I just booked my summer flight to visit my folks in Ohio. Over the years, prices have been going up and flight selection down, so every year it's a bit more difficult to find a reasonable combination of price and inconvenience. I used to be able to make the flight for $1,200 but now it's over $2,000 for the cheapest flight.

I hunt around various sites like Orbitz and Expedia and Yahoo! Travel and the like, and this year I happen to have bought from Orbitz.

As you might expect, you have to go through a bazillion pages of selection [...]
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As I mentioned the other day in the post about an outing with Vaughn Hart to the mountains of north-western Kyoto, we stopped by a simple, unassuming rural shrine. The entrance to the immediate shrine area was through a small little wooden gate, seen here at the top of the steps Vaughn is standing on...

You can't see them in the photo above, but the gate actually has doors, propped open at the moment...

Something about the carving at the top of the gate caught my eye. The light was just wonderful for it... strong shadows, yet somehow soft....

The [...]

At the end of my previous post, I showed an odd tree... very tall without branches, except at the top a rat's nest of tightly bunched twigs and cones. Futzing around in Lightroom with a shot of the top of the tree, I came across a fairly stark monochrome version that struck me as interesting enough to give it a try as a desktop background.

Prior to happening upon that, I had a "stylized" version that I sort of liked...

I don't often venture into these non-realistic versions unless I'm doing something specific (such as this, this, this and this), [...]

On the family outing to some nearby still-snowy mountains the other day, we noticed that the maple trees are starting to bud, with an odd rust-colored fringe...

Up close, it was easy to see what was happening...

Elsewhere along the drive we found a tree with big, pink buds.... likely plum.

I don't know for sure whether they're plum, but it's likely because we're well into plum-blossom season. Even two weeks ago another Kyoto blogger posted about plum blossoms in Gion, and in prior years I've posted about them as early as late January.

The plum-blossom season winds down early, [...]

When we got Anthony new clothes for the winter, we happened to get him some turtleneck shirts, and (of course) I think he just happens to look really good in them :-). This photo is from a month ago, a month after his last haircut (which appeared in "Shorn").

He still hasn't had it cut since, so it's been two months and his head is currently a shaggy mop of cuteness.