In my most recent post about our short four-day New Year excursion a few hours' north of Kyoto by car, I ended with our having left Gokayama village (五箇山) after lunch, heading a bit further south to Shirakawago Village (白川郷).

The two villages are both world-heritage sites, famed for their quaint and interesting gasshou zukuri style of construction (built without nails or screws). Shirakawago is by far the more famous, and it suffers for it: it's a tourist attraction that happens to have some quaint buildings. Gokayama, on the other hand, felt like a small village that we just happened [...]

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This is a photo from or snowy New Year trip, which I last wrote about the other day in "Snowy Farewell to Gokayama Village", which ended up with us arriving in Gokayama Village's much more famous thatched-house sibling, Shirakawago Village.

I'd originally intended to full post, but am running out of time this evening, so thought then to just post this photo. As I was preparing it (I added a slight vignette), I noticed two dark lines in the left half of the photo (mouseover here to highlight them in the photo) that I hadn't noticed before.

Can you guess [...]

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This cold I've had for the last week and a half seems to be getting a bit better, but it's been a killer, flip-flopping me between sleeping all day due to lack of energy, and wanting to sleep all day but not being able to due to insomnia. A few days ago I was an absolute zombie from having not slept for two days, but got enough of a second wind that I decided to try to get out a bit into Nature, to see whether that would refresh me a bit.

I brought the Zoom H4n high-quality audio recorder [...]

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For something a little bit different, here's a free audio book, "イノシシ" ("Wild Boar"), story written by seven-year-old Anthony Friedl. Unabridged reading for you today by the author himself.

I'm really impressed with the quality of the recording, both in technical terms, and in Anthony's clear reading voice. More on the recording later in this post.

The Story

First, here's the story (unabridged! :-)), with my attempt at a translation:

イノシシ イノシシが車にぶつかり タイヤがパンク 車もパンク ほかの車はびゅうんびゅうんはしり 自分だけのこってた。 Wild Boar A wild boar was hit by a car tire's flat car is totaled other cars go zipping by only [...]
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Here's a helpful tip...

If a lingering cold and a sudden intense bout of insomnia has made your nights (and hence days) a living hell of misery and anguish, going through your medicine cabinet to collect two of everything marked "nighttime", "sleep aid", or with warnings about operating heavy machinery... may not be as good a solution as it first appears. This Noah's Ark of drugs will indeed help you finally get sleep, but waking up then becomes problematic. Furthermore, long after finally waking, your brain continues to live in a groggy haze not unlike that of the sleep-deprived head-cold [...]
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