Yesterday afternoon, prior to the Pleasant Day Along the Kamo River, I had to kill an hour with Anthony near his school. We decided to go with a classmate, Mizuki-chan, across the street to the grounds of Kyoto's old imperial palace...

While they played, I and the camera noticed some things...

At one point they played a game similar to what American kids might do with a turkey wishbone. Pine needles tend to fall in pairs, so they found old dried ones on the ground, hooked the two together, then pulled. The holder of the pair that doesn't break wins.

Today was a sunny, gorgeous day in Kyoto, with temperatures in the low to mid 70s. Totally pleasant. Conveniently, I had an hour to kill while Anthony was at "Jumping" (gymnastics), so I wandered around with my camera near the Kamo river, where the Takano river joins it at Kawabata and Imadegawa Streets.

In Making Udon Noodles from Scratch, I showed how dough was flattened out like a pizza crust, folded over, and carefully cut into long strips to be boiled into udon noodles. While in Tokyo earlier this year, we came across a different method of preparing the noodles at a shop named for the this style of noodle preparation: Tosho-men (刀削麺).

This style, from the Shanxi region of China, literally means "knife-cut noodles".

As with the Japanese preparation style, the chef starts with a hunk of dough...

He then stands some distance from a big pot of boiling water, and starts [...]

During last month's trip to Amami Ooshima (a southern-Japan island in the East China Sea), the big attraction for Anthony at our hotel was a swing. Out behind the gift shop was a spooky-style tree with three swings hanging from it, and a bunch of netting above to allow kids to climb its expansive branches in safety.

His favorite by far was the orange buoy, which he sat on while I pushed or swung him around.

Of course, focus and composition were also a challenge, doing everything with one hand while pushing him with the other, all the while having [...]

Anthony's US passport is about to expire, so we need to renew it at the US Consulate in Osaka. Hopefully the trip goes better than last time I had to go there.

We've got all the paperwork ready, but for a while had trouble finding his birth certificate. Eventually, I had to make contingency plans and check to see how to get a copy (from the State of California), and was shocked to find that it takes, on average, three months to get one!

However, that's nothing compared to how long it takes to get a simple copy of a [...]