Another Wednesday and I'm back out, walking. It's been a while. I managed to catch a summer cold that turned into a nasty eye infection that turned me into a solid couch-potato for a couple of weeks. But that's done and, as I said, I'm walking again.

The main picture today, the one above, is one of the more recent developments in Japan: small-scale solar farms. As the efficiency of small solar-panels has grown, many farmers in rural areas have been setting aside unused plots which are then converted into solar panel installations as you see here. During the summer, these installations can often generate so much electricity that the owners are able to sell it back to the electric companies, helping to assuage the cost of installation and maintenance.

The technology has been around for a while, but it wasn't until the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that many people realized just how much of Japan's electrical grid relied on nuclear energy. The resultant weeks and months of uncertain power supplies caused people to investigate changing over to solar. Since then, just in my neighborhood, dozens of installations like the one in the photo above have cropped up.

They're not that pretty, but if it keeps all the lights on, then I suppose it can't be helped...

No solar panels in this photo, I just thought it was kind of charming how the farmers need to keep a parking space cleared so they can take care of their crops. It makes perfect sense, of course, but probably would never have occurred to me, leading me to have to do something drastic in order to have my car and crops at the same time.