More on country living during our trip to Ohio....

With family with lots of little kids coming into town this week, my folks are trying to keep the geese (and their copious quantities of poop) down by the lake, so have set up a little fence that marks how close they're allowed to approach. Sometimes they venture a bit too close, and need a gentle reminder of the limits....

Reminds me of doing something similar last year.

As I mentioned yesterday, we're in Ohio for the summer, and Anthony quickly started to enjoy the benefits to country living. He caught toads, played with fireflys, played baseball and basketball with Daddy, chased geese, played in a big sandpile, and generally explored around. That was his first full day here at Grandma and Grandpa's place.

The play backhoe (whose many-year provenance was provided in the previous post) had more spiderwebs and such than he cared for, so he wanted to rinse it off.

Eventually I put on one of those multi-nozzel sprayers, which provided a slight improvement in washing [...]

Well, no, not any kind of business like the KidZania play spot in Japan that I've posted much about, but perhaps even better: Grandma and Grandpa's place in Ohio.

Anthony generally spends the summer at my folks' place in rural Ohio, both to bolster his English ability, and, well, to be able to see Grandma and Grandpa. They live in the countryside, so it's always a great experience for him.

We arrived yesterday evening. Our luggage arrived this morning. It didn't take long before he was playing outside, power-washing some heavy machinery. The toy backhoe has been a recurrent theme [...]

As soon as I switched to a Nikon D700 from a Nikon D200, I started getting corrupt memory cards. I brought the camera to the Nikon Service Center in Osaka, but they said that it's probably the memory card that's the problem. I used only Transcend compact flash cards, which are not on the official supported list, so they suggested that I move to an officially-supported card.

In those early days, the problem manifested itself with a scrambled view of the image on the D700's screen, but they downloaded fine and I never had other problem with the images. In [...]
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In my previous post about our recent trip to Ishigaki Island in southern Japan, I mentioned that we'd taken a side trip to the small but nearby Taketomi Island. The trip involved a 15-minute ride in a boat similar to...

Anthony took the picture above likely due to the whale-themed boat in the center, but it turns out that we made an impromptu decision to see the coral in a glass-bottomed boat, so we ended up getting onto the boat shown at right, for a short trip out to some of the many coral beds....

All the color were muted [...]