Last fall I visited the Ginkakuji Temple (銀閣寺， the "silver pavilion") in north-east Kyoto. It's named for a building that was intended to be coated in silver leaf (comparable to how the golden pavilion is coated in gold leaf). Apparently they never got around to actually applying the silver, but the name stuck.

As it is today, the temple is noted for its sculptured sand, including a huge Mt. Fuji shaped cone.

The minor entrance stone garden is not particularly special, with similar features easily found at other temples. But the main garden raises the level considerably...

There's also a [...]

As I mentioned in the comments on last month's post about horrid watch-marketing copy, I've been looking for a nice watch with a combination of features and simplicity and size that no one seems to make. So after years of keeping my eye out, I finally decided that "perfect is the enemy of good enough" and went ahead and bought some cheap watches just to try.

I'm glad I did because I found out some new ways in which what you see in advertisements is not necessarily what you get, and I also found that what I though was important [...]

I've used Emacs as my primary email client since about 1982, and for the first time in those 30+ years it inexplicably deleted my entire queue of unread mail (about 1,400 messages) when I tried to load the last day's worth of new mail this morning. Doh!

The thought of losing 1,400 messages awaiting my attention was both frightening and liberating. Sadly, I keep good automatic backups (in this case with Crashplan), so I was able to recover my mail queue as it stood a few hours ago.

As I mentioned yesterday, I've not been too attentive to email lately [...]

I'm back in Kyoto after a couple of weeks visiting my folks in Ohio and a friend in Milwaukee.

I've accomplished a lot in the week I've been back:

That's an impressive list for me after a transpacific trip.

I also got a new MacBook pro set up (upgrading from a circa 2010 model) and replaced, for the umpteenth time, failing Seagate Barracuda hard drives in my NAS (giving some Western Digital NAD drives a try this time).

"What I haven't gotten done since returning" is a much longer list, including processing photos from the trip, writing [...]

Our trip to visit my folks in Ohio ends tomorrow with a long trip back to Kyoto. I've still much to post from this short two weeks, but here are some random photos to fill out my last night...

We ended up visiting ZipCity four times. I posted about it earlier, and will again I'm sure.

My brother Mike and his wife ran a local 5,000-meter race. Mike came in first overall, which is better than he did earlier in the summer in an 56-mile ultramarathon. Chickee came in third in her age group.

The older kids doing a zipline [...]