Yesterday's post about our visit to Gokayama Village in Toyama Prefecture, Japan, ended with us about to stop in a cafe for lunch.

Inside, the soba was the best I'd ever had... the soup was just amazing.

The house was also amazing, with the same no-fastener construction seen on the outside of the houses in my introduction to Gokayama post. Here's part of the ceiling near our table, with straw stuffed in crevices as insulation...

Anthony didn't care about that.... he cared about...

Inside it looked more like someone's messy house than a cafe, because it was both, but apparently [...]

So, it's been a week since "Introduction to a Snowy Gokayama Village", and though I intended to pick up where I left off right away, I got sidetracked with related posts "Rosy Cheeks", "Japan's Deep-Rooted Ethos of Fire Prevention", "Snowy Mountains", and "Shutter Speed's Effect on Falling Snow". So, picking up where I left off in the Introduction post, more on our stroll through this picturesque frozen countryside...

I'm really disappointed with this last shot... the scene offered so much potential, but my composition here is just pathetic. Would like to return in time to that spot to try the [...]

It's the view on my computer, at least, when I first sat down this morning. When I'm testing Lightroom things, I'm often jumping around randomly in my image archive, and apparently this was the image I happened to end at when I went to bed last night. Concentrating on my work at the time, I didn't think much about it one way or the other, but it was a nice image to wake up to, so I thought I'd share it.

It's from the last day of our short New Year trip to Toyama Prefecture, seen in other recent posts, [...]

Some people subscribe to my blog posts (and/or the comments left on posts) by email, which means that my system sends them a message from time to time. This is all done automatically, so I normally never see these messages, but the other day I received a reply to one, from a guy whose name I recognized from the comments he'd left on my blog over time, and from some private email exchanges we'd had about Lightroom.

This particular guy lives in Bangkok, but is British, so I didn't expect the bordering-on-gibberish broken English of the short message in his [...]
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