Day 4 of my camping trip with Anthony started early, as usual, but without the prospect of having to move the tent (as I did the previous day), I looked forward to a day of fun.

Anthony's new friends had returned home the previous evening, but now he had May and Monet to play with, and added new friends Emma and her older brother, Benjamin, as well.

Kotobikihama beach is large – about a mile long – with several distinct sections. This morning, we headed out to the main part of the beach, which is quite a distance from the [...]

Day two of my camping adventure with Anthony ended pleasantly, with new friends and a nice sunset.

Day 3, however, started much earlier and much less pleasantly than I would have expected – right at midnight – when some rude family burst into the campground with loud voices and bright lights, searching for a spot to set up their tent, then setting it up.

Inconsiderate people suck.

I barely got a few hours of sleep, and was up at 5:30 or so with Anthony and daybreak. Day three was Saturday of Golden Week, meaning that now the crowds would really [...]

Today was our 10th wedding anniversary.

It wasn't quite what I might have visualized 10 years ago – we were all pretty tired, and even normally robust Anthony was a bit under the weather – but Fumie and I got here together, and that's what it's all about.

Her mom invited us for Happy-Anniversary pie (a pie that Anthony felt the need to put candles in)...

Anthony was torn between wanting to put candles in, and wanting to eat the chocolate card and chocolate eye...

You may well be wondering why an apple pie for a 10th wedding anniversary, [...]

Picking up my "Camping with Anthony" story (about my camping trip with Anthony to Kotobikihama beach, in northern Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) from after the end of Day 1....

On the second day, the sun rose at 5:07am, and, unfortunately, that means that we did too.

We decided to talk a walk along a path to a big hill we could see along the coast, stopping by a big beach in between that the path dipped down to.

As I mentioned yesterday, the amount of yellow pollen dust that the pine trees produced was staggering. Maybe some clever bees enlisted a [...]

It seems that my cellphone somehow dropped out of my pocket while scootering home today. Lucky for me, a kind stranger found it and called the "HOME" entry in the address book: she told me that she'd found my phone before I even realized I'd lost it.

It's not fun to lose a phone. The last time that I lost my phone (which was also the first time I lost my phone) it was a huge hassle to have to get a new one, new plan, re-enter data, etc. Yuck. (It turns out, though, that the phone was just hiding [...]