When it rains it pours. I hadn't had someone visit from The States for three years, and this week I'm enjoying two visits, my Aunt Jeannette as I noted yesterday, and separately, an old colleague from Yahoo! who now lives in Singapore, Kuan-Fu Chang (aka "KFC"), and his wife, also a former Yahoo!, Verena Wee.

I particularly enjoyed how they're both somewhat camera geeks, so I enjoyed taking pictures of them taking pictures.

I'd met them for dinner the other night, bringing along my Sigma 30mm f/1.4 for the low light, watching as they photographed the various dishes as they [...]

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My Aunt Jeannette came to Kyoto this week with a tour group from The States. We're not related by blood, but by virtue of her having been friends with my folks since I was a kid. I don't think I'd met her since I was 10 or so, but I recognized her right away when I went to her hotel to touch base yesterday.

Anthony and I tagged along with her tour today. Anthony took to her easily, those friendly feelings perhaps eased along by the Fireman George gift she brought.

I had a "snuggle chat" with Anthony this evening. [...]

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Last month we attended a small get-together at the house of one of Anthony's classmates, Yoko-chan. Yoko-chan's daddy really appreciates music ... jazz, classical, classic rock.... all kinds, and we were treated to a wonderful selection from his CD and LP collection throughout the evening.

He also plays the guitar quite well, and at one point he and another daddy had a little jam session. I snapped a few wholly unremarkable pictures, but I thought I'd see whether I could turn them into something more interesting. I know that he saw Eric Clapton two nights in a row when [...]

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For some reason I thought that the cherry trees in Japan generally bore no fruit, so it was with some surprise that a cherry almost hit me in the head while I was standing under a tree today. Sure enough, there were a few very small cherries (the size of large peas) here and there on the branches. It was windy and hard to get a picture of anything, but I did taste one and it was bitter-sweet, which reminded me much of what the normal wild cherries I had as a kid.

I was under a cherry tree by [...]

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I noticed this headline in the news today:

Uganda shelves plan to convert rainforest

Now, let's imagine a non-native English speaker comes across this headline but doesn't know that "shelves" is a verb meaning "to suspend indefinitely" and instead thinks that it's the more commonly seen plural of "shelf." The headline still makes complete syntactic sense, although the part of speech played by every word changes.

What had been the verb becomes the subject, what had been the subject becomes an adjective, and so on...

Intended Perceived Uganda nounadjective shelves verbnoun plan object phraseverb toinfinitive phrase convert rainforest

I might [...]
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