At the end of my previous post, about Taketomi Island in the far south of Japan, we'd stopped at a cafe for cake and coffee.

I felt bad that we inadvertently chased him out of his home. When he returned to the beach, we put his shell back near him, and left him alone.

So, picking up from yesterday where I recapped our spring trip to Ishigaki Island in the far south of Japan, and our side excursion to the culturally unique Taketomi Island....

Taketomi's tourist draw, besides the quaint little town, are tours through it in carts pulled by water buffalo. (Why water buffalo? No idea.) There were maybe a dozen water buffalo we could see, two or three in active service.

I don't have many pictures from our ride, but wish I did because our tour guide (and caretaker of our buffalo, whose name he told us but I've now forgotten) was [...]

Last spring we made a short trip to Ishigaki Island in the far south of Japan, just this side of Taiwan. I posted about the trip there and the amazing first sunset and first dinner, some zero light night photography. And more. And that was just from the first day of the trip.

The second day generated nine posts, including some beautiful vistas, a secluded beach, some dynamic weather at a lighthouse, a sunset dip in the pool, a lively "flame & rain" dinner, and a retrospective through Anthony's eyes.

I barely started posting about the third day, having only [...]

After getting ready for Santa, Anthony went to bed at about 8:30pm. I happened to wake up a bit before 4am and noticed that Anthony was already up, had already confirmed that Santa had visited, had already opened the small present he's allowed to open when he wakes up, had played with it, grown tired of it, and was entertaining himself with a video. At 3:55am.

With effort, against his protests of "I'm not tired!", I got him back to bed, and soon he was sleeping again. Me too.

We had a nice little presents time, with Fumie's folks stopping [...]

Kanji are the complex "Chinese characters" of Japanese writing, as opposed to the two simple phonetic Japanese alphabets that he uses mostly at this point.

While wrapping presents this evening, I thought of a great response to when, inevitably, he'll hear from a classmate that Santa is not real, that it's really the parents. I'll affect an air of grave concern, then in a low voice confide that Santa brings toys only to kids that have been good, and so parents secretly get up early to check, and if Santa didn't bring a toy, they feel bad for their kid, [...]