We had a nice view of the annular ('ring-shaped') eclipse from Kyoto this morning. We are on the edge of the shadow's path, so the view for us was of the moon skirting the edge of the sun. We had only 100 seconds of ring. (Folks in Tokyo got five minutes.) I took a bunch of pictures, but don't know whether anything came out. Will look through them later. At the moment (an hour later), the sun still has a small bite out of it, getting smaller by the minute.

Continued here...

I took another walk in Fushimi yesterday (a south-east area of Kyoto), similar to that of my previous post ("A Few Over-Process Under-Thought Photos From Lunch"), but with nice weather. Red and orange seemed to be a theme.

For the most part, cherry trees here in Japan don't bear fruit in a meaningful way (normally just small bitter fruits that are usually unnoticeable to begin with), but at the start of yesterday's walk I came across a real fruit-bearing cherry tree in front of someone's house, with a note "Enjoy them once they become red"...

Sadly, they were not red, [...]

I took a short walk today with some friends to go for lunch. Took some random shots along the way. Went crazy on them in Lightroom. Posted them here.

I'm finally following up on last month's "A Bit of Wine Tasting at Kyoto Station", with what amounts to a bunch of pictures of people pouring wine. In this case the people puring wine are employees at various importers or wineries who were assigned to work the table for their company at the event. For some reason, I like the collection of mostly-blurred faces...

I'd never before had a sangria that didn't taste like some kind of yucky adult Kool-Aid, but this Sangria Peñasol was really good, and the gentleman pouring it (who spoke Spanish, no less) was most delighted [...]

Anthony still really enjoys his LEGOs, making "mockups" like the Clones vs. Droids Battle I posted last year. It's been fun to see his play progress from simple add-ons to toys when he was three years old, to mimicking airport security after some flights when he was four, to car repair and advanced flight design and intergalactic speeders to a full cityscape to complex combinations of Lord knows what.

Now at nine years old, he still enjoys his LEGO and saves almost all his allowance for it.

A month or so ago he was very happy to find Swedish retailer [...]