It's been ages since I've been able to visit my friend and best man at my wedding Ram Kulkarni and his wife Julia, so I took a long weekend to pop over to visit him at his house in suburban Milwaukee. (I had been scheduled to visit last January, but had that canceled by the "arctic freeze".)

Popping over from Ohio involves an hour flight to Chicago, and then a 20-minute flight to Milwaukee...

It was my first time to meet his boys Shiv (8) and Arjun (4), and for Ram and Julia to meet Anthony (11).

The nearest shore [...]

We made a visit to ZipCity trampoline and zipline park in Streetsboro Ohio the other day. We did some zip-lining, but mostly jumped on the trampolines.

We had the place mostly to ourselves at first, but it eventually got crowded enough that they organized dodgeball games....

We were both dog tired after 2½ hours of nonstop play, and I came down with a cold later that evening. Two days later I'm feeling better, so we'll probably go again tomorrow (with three of Anthony's cousins, who came in last night).

Continued here...

I'm in Ohio to visit my folks for a couple of weeks, having flown out of Osaka on Friday afternoon, via Tokyo and Chicago to arrive in Akron, Ohio on Friday evening. Unlike many previous trips where I had some form of harrowing experience (such as this, this, or this), this trip went perfectly smoothly.... until we arrived.

The 12-hour Tokyo-to-Chicago flight seemed to go quickly thanks to copious amounts of Ambien, and arriving half an hour early helped make immigration/customs and making the connecting flight much better. We arrived in Akron on time and my Dad was waiting, and [...]
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One of the famous spots in Kyoto for plum blossoms is the Zuishin Temple (随心院) in Yamashina ward, and its blossoms appeared on my blog eight years(!) ago in "Plum Blossoms and Photographers". The style of both my blog presentation and photography has changed quite a bit in the intervening years.

Anyway, I made a visit this past March during plum-blossom season, but having already enjoyed the plum at the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine and at the Kyoto Imperial Palace Park, I decided this time to actually venture inside the temple building for the first time. I was joined by Damien [...]

Poking around on Amazon.com, I got sidetracked browsing some truly horrid-looking watches, and came across the most meaningless marketing fluff I've ever seen, for any product, anywhere.

The "product description" has four beefy sentences barely able to contain all 576 words, yet not weighted down by even the slightest actual fact or hint of useful information:

A vision quest indeed. Not knowing ahead of time what this was "describing", I think many would be hard pressed to realize it's supposed to be about a watch. "Swiss movements" is perhaps a good hint, but it could just as easily get lost [...]