Since the cherry blossoms are pretty much failing us so far this year in Kyoto, I thought I'd pull out a nice picture from last autumn that I've not featured yet:

I took this picture on the same trip that yielded many wonderful pictures from my friend Shimada-san, featured in this post from last fall. Some other nice pictures I took from the same time are on one of my pretty pictures pages.
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It's a lackluster cherry-blossom season this year in that for whatever reason, the trees are not blossoming all at once but each at their own pace. Looking out the living-room window, for example, I see one tree that has been in full bloom for almost a week and the one right next to it just barely starting.
Yet, similar to the popular bumper-sticker adage “a bad day at golf is better than a good day at work”, it's still a pretty darn lovely week. This morning I needed something from the convenience store, and when I stepped out the front door, [...]
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Yesterday, Fumie and I went to an event at the Heian Shrine where they had live viola/guitar music while you could stroll around looking at their cherry blossoms, all lit up by hundreds of flood lights. I didn't have my camera with me, but most of the tens of thousands of others who were there did. It was very crowded, unfortunately, just this side of oppressively so. (At about $15 per person, it wouldn't surprise me if they grossed at least half a million dollars just this weekend alone.)
It was beautiful. I'd been inside the shrine's huge garden area (map) only two other times, both [...]
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It's been raining all day.
He's three and a half years old.
You do the math....



Launch   -   Hang Time   -   Splashdown   -   Aftermath
mouseover a button to see the image
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Anthony is now a “big boy”, having started preschool today at Doshisha Youchien.
Yesterday was the entrance ceremony, which although short, was a lot to ask of a three year old. Luckily, Mommy's shoulder was available.


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As I commented a few weeks ago, I worried that the barometric altimeter on my GPS unit (a Garmin GPSmap 60CS) was worthless because there are many factors that change air pressure besides a change in altitude (such as holding the unit in a breeze, moving with the unit, changing weather, etc.)
So, I sent a note off to Garmin asking about it, hoping that I was just missing something. Really, why would they include such a feature if it was worthless, much less tout it as they do?
Here's what I sent:
Is there a way to turn off the barometric altimeter, leaving only [...]
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Today at the playground....
So, which hand is the ball in?
Is it in this hand?
Or, is it in this one?
Nope, not here....
Ta-daaaa! It's here!!!!
This was followed by what might only be described as a “silly dance”, and then play on the slide.
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When a cherry tree starts to give up its petals, it does so in great bursts and flurries. A puff of wind will come along, and every darn petal will spring into the air in a veritable supernova of off-white pink that becomes a localized blizzard as it swirls and dissipates in all directions. Gravity eventually wins, and the ground becomes a thick bed of blossoms sometimes several inches thick.
It's beautiful and mesmerizing, but the most amazing thing about it is that after every petal has been lost to that breeze, the tree remains as heavily laden as ever. It's as if the blossoms for [...]
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After Anthony woke up from his afternoon nap, he wanted to do some cooking play with me. He had something specific in mind, suggesting:
Maybe you can be the daddy and not very jouzu cooker, and I is the mommy and I is very jouzu cooker...
(Jouzu is 上手, Japanese for “skillful”)
It was so precious (and, for that matter, on target) that I immediately took a moment to write it down just as he said it.
(In the end, I think my pretend food was pretty pretend tasty... after all, what good is an imagination if you can't [...]
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Today we went up to the Takaragaike Children's Park, a wonderful playground with lots of fun things for young kids (those older than elementary-school age are not allowed in unless accompanied by someone in elementary school or younger).
It's in a cooler area of Kyoto than we are (they get a fair amount more snow during the winter, for example; as the blog of Nils, who lives up there, will attest). Being cooler, some of their cherry blossoms are peaking and fading a bit later than ours.
Here's a tree right between the “petals fallen” and “leaves grown” state:
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This picture doesn't look like much when it's small, but click on it for a larger (1,600 × 1,200) version suitable for what I think is a lovely desktop background. It's from our trip to the Takaragaike Children's Park, mentioned in the previous post.
(click to expand)
UPDATE: more cherry-blossom backgrounds from the same trip.
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