While Anthony and I were in The States this summer, Fumie got a chance to visit with a friend she met while we lived in Cupertino, Yoppu-san, who now lives near Tokyo. She has a son, Maho-kun, who is a week older than Anthony.

During the meeting this summer, Maho-kun sent along a present for Anthony, who got to open it today just before bedtime. Having used phrases like "unbridled joy" too much lately, I'll leave these without captions and let them speak for themselves...

Thanks Maho-kun!

I was a zombie for a couple of days after returning to Kyoto, despite being able to sleep soon after landing. I got a good night's sleep and awoke at 6:30 feeling refreshed. I took the haruka express train home, but soon started feeling tired again. Despite being tired, I didn't sleep much that next evening, waking up at 2:30am and was a zombie for all of yesterday. I was so tired it hurt.

Finally, I slept well last night, and today was much better.

One nice moment the other day was when Fumie pulled out an old classic Japanese [...]

Anthony and I returned home to Japan yesterday after a month at my folks' place in Ohio. The return trip was substantially longer than the flight out, and much more gruleing than last year's return to Kyoto because it included a cross-country leg before the trans-pacific flight.

Our trip started with a 4:00am wake-up-call in Cleveland, Ohio, with us finally walking out of customs/immigration at Kansai International 25 and a half hours later. It was a long journey, but to see Fumie -- and to see how Anthony ran to her and jumped into her arms -- was certainly worth [...]

Anthony and I are heading back to Japan tomorrow, leaving this afternoon to stay at Cleveland's airport hotel because the flight leaves tomorrow at 6am (ugh!).

So, no new posts for the next few days...

Parts of Ohio have been having heavy rain and flooding lately, although where we are it's been sunny and hot for the last few days. We did get pounded with very heavy rains over the weekend and Monday. Yesterday, I happened to notice the effects from those rains in the play sandpile.

When we first arrived a month ago, Dad dumped a few bags of play sand for Anthony to play, but the heavy rains totally flattened the pile....

Each of the bazillion rain drops splashed up a bit of sand when it hit, and sometimes that sand got stuck [...]