Sort of a followup to "Catching Air on a Snow Sled", this is another post of pictures from a year ago.

Playing on the lake behind my folks' place in Ohio, Anthony used an old spade as a hockey stick, and a chunk of ice as the puck....

I liked the shadow and asked Anthony to hold the pose for a few shots...

This last one has had the saturation turned up to exaggerate the blue from the sky showing in his shadow. (The blue is not seen except in the shadows because the direct sun overpowers it elsewhere.)

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The pictures of snow play I posted earlier today of my brother and his family reminded me that there's much from last year's trip here to Ohio that I still have not posted. At the time I'd done one Snow Play post, so I guess today is a followup.

These pictures of Anthony (age 10 at the time) sledding in the back yard are from exactly one year ago today.

He gained confidence as time went... here's a shot from 10 minutes later; he seems much more composed....

As I mentioned the other day, we made the hour drive from Kyoto to the mountains of Takatsuki to visit a small food/entertainment area where the main attraction for us was picking (then grilling then eating) shiitake mushrooms.

As one might expect, the mushroom area was like an old damp basement, but with more light...

There's a limit of five mushrooms per person, so you have to take care in how you select and pluck a mushroom, to maximize your take. If they were stuck together, they were considered one mushroom, so we tried to find groups.

They sell out [...]

We had a fun trip today to a small food/entertainment area in the mountains of northern Takatsuki City (高槻市), an hour or so west of Kyoto. The main objective that I'll post about another time (Update: here) was the picking of (and grilling of and eating) shiitake mushrooms (椎茸), but we also had fun at a play area that included a slide of rollers for 80m (260') down a hill.

UPDATE: for more information about visiting this slide, see this follow-up post.

It was wet and dirty, but YOLO, so we gave it a go.

I waited to catch Anthony [...]

The time we spent with family in Washington last week was filled with lots of sports, mostly baseball (both playing and watching), but Anthony's love of soccer was not overlooked. One day before the bulk of the family flew in, we visited the playground at his cousin Josh's elementary school to kick a ball around a bit...

Anthony's cousin Josh is really talented in baseball -- he's seven years old, but holds his own playing against twelve-year olds -- but he has little experience with soccer, so the play today was a bit lopsided.

The soccer was fun, but once [...]