I recently had the pleasure to tour Suntory's "Yamazaki" whisky distillery, 20 minutes by train south of Kyoto. Dating from 1923, it's the oldest whisky distillery in Japan. (Wikipedia - home page)

Suntory uses the British "Whisky" spelling, rather than the Irish/American "Whiskey", so I'll do the same in this post.

20 years ago I used to drive by the front gates every day on my commute to and from work, and the smell was amazing. I'm not a particular fan of whisky's taste, but the smell of it being produced is rich and heavenly, and those few seconds driving [...]

There were plenty of folks enjoying the blossoms, but it was quiet and relaxed, nothing at all like the ugly, disgusting spectacle you so often find (that I wrote about seven years ago in "The Ugliness of Japanese Cherry-Blossom Viewing"). It wasn't even like "Cherry-Blossom Joie de Vivre in Kyoto". It was just a normal (chilly) Sunday afternoon in the park with kids playing and folks jogging, but with a quiet floral bonus for those who happened by.

Anyway, the photo above is horrible from a photographic sense, but I like the mood.

I was playing catch with Anthony and [...]

Dark buds have been slowly making the cherry-tree branches bumpy, but today they suddenly erupted with color. No blossoms as of yet, but the color is clearly there where yesterday there was none.

The blossoms are quite late this year. Comparing to the my cherry-blossom timelapse from 2007, this year seems to be about five days late.

While I was down taking shots of the buds, an obvious grandpa/grandson pair strolled by, and they just looked so pleasant that I had to snap a shot...

I had a small but tasty get-together the other day with some friends, including recent graduates of the school I wrote about the other day in "Kyoto Butsugen College of Massage".

This was at Uroko (鱗), a restaurant near the corner of Shijo/Kawaramachi in Kyoto, that I really like for their 蛇の目焼き (janomeyaki) grilled chicken, which is utterly out-of-this-world tasty. The food and drink seemed to never stop all night, but the price was quite reasonable. Highly recommended. The restaurant is here.

I knew my crop-for-iPad plugin for Lightroom would come in handy sometime.

The recent grads were from a [...]

Some random desktop backgrounds in my photo library from the past year. I used these as practice with the new render engine in Lightroom 4, which I like but am not completely used to yet.

Often, a photo here is from some trip or event that I already blogged about; the "nearby photos" link under each image brings you to related posts.