Anyone who's dealt much with infant seats and child car seats knows of the various ways to attach the seat to the car. The best way is via LATCH anchor points (LATCH is the contrived acronym for "Lower Anchors and Tethers for CHildren"), which became mandatory on all new cars sold in the US since Sep 2002, although most new cars had them years before that.

In other parts of the world, these anchor points are called ISOFIX, and they've been around for quite some time. For example, an article at Audi Japan from 1999 states that the [...]
View full post »

Now that the Japanese New-Year cards have been delivered (they're delivered en masse on New Year's morning), I can show the cards we sent this year:

Our Christmas 2005 Card For friends/family outside of Japan Our New Year 2006 Card For friends/family within Japan

They were actually both exactly the same size, but our address info took differing amounts near the bottom, and they got lopped off for this post.

The New Year card has a dog in the upper corner (2006 is the year of the dog), and the spinning top under "Happy" is a [...]

View full post »

Instead of the usual "good morning" from Fumie the other day, I got "oh, stinky!" I thought I could generally tell when my breath was less than the proverbial bouquet of roses, so I was somewhat surprised.

I breathed into a cupped hand and smelled, and noticed nothing untoward. She suggested that I wipe my finger on the back of my tongue and give that a whiff. It sounded slightly odd, but I gave it a try, and wow, talk about putrid! I hadn't been expecting any result, much less that result. I almost vomited.

A toothbrush [...]
View full post »

We seem to have started a new family Christmas Eve tradition.....

First, we enjoyed the free mini concert that the Kyoto Hotel Okura puts on in their nicely-decorated lobby each Christmas Eve. We enjoyed it last year as well, when they had a men's choir. This year they featured the Tokyo Horn Spieler horn quintette.

They started out with a huge alphorn (looks like a 20-foot-long tobacco pipe originally used to communicate long distances in the Alps), then moved on to a pair of natural horns (like French Horns, without keys or valves -- basically, just an [...]

View full post »

I don't think anyone would call it the "blizzard of '05" but the other day Kyoto certainly did get more snow than normal. It tended to come in heavily, and then be bright and crisp, and repeat. Here are two shots I happened to take an hour and a half apart, of the main gate of the Heian Shrine, as seen from my veranda:

1:20pm 2:55pm
View full post »