Weekly Praise Thread – 27 March 2026

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1. Kaldi is once again not stocking its tortellini (one of my kid’s faves…well,.mine too) but now suddenly Yamaya is! Separate brand, but same size and similar price AND they have cheese ravioli as well.

2. Meitetsu changed their timetables and it actually helps me.  No transfer on the way home and I can get the 18:00 instead of the 18:08.  Eight minutes at home is way better than eight minutes not at home.

   My best mate drove 900km to meet me on my bday in Oz last week.  Two others drove 200km.  Bloody legends!

3. Strangers sent drinks for me and my friends at a bar. Found this ingredient from my country that is hard to come by here and can’t wait to do a lot of recipes.

4. on Monday evening, my (useless) coworker asked me to sub in for them at a meeting on Tuesday. the meeting was scheduled at an office an hour away and started from 4 PM. I had already promised my junior that I would sub in for them at a similar meeting on Friday, at an office 1.5~2 hours away that also started at 4 PM, so with extreme reluctance I agreed to do the Tuesday meeting, because no one else was available.

   another (much more helpful) coworker overheard all this and said he would take over the Friday meeting, as he felt bad that he couldn’t cover the Tuesday meeting in my stead. so now I don’t have to battle potentially 2-3 hours of traffic on my way home today!!

5. I was cooking dinner at home yesterday and we usually play music in the background while my daughter dances along. I go to airplay a track from my iPhone to the HomePod and it glitches out and starts playing a shuffled mix of songs instead of the playlist I wanted.

   Slightly annoyed at first I realize it’s a song I hadn’t heard in something like 15 years. Huge dose of nostalgia and I think to myself that I can’t believe I still had it somewhere in my Apple Music library. Next song queues up, another hit of huge nostalgia, I’m smiling from ear to ear joking to my wife about it. Third song plays and it’s even more nostalgia. So now I’m confused because I know for a fact I lost these tracks something like 11 years ago.

   When I moved here I brought a hard drive and iPod with something like 1000 songs I had purchased back in the day on iTunes and collected over the years since like 2005. Part way through my life in Japan I had lost all of that and it was genuinely heartbreaking. I did my best to recover some of those tracks but definitely couldn’t remember all of them.

   So imagine my surprise when all of them suddenly pop up 10+ years later out of nowhere.

   It turns out that when I went to play my iPhone playlist my Apple TV was on my Canadian Apple account and not my Japanese one, and had unbeknownst to me downloaded all of those songs in the Music app, which then triggered when I tried to do Airplay.

   I spent the next 3 hours going through a musical nostalgia trip and getting back most of the songs I had not been able to track down. There were a lot of tracks that had marked important parts of my time before leaving Canada, traveling around Korea, and then starting life in Japan.

6. It ain’t much, but well, I feel like I finally graduated from the “Nihongo Jouzu” level!

   I got hit with 日本長いですか？ at least three times this week. It feels like such a level up compared to the standard 日本語上手ですね。😅

7. Got headhunted by a competitor with a substantial offer, went to talk to my manager about matching that offer, got an immediate yes answer.

8. At my new workplace, my senior colleague (late 50s) praised me to my manager.

   We have English speaking teammates offshore, they have bit of accent too. Even though the senior colleague’s English is really good, he’s having trouble following up in its entirety.

   There are security restrictions on PC as well, so we can’t do much. So I tried workarounds on my own to bypass this which worked! ( within company rules ). Now he’s able to follow along better with live captions and recording. He was praising me to our manager.

   I helped cause I know how frustrating it feels when you have more than enough knowledge but language becomes a barrier in conveying your idea.

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