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. 😀
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.
If you like, you can find me on Twitter at @nick_ramsay. I'd love to hear from you!