The birds who live around my folks' place have the humans trained pretty well. If you're out on the veranda but neglect to feed them, they'll of course pester you for worms, but if you don't even go out, they'll come calling. While we were visiting with cousin Titi, Anthony answered the call of a chickadee that summoned us for food.

My brother Alan and his wife Natalie were in town for a friend's wedding (four years after their own), and stopped by with 16-month-old Titi, whom Anthony hadn't seen since first meeting last year.

We fly 100-gazillion-billion miles to visit America, and the first thing he wants to do is use his allowance to buy a LEGO® Star Wars™ toy he'd been thinking about getting in Japan.

It became a Hyena Droid Bomber™ in short order.

Star Wars™, and in particular LEGO® Star Wars™, are the center of his universe. I've only mentioned it on the blog a few times (such as here, here, here, and most recently here), but every other post would be about it if I were to give it accurate coverage.

A friend of mine collects Japanese swords. He doesn't have very many... five or six.. but makes up for lack of quantity with quality: each one is priceless (where "priceless" means "has a price, but it's much, much, much more than I could afford"). One is a designated "Japanese National Treasure".

I don't know much about Japanese swords, or swords of any type, and I'm not real keen on the whole concept of tools designed for killing, but I remember being impressed by a paragraph I read long ago in, I think, a Lonely Planet guide, describing the painstaking method [...]

Two "What am I?" quizzes in a row, sorry, but I just arrived at my folks' place in Ohio after a series of very looooong flights from Japan, so jetlag-wise I'm not quire ready to do much writing.