The answer to the Stone Puzzle "What am I?" Quiz is "lamp". It's made of simulated faux stone (that is, real carved stone) with a lamp and sensor inside.

It's in the garden behind the Nishimura Stone-Carving Workshop in north-east Kyoto, Japan, and was visible in the "Gazebo" photo on that post.

In my previous post, "Changing Lenses", I showed a picture of a friend in front of a serious splash of fall colors. The leaves were so low in the view because we were at the top of a set of stairs. From the bottom of the stairs, looking up, the view was the impressive canopy seen above.

The view was pretty impressive from most everywhere...

In the background of the center of the shot above, you can just barely make out bits of the namesake for my "Gate of Disrepair" post.

The shrine area itself is fairly small, but picturesque...

From our visit last month that yielded the "Gate of Disrepair" post.

Continued here...

So, the other day, I posted the above photo without a title, soliciting captions. Almost two dozen suggestions later (all of which were kept hidden until after I posted this followup, so as not to influence subsequent suggestions) and the overwhelming theme is "layers" and "strata".

Of course, the wonderful banding of different colors and textures is what prompted me to take the photo in the first place. It took it from my balcony, looking across the little stream next to our place to the path on the other side. I've lived here for four years and never noticed it [...]

Chipping away at the backlog of things I want to share, here are some photos from a short outing with vacationing American Jon Van Dalen in July. He was traveling Japan with his wife and her sister, and while in Kyoto I took them on a drive in the mountains north of the city.

Along the road in a small village, we noticed a shrine gate over a path leading away up a hill. It was visible from the road only for a moment as driving by, so we were lucky to spot it. I'd driven by many times in [...]