I accepted an invite the other day from my friend Shimada-san to visit the Nanzen'in temple/gardens located in a sequestered back corner of the large Nanzenji temple complex. It was my first visit to that sub-temple, and I'll post more about it later, but suffice to say that it was spectacular. I took a bazillion pictures, which I found totally missing when I got home and tried to load them onto my PC. The card was corrupt and Windows hung trying to read it. Yikes!

It's the first time I've had a problem like this in the 10+ years I've [...]

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I mentioned in yesterday's very long Joseph Niisima and The Savory Family Bible post that my friend Arthur's brother John had visited him from The States to, among other things, remodel Arthur's kitchen. John has returned home, but asked me to post some thoughts he had from his trip, so here they are...

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I like to post about Anthony opening and playing with presents he receives, both because I like to keep it as a happy memory, and to share the joy with the gift-giver. It's been more than a month since Anthony turned six years old and it's been on my mind to share some shots of when he opened the presents from Grandma and Grandpa.

We opened just the one on one night, then the rest the next night. On the second night, the combination of fluorescent lighting above and an incandescent lamp to the side made for some pretty odd [...]

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On our drive to the Hiyoshi Dam the other day, while driving through the mountains in the middle of nowhere, we came across a set of buildings that had clearly been abandoned for a very long time....

There were at least three buildings, probably all part of one homestead. I'm guessing that thatched-roof house is the original, with the tile-roofed buildings being more modern. It's just a guess, and in any case, "modern" is relative....

You can see that there's quite a stone embankment in front of the thing, probably a result of the original builder having created a level [...]

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