Dipping into my photo archives back to last February, I've been wanting to write about our visit to Ichiwa in north-western Kyoto, a thousand-year-old family-run purveyor of aburi-mochi (あぶり餅 – "lightly grilled mochi"): grilled kinako mochi on skewers.

Mochi is basically cooked sweet rice that's been pulverized into a sticky, gooey paste. Kinako is flour made from roasted soybeans.

The family started business in the second year of the reign of the emperor Chouhou (長保２年), which would place it square on Year 1000 of the western calendar. 1,008 years and 24 generations of history later, it's currently run by Mieko [...]

Piglets are for Lightroom 1.x plugins only, and are not needed in Lightroom 2 or later.

The four export plugins for Adobe Lightroom that I've written – for uploading to Zenfolio, SmugMug, Flickr, and Picasa Web – are useful, I hope, and offer lots of options and ways for the user to configure how their images are processed. If I had more time and more skill, though, the plugins could do more. So much more.

For example, Tim Armes' LR/Mogrify Lightroom Export Plugin offers a lot of nice features that I wish my plugins offered, including:

Those who have been in Roppongi (an area of Tokyo) recently will likely have seen this outdoor light installation, and will realize that all the white lights mixed in with the blue above are really blue lights that were so bright that they "blew out" all the color channels on my camera's digital sensor, leaving only white.

For those not having seen it in person, let's just say that it was a really, really blue area.

Anthony served at Mass again today, and it's still so incredibly adorable that I just have to post some more pictures from his first time serving last week.

But a few seconds later, after noticing me looking his way...

Anthony overheard the word "culture" (bunka – 文化) during a conversation between me and Fumie, and asked what it meant. It's a difficult concept for a five year old, but I tried to explain a bit, then gave the example that one doesn't wear shoes at home in Japan, but they do in America.

He thought about it for a bit, and as it set in, he said in the most incredulous tone of voice: "they wear shoes inside the house?"

I said yes.

His reply to that was the single word "why?", but if only I could possibly convey [...]
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