This is a photo from or snowy New Year trip, which I last wrote about the other day in "Snowy Farewell to Gokayama Village", which ended up with us arriving in Gokayama Village's much more famous thatched-house sibling, Shirakawago Village.

I'd originally intended to full post, but am running out of time this evening, so thought then to just post this photo. As I was preparing it (I added a slight vignette), I noticed two dark lines in the left half of the photo (mouseover here to highlight them in the photo) that I hadn't noticed before.

Can you guess [...]

For something a bit different from my normal fare of late, here are some pictures of a Japanese speed trap I took a couple of years ago. In front of Kyoto University where lots of college kids are, well, being college kids, it's not at all uncommon to see a speed trap set up here.

He's actually checking the color of the license plate of a scooter that just passed. If it's white (meaning it has a 49cc engine) the driver will get a ticket. If yellow or pink (larger engines, up to 124cc), they're okay.

If you're caught, here's [...]

This cold I've had for the last week and a half seems to be getting a bit better, but it's been a killer, flip-flopping me between sleeping all day due to lack of energy, and wanting to sleep all day but not being able to due to insomnia. A few days ago I was an absolute zombie from having not slept for two days, but got enough of a second wind that I decided to try to get out a bit into Nature, to see whether that would refresh me a bit.

I brought the Zoom H4n high-quality audio recorder [...]

Now that I've finished up my posts about taking seven-year-old Anthony on his first real ski trip, I can get back to the story of our short New-Year's trip to Toyama Prefecture, a few hours' drive north of Kyoto.

My last post about the trip was the one-off "Deceptively Clear: Snow-Covered Mountains in Exquisite Detail", but the ongoing story was in the middle of our second-day visit to picturesque Gokayama Village, where we'd left off having had some hot noodles at restaurant "Yohachi".

To remind you, it was very snowy...

Anthony decided to pretend a snowball was a baby and [...]

We still have freezing temperatures here in Kyoto, but down on Amami island in the far south of Japan, they've got cherry blossoms. Earnest Barr has some wonderful cherry-blossom shots on his blog lately, with blossoms with a glow, another with bird n' blossoms, and possibly my favorite, "Honcha Pass" on this post.

Highly recommended.