We are Nobuo and Suu. Nobuo is generally in charge of our Japanese blog, Suu is in charge of the English one (the one you're now reading).
Suu
Hello! I'm Suu.
I'm from Slovakia. I came to Japan in 2006. I don't know why or how it happened, but 15 years later I'm still in Japan.
I like reading. Especially news, opinion pieces, essays, novels, short stories, children's books, user manuals, food ingredient labels in different languages, and research papers from any field (the less I understand the better).
I also like mountains (especially climbing them), and animals and tofu. More on that some other time.
Nobuo
I live in Tsukuba, Ibaraki prefecture, Japan, and work in a big U.S. company in a nearby town by the lake.
With Suu we built a solar sharing farm and now have a few chickens and goats. I don't help much with everyday mundane tasks like feeding the chickens in the morning or doing the weeding or trimming the shrubs. I like to leave these to others. My specialty is monitoring solar panels and check whether they all work properly. I like this so much that I developed an original monitoring system on my own. It's cool. It allows me to compare in real time the output of each of 7 inverters and compare their performance at a glance. This makes it much easier to notice any irregularities, which are usually signs of panel malfunction and other failure in the system.
We are happy that we decided to build a solar sharing farm instead of a conventional ground-mount solar system. We have chickens and goats under the solar panels and it's great. Neighborhood children come to the farm to say hello to the goats and the chickens, and people walking their dogs stop by for a chat. It's a place where people meet. I'm glad that the farm is in this way a welcomed part of the local community. (Which can't be said of the conventional ground-mount systems.)
When you keep chickens or goats, you often have to build things like fence or shed, so you naturally become a little better in Do-It-Yourself things. This, together with free eggs, is another positive byproduct of this lifestyle.
On this blog I mostly write about farm happenings but also other topics that I find interesting.
Ultimately I'm pursuing a life in which I am the master of my time, doing things I want to do. (Commuting to the company every morning is not one of them.)