I mentioned yesterday that Anthony had received some train stuff for Christmas. From Santa, he received the Tomy PlayRail Twin Tower Train Station that he'd petitioned Santa for, and from Mommy and Daddy he received various sets of extra track, bridges, and the like. All this added to the little PlayRail Automatic Train Transfer Station that he picked out when he turned five in October.

He'd really been hoping for the twin-tower station, and when it came to opening the last present – the present from Santa – he saw what it was with the first tear of the wrapping. [...]

Anthony served at Mass for the first time today, at a Mass said by Fr. Graham McDonnell, who says an English Mass once a month at the Catholic church we attend (the Kyoto Kawaramachi Cathedral, which is the same church that I got married in almost 10 years ago).

Anthony had been begging to do it for months, but it took until today until our schedule matched up with Fr. McDonnell's, so by the time we got there, he was quite excited.

Jimazaki-san (one of the parish office workers) had to scrounge around for a cassock in Anthony's size. She [...]

We took a short trip over the New Year holiday to the Amami Islands of southern Japan, in the East China Sea about halfway between Okinawa and the Japanese mainland.

The map below shows our flight back, from the northern part of the main Amami island (circled in green) to Osaka (circled in blue). Mentally, Amami feels much further away than Hokkaido (circled in Red) where we visited last May, even though the latter is indeed farther away.

When we went to Hokkaido, we took an 18-hour ferry trip, but were almost always within sight of land. The flight back [...]

Alexander Kiel's has developed some insight into the "FormatMessageW failed" error that plagues some Windows users of Lightroom export plugins, including my export plugins for Zenfolio, SmugMug, Flickr, and Picasa Web. From his reports, the problem seems to be related to IE7 and slow internet connections.

He poses a potential solution, so those running into this error are encouraged to see his writeup on the subject.

I'm trying a new look for my blog....

It's a look that I hope is more suitable for the photo-heavy content I tend to produce, and lighter and simpler overall.

I've been working on it for the last month or so. Having not really grasped the essential nature of how to use CSS (style sheets) for a long time, my years of content developed a hodge-podge of style markups that changed over time as both my knowledge of CSS and my sense of aesthetics changed.

It was a monumental task to go over all the older posts to [...]