Instead of the usual "good morning" from Fumie the other day, I got "oh, stinky!" I thought I could generally tell when my breath was less than the proverbial bouquet of roses, so I was somewhat surprised.

I breathed into a cupped hand and smelled, and noticed nothing untoward. She suggested that I wipe my finger on the back of my tongue and give that a whiff. It sounded slightly odd, but I gave it a try, and wow, talk about putrid! I hadn't been expecting any result, much less that result. I almost vomited.

A toothbrush [...]
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Santa brought Anthony a new truck, and even after he'd played with it for several hours, I was awe struck by the concentration he showed, paying rapt attention to every detail.

Unlike most of the 15,000 photos I have of him (would you like to see them all? 🙂, these actually reflect the real Anthony that we see every day in person.

I'm totally enthralled with this whole series of a dozen or so shots, which I took at the kitchen table while he played.

(Daddy side comment: I remember [...]

We seem to have started a new family Christmas Eve tradition.....

First, we enjoyed the free mini concert that the Kyoto Hotel Okura puts on in their nicely-decorated lobby each Christmas Eve. We enjoyed it last year as well, when they had a men's choir. This year they featured the Tokyo Horn Spieler horn quintette.

They started out with a huge alphorn (looks like a 20-foot-long tobacco pipe originally used to communicate long distances in the Alps), then moved on to a pair of natural horns (like French Horns, without keys or valves -- basically, just an [...]

Who says that the Japanese don't know the reason for the season?

We received this advertisement from Antenor, a Japanese (but French-wanna-be) sweet shop who knows that the true meaning of Christmas centers around "any of numerous trees or shrubs of the genus Ilex, usually having bright red berries and glossy evergreen leaves with spiny margins."

And at more than $20 for a tiny cake less than 5" in diameter, their idea of Christmas sure isn't cheap.

One possible source of the high cost is, looking at the decorations, they seem to have splurged for [...]

I don't think anyone would call it the "blizzard of '05" but the other day Kyoto certainly did get more snow than normal. It tended to come in heavily, and then be bright and crisp, and repeat. Here are two shots I happened to take an hour and a half apart, of the main gate of the Heian Shrine, as seen from my veranda: