sugar for me!

But besides all the sweet stuff, I had a whole lot of curry as well. We went out to lunch at a Thai restaurant where I had a super-spicy green curry and rice. It was tasty! As I mentioned before, I love Thai food. I could eat it every day. Well, maybe not that often, but I do enjoy it a lot.

Finally for dinner, my wife made a gigantic pot of Japanese beef curry which is always a favorite. 🍛 We had it with eggs and rice for the perfect meal. I always eat too much, but I cannot help myself… I’m sure you understand. Doesn’t it look delicious?

Oh, by the way, happy leap year day! 🎉

I hope you have a wonderful Tuesday! おやすみなさい!

-B Barron Fujimoto