Yesterday's drive in the mountains left us wanting more, so today we took off in the opposite direction for another drive. It was a very hazy, overcast day, but relatively warm and much less crowded where we ended up.

We ended up in the same little rice-farming village in Shiga prefecture with tiered rice paddies that we visited last year (where Anthony and a friend playing among the rice paddies and in another post, I documented the rice harvest). I had remembered a small park where we'd stopped last time, and so stopped again this time.

Fumie and Anthony hit [...]

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That caption might not make sense at first, but read on...

Yesterday was Fumie's dad's 60th birthday, which is a major life event in Japanese culture, and so this evening we had a party for him. Among the vast quantity of food was a fish called a tai (鯛), which is served at auspicious events due to the somewhat corny reason that its name is the final sound of omedetai, "auspicious". (It probably felt much less corny ages ago when the tradition began, because back then, a gift of food was a true gift indeed.)

Anyway, on Fumie and my [...]

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Anthony gets to pick his own present on his birthday. Last year when he turned five, he picked a train set. The year before, he picked a big garbage truck. This week, he turned six...

He has enjoyed playing with helicopters, been excited to watch a helicopter takeoff, and recently got to ride in a helicopter, so it wasn't too surprising that this year he chose for himself a helicopter, one from the same makers as his now fairly large train set.

I'm not sure where he learned the silly exaggerated "I dunno" response, or exactly what he was joking [...]

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Looking in my photo archives, I see we've done this type of thing a few times before. We did it last year, and the year before as well. It's almost as if we do this every year. 🙂

I'm not all that happy with the photos... the lighting was horrible (mixed incandescent and fluorescent) which makes for a white-balance nightmare, and for the dark, candle-lit shots.... I dunno.... I just expected more from a D700 that can take pictures in the dark. One of the problems was nailing focus... the lack of a good focus screen on the D700 is [...]

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