The other day when Anthony and I did some local hiking that ended up at the back entrance to the Kiyomizu Temple, we got to watch a helicopter take off from the helipad at Shogunzuka, the top of one of Kyoto's "Eastern Mountains".

Besides a helipad and hiking trails, Shogunzuka offers some nice views of Kyoto, but unless you're at the overlook, it feels like you're in the middle of nowhere...

This helipad is just a few minutes' drive from the Kyoto Westin Miyako Hotel, generally considered to be the best hotel in Kyoto. Until the government's Kyoto State Guest [...]

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A neighborhood restaurant featured in an earlier blog post suffered a fire yesterday when the cook took the wrong approach in cleaning the vent ducting above the stove. (Note to other cooks: using fire to burn away accumulated grime in vertical ducting works very well only if you consider the rest of the building to be "accumulated grime".)

The fire explains why helicopters were hovering directly over our place for a while yesterday. (Hovering helicopters are apparently not good news in Japan. The last time helicopters were buzzing around, two weeks ago, it was due to a keeper at the [...]

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Putting five-year-old Anthony down for the night, we were lying in bed and chatting, and out of the blue he says...

" When I get big, if you're not dead, I'll become a spaceship person and go up to the stars and check how much big they are, how much round, how much heavy.... "

I sort of chuckled at the "if you're not dead" part, but didn't comment. Since his great-grandmother died recently, and the ensuing funeral and such, we've had some matter-of-fact talks about death, and he seems to understand things well, and be at peace with the [...]
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While on a bike ride the other day, we stopped to watch a bit of hubbub as 15+ people doing a photo shoot for a catalog spent the better part of half an hour for just one shot.

Of course, Anthony doesn't care that they had a Nikon D3 or how they did the lighting, etc., so he was soon off to investigate more important things...

He eventually noticed the ones I was photographing, and he came over and got it (that's the first photo above). He also had one that hadn't yet turned fluffy, and was surprised and interested [...]

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Yesterday's picture of a water lily was taken during a dark, rainy day at the City of Kusatsu's ("Water Forest") park. The name in Japanese is mizu no mori (水の森). They have outside gardens with all kinds of water plants, a large greenhouse ("Lotus Hall"), a movie theater, and restaurant. It costs $3 for adults.

It was raining while we where there, which is perhaps appropriate for a "water forest".

One thing I'll never understand is the apparent need in Japanese culture to make allowance for the fact that a smoker might not want to go for more than three [...]

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