The picture above of Anthony ripping the packaging from a present pretty much sums up the day, but our Christmas started a month ago when we set up our Christmas tree.

When I was growing up in Ohio, we had a real, perfectly-shaped, wonderfully-smelling, live evergreen tree every Christmas. We always got scratched up when decorating it, and the needles would eventually get shed to the floor only to eventually find their way in a most painful manner to our feet. It was absolutely wonderful.

It's been 20+ years since I moved out on my own, and 20+ years since [...]

As we have done in the past, we started our Christmas by taking in the free Christmas-Eve concert in the lobby of the Kyoto Hotel Okura, our fourth year in a row (having done it in 2006, 2005, and 2004). Fumie's dad is in Malaysia at the moment, so her mom joined us as well.

Prior to the concert, the hotel passes out free champaign and juice....

Then there's the concert. This time was a very nice choir of about 50 kids, but unfortunately, they brought their families so even though we got there very early, there wasn't a chair [...]

Driving today on a road in Kyoto today that I've driven many times in the past (the road I reddened above, traveling from the upper right to the lower left), I was surprised to notice for the first time that there's a building right in the middle of an interchange cloverleaf.

Quite efficient, if not a bit unpleasant for the occupants of the building.

When viewing a geoencoded photo – one where the location's latitude and longitude are encoded in the metadata – in Lightroom, its coordinates are displayed in the metadata panel as shown below:

(Well, it shows up if you're using a metadata-panel view that includes the coordinates among the items to be shown, such as "all", but you can also use my Lightroom Metadata Viewer Preset Builder to build a customized metadata-panel view.)

Clicking on the little arrow to the right of the coordinates brings up your web browser, with the location showing in Google Maps. In the case of the [...]

I noticed a tiny old house being demolished nearby the other day, and stopped in for a look. It could be anywhere from 40 to 100+ years old... the guys tearing it down didn't know, but it was built at a time when Japanese homes were still built with mud and bamboo for the walls.

There are still plenty of this kind of construction in Kyoto. Often, the outside of such walls are veneered in wood, as seen in my Randomly Photographed Stroll in Kyoto and Old Wood-Veneer Siding (Desktop Background) posts.

The shot above shows rough-hewn beams that were [...]