In "Snowy Frigid Ohio Morning" a few days ago, I posted a photo of the back of the house that I grew up in and that my folks have lived in for 49½ years. I captioned it "Warm", but commented that I had hoped for more orange spill from the incandescent lighting inside.

I hadn't gotten what I wanted because I was too late in the morning, where ambient light from the pre-dawn sky was already bright enough to overpower the house lights.

So I tried again this morning. We had quite a bit of snow last night, and I [...]

This should be my final post about having watched my first cyclocross bicycle races recently.

There was a lot of mud.

Most photos in previous posts (the intro, "Practice at the Mud Baths", "The First Two Races", and "Falling in the Mud") concentrated on areas I called "the Mud Bath" and "Mud Hill". I finally got far enough through my photos to find some that show them in context a bit... here's a wider view showing folks going through and away from the Mud Bath....

A reverse-angle shot from the overpass in the distance...

Some other random shots from the [...]

It's pretty chilly this morning here in Ohio, about 5°F (−15°C), with about 8" (20cm) of recent snow. It's not all that bad by Ohio standards, but it's been 30 years since I lived here, and Kyoto rarely gets much below freezing. Then again, it was only two years ago that I visited Ohio when it was -10°F (-23°C), so I guess today isn't so bad.

I woke up with the light, and it looked so pretty and calm outside that I had to run out with the camera. I only have one lens with me on this trip, a [...]

Last week's "Watching My First Cyclocross Bike Race" opened with the photo above. Today I'll share the whole fun sequence of photos that followed.

As I write this I'm dealing with a family medical emergency in America, and as I sit in a hospital waiting room, these photos from a cyclocross bicycle race last week in Kyoto Japan strike me as a perfect metaphor for life: if you suffer a setback, just shake it off, put on a smile, and continue forward.

(PS: I just made up the "Cyclocratic" seen in the title; there's probably a more grammatically-appropriate word I [...]

This post, brought to you at 4am by jetlag, is a continuation from "Cyclocross Races: Practice at the Mud Bath". Above we have the very first rider of the first race to make it to where I was at the Mud Bath.

The first race actually was three separate races run in parallel: "Category 3" (men who had earned the right to advance from the anyone-can-enter Category 4), "Masters 2" (men 40 and over who have done well enough to progress from Masters 3 and Masters 4), and "U17", children 17 and under who, presumably, are too old or too [...]