Yesterday during our Christmas, the first present Anthony opened set a pattern that we saw repeated fairly often, one quite different than the wide-eyed wonder of a year ago...

He brought it to Mommy, asked what it was, and was thrilled to find out that his Aunt Marci and Uncle Marty had sent him two uniforms, one for a policeman and another for a chef....

Later, Anthony and I were playing, and we pretended that I did something bad so that he could be a policeman and "get" me....

Thanks Marci and Marty! The Chef outfit will have to be [...]

The picture above of Anthony ripping the packaging from a present pretty much sums up the day, but our Christmas started a month ago when we set up our Christmas tree.

When I was growing up in Ohio, we had a real, perfectly-shaped, wonderfully-smelling, live evergreen tree every Christmas. We always got scratched up when decorating it, and the needles would eventually get shed to the floor only to eventually find their way in a most painful manner to our feet. It was absolutely wonderful.

It's been 20+ years since I moved out on my own, and 20+ years since [...]

As we have done in the past, we started our Christmas by taking in the free Christmas-Eve concert in the lobby of the Kyoto Hotel Okura, our fourth year in a row (having done it in 2006, 2005, and 2004). Fumie's dad is in Malaysia at the moment, so her mom joined us as well.

Prior to the concert, the hotel passes out free champaign and juice....

Then there's the concert. This time was a very nice choir of about 50 kids, but unfortunately, they brought their families so even though we got there very early, there wasn't a chair [...]

I've been meaning to write about and recommend the 16" FotoSharp Camera Rain Cover I picked up last summer. It's a remarkably simple little cover that scrunches up into a tiny ball in my camera bag when not in use, yet provides rain protection even with my big Nikkor 70-200 VR zoom on my D200.

The pictures on its web site pretty much show what it is, especially the 3rd one that shows it laid out flat (on top of a book, to show its transparency). It's a tube with a smallish opening on one end that goes over the [...]
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Adding to my stable of export plugins for Lightroom (Zenfolio, Smugmug and Flickr), I've just released my "Export to Picasa Web" Plugin for Lightroom.

I just hacked it out and it's received minimal testing by me (and no testing by anyone else), so version churn is likely at first as bugs are reported and shaken out. It comes with a French translation for all the parts that are the same as the other plugins, but the texts unique to this plugin remain in English until the French translator is able to send an update.

(If you're one of the [...]
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