March is a time of hope in Japan... hope for a good cherry-blossom season, hope for a nice spring, hope for the coming new school/fiscal year (the school year and most companies' fiscal year start in April). Maybe this week has more worry than hope, but hope will return.

I mentioned the other day in "Surprising Early Cherry-Blossom Preview Hits Kyoto" (about a snowfall that made the cherry trees look as if they are in bloom), it's about time for a "Cherry-Blossom Preview" type post, and I linked to some preview posts from earlier years. I'd still like to do [...]

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As I mentioned yesterday, we're not affected here in Kyoto by the big quakes yesterday, but of course it's big news. There are lots of amazing photos out there... I've found the location for a few so that you can see the "before" images on Google Maps...

Photos at The Big Picture Google Street View: biggest white building in the center of the top photo, upper-left of the second photo, so you can look around, to see what the town looked like when it still existed. Photo at The Big Picture Google Street View: the red building in the lower [...]
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There was a cluster of large earthquakes in northeastern Japan today; we didn't feel any of them here in Kyoto.

The main one, a magnitude 8.9 9.0 monster that would fit as the 7th largest earthquake in recorded history at the U.S. Geological Survey, just above the one in Chile last year (Wikipedia concurs), was luckily fairly far out to sea. It's a smaller earthquake closer to the mainland half an hour later that really rocked Tokyo. It's during that later/closer quake that I was first alerted to the situation here in Kyoto when a friend texted me "Big f#@*!ng [...]
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We woke up this morning to find the pleasant surprise of a fresh coating of snow on the trees. It looked remarkably like the cherry was in bloom, which seemed particularly apropos because last night I was thinking that today I should write up a "Cherry Blossom Preview" post (as I've done occasionally in years past... searching my blog table of contents, I find this, this, and this).

Compare the view above with real cherry blossoms from the same vantage point, either in this post or at points during this cherry-blossom timelapse also from my balcony (in which you can [...]

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Another one from the outing last week that also produced the previous post about the carving on the wooden gate. This shot is part of the wall of the little relaxation hut in the stone-lantern gardens behind Nishimura Stone Lanterns in Kyoto Japan. The hut can be seen in previous posts, here and here.

I thought I'd give it a try as a desktop background, but since I'm still really digging the "stark tree" desktop background that I posted the other day, today I'll try it on my portrait-oriented second monitor (as mentioned in "Going Vertical"), using this next version....

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