The weather has been miserable lately -- cold and rainy, with possible snow tomorrow -- but the cherry blossoms have started blooming already, a week earlier than normal. You can see the normal season for the trees near my place in the month-long cherry-blossom time-lapse from a few years ago. It stopped drizzling for a bit late this afternoon, so I went out for a picture.

My main intent this afternoon was to try to get something that highlighted that one tree had absolutely no blossoms yet, while the trees next to it were well on their way. (You can [...]

So in the post a week ago about our visit to the palm reserve on the last day of our short trip to the southern-Japan island of Ishigaki last May, I ended up with a photo of a small tree-climbing lizard.

Here's a slightly larger tree-climbing lizard...

Even stranger was the location, a long series of underground limestone caves whose only representation above ground was a set of covered stairs descending down from a small parking lot. (There's an entertainment complex some distance away where you buy tickets.)

The area you could walk ended under a gaping hole in the [...]

Anthony finished first grade on Friday, capping a year of very big events in a little boy's life. The picture above includes self portraits of his teacher and of all the kids in his class.

Can you guess which is his?

The Japanese school year runs from April to March, and so it was a year ago that he graduated from kindergarten in a big ceremony with lots of pomp and circumstance. Then in April he started first grade, and soon was taking the city bus on his own to school in the morning, and home in the afternoon. Unlike [...]

It's been a while since I posted anything from our trip last May to Ishigaki Island in the far south of Japan, the previous post on the subject having been"Anthony Gets Crabby", from toward the end of the trip's third day.

We started off Day 4, the last day of the trip, taking a drive up the center of the island to the fairly remote, complexly-named Yonehara Yaeyama-Palm Reserve (米原ヤエヤマヤシ群落). For us it consisted of a mildly jungle-like path where you can see some tall palm trees that are apparently found only in this part of the world.

Prior to [...]

Recovering now from a third cold in about as many weeks, the photo above represents my backlog of email and blog comments that I have not gotten to in the last month. If one is from you, sorry.

Feeling good enough this evening finally to want to write something (but not enough to want to deal with email), I'll begin the foray into Day Three of our very snowy, fairly photogenic four-day trip over the new-year holiday. My previous post on the trip closed out Day Two, and summarized the 14 posts that came from that day's snowy adventures.

While [...]