Now that I've finished up my posts about taking seven-year-old Anthony on his first real ski trip, I can get back to the story of our short New-Year's trip to Toyama Prefecture, a few hours' drive north of Kyoto.

My last post about the trip was the one-off "Deceptively Clear: Snow-Covered Mountains in Exquisite Detail", but the ongoing story was in the middle of our second-day visit to picturesque Gokayama Village, where we'd left off having had some hot noodles at restaurant "Yohachi".

To remind you, it was very snowy...

Anthony decided to pretend a snowball was a baby and [...]

We still have freezing temperatures here in Kyoto, but down on Amami island in the far south of Japan, they've got cherry blossoms. Earnest Barr has some wonderful cherry-blossom shots on his blog lately, with blossoms with a glow, another with bird n' blossoms, and possibly my favorite, "Honcha Pass" on this post.

Highly recommended.

This is the final installment about taking Anthony skiing, where we he skied for the first time, and together we did lots of sledding, and had fun watching others sled and crash. As the day was winding to a close, a mini snowball fight turned into batting practice....

I'm sure I made a comical sight taking these shots. Normally when I take shots while pitching to him (something I've done several times, but apparently have never posted) I normally hold the camera in the right hand and pitch with the left, but for whatever reason I didn't do that this [...]

I've got a nasty cold so no energy for a proper post. Here's a pair of photos from sledding with Anthony, of two others we encountered on the slope.

Unlike the "others enjoying the slopes" pics I put on my earlier post, there's not much action evident in the photo above, but one can imagine it well enough when also seeing the shot taken two seconds earlier...

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Continued here...

Flipping around in my image library while doing some Lightroom testing, I came across an image that I happen to see fullscreen, and was wowed by it much more than a small-sized view would have led me to expect. I'd published it before (two and a half years ago in "A Few Unremarkable Fern Pictures"), but with desktop-image sizes, so I thought I'd go ahead and do that today.

It's from a trip a couple of years ago to Giouji Temple, images from which have appeared many times on this blog... if you're interested, check out the "nearby photos" link [...]