Having mostly conquered the ability to drive in snow on our recent trip to snowy Toyama Prefecture, four hours' drive north of Kyoto, I thought to see whether I could enhance my ability to take photographs in the snow. At our first big stop in the snow, the historic Gokayama Village, while Anthony played on a slight hill covered with a lot of snow, I tried different shutter speeds so that I could inspect the effect they had in capturing the moving snow.

The results are not too useful in an absolute basis because snow falls at different speeds, ranging [...]

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One of the photos I posted in yesterday's introduction to Gokayama Village in Toyama Prefecture, Japan, was this one of Anthony and Fumie walking down one of the streets...

I pointed out the silver boxes on either side of the road and in the background contain powerful water guns, on hand for fire prevention.

It's not possible to overstate how deeply rooted the fear and respect of fire is ingrained into Japanese culture. Especially for the first couple of thousand years of modern Japanese civilization, the safety of one's house and family was directly related to the fire-prevention habits of [...]

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It turns out that Anthony's art project, A Fish That Can Suck In Anything, was a more than a hit just here at home. He was one of several who received recognition for interesting, individual thinking in their art project, in the form of an "Idea Award".

The prize was lunch with the principal, who has street cred with the kids (one of the sports-day activities, for example, had him dressed head to toe in a blue-spandex super-hero suit that I would certainly not have the guts to don.).

Anthony said that he enjoy it..... it's normally a bit crazy [...]

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They were actually all working, but had congregated momentarily to consider an issue of some sort, and I caught them briefly looking like they were standing around. This truth does not make for a funny post, so I choose to withhold it.
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The day we arrived up north in Toyama Prefecture at the start of a short New Year trip, it was clear and sunny, but that was pretty much the last sun we saw until on the we came home. We woke up the next morning to find that it had apparently just started snowing hard... there was only a bit of new accumulation, but no let up in sight.

So we headed off to our planned destination for the day, which entailed a drive through the mountains. It would have taken about 45 minutes in clear weather, but since we [...]

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