I've been so overwhelmed with built-up stuff to do since returning from camping with Anthony that I've only just started really looking in detail through the photos I took, and came across this interesting shot. At the end of the second day, Anthony was out on some rocks just off the beach and playing with some new friends, and I was with them and enjoying the sunset and conversation with their mom.

I then noticed this bird flying by and something seemed very odd about it, so I quickly snapped the lopsided picture you see above. (I seem to have [...]

I mentioned the other day that I was going to take Anthony camping for the first time, and I did. We just got back this afternoon.

I'll write more about the whole experience another day (one that I don't wake up at 5am), but the location was a campground on a cliff overlooking Kotobikihama beach (map) about three and a half hours away by car, in the far north-western corner of Kyoto prefecture.

I took the picture above on our first night, about half an hour after sunset. It was so dark that I could barely see anything (including how [...]

Fumie grew up going camping several times a year, and has fond memories of it. We're not really the "outdoorsy" type, but we thought it'd be nice to give Anthony the same experience, so we're heading camping for a few days. We borrowed her folks' tent, and her dad and I (and Anthony, of course) practiced setting it up in the living room....

I went to Costco yesterday – there's one an hour south of Kyoto – to get some supplies, but ended up buying a tent. It cost only $120 but is about the size of Rhode Island. The [...]

"Golden Week" is about to start here in Japan, a bunch of national holidays in short order that, along with a weekend or two, gives people willing to use them a long vacation. I work for myself so it doesn't matter to me on that level, but now that Anthony's in school, we have to match our travel to the national schedule. (For a laugh, see this humorous but sadly accurate description of Golden Week.)

We had been planning to bring Anthony to Tokyo Disneyland today, but that plan got scrapped with recent events, so instead I'm showing some pictures [...]

Fumie's grandmother was born and raised on Amami Ooshima, an island far in the south of Japan, part of a long drawn-out chain of islands that delimits the boarder between the East China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The island's main local specialty mean is keihan, a shredded-chicken rice/soup dish.

Fumie's grandmother lived in the Kyoto area for 50+ years after WWII, but she kept her Amami roots and continued to prepare keihan for her family when she had one. Her daughter, then, having grown up with the dish, continued to prepare it for her own family when she had [...]