Wrapping up with a few final pics from my five-day camping trip with Anthony two months ago, the shot above is from the Ocean At 6:05 AM point of the morning walk on our first full day.

The rain on Day 5 wasn't very fun, but all in all it was a great trip, and unless the weather forecast doesn't bode well, we'll likely do it again next year.

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Fumie and I made a day trip up to Tokyo yesterday for a birthday party for singer Kousuke Atari (中孝介), whom we've seen in concert many times. It was attended by 85 of his closest friends fans.

We ran into a lady we met at his Roppongi Hills, Tokyo concert in January, whom Fumie had really clicked with, so after yesterday's event, we all stopped by a nearby cafe so that they could chat.

The cafe had a nice – although somewhat pretentious – atmosphere. One of the workers was a "non-Japanese looking" guy who greeted me in French, to [...]

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I've mentioned recently how much I love the natural roofs of many temples and shrines, having noted it in recent posts about the Fushimi Inari Shrine and about the Kiyomizu Temple. The roof above, like the roofs cited in those posts, are made of many layers of thin sheets of what I assume is wood. Such a roof, over time, slowly breaks down and returns to nature.

Here's a relatively new one, as evidenced by the sharp shadows showing that the individual sheets of wood are still easily distinguishable as, well, individual sheets of wood....

It's not so new that [...]

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The first thing I noticed upon arrival during our visit to the Kamo no Shirabe cafe in Shiga last month were the flowers that separated the parking spaces from the walkway. It had been sprinkling, so they were photogenicly wet, and they were so vividly colored that they seemed to glow in the overcast light.

I got fooled again by a syrphid fly (AKA hoverfly), a fly beneficial to gardens (it eats pest insects) whose primary means of defense is to look like a bee or a wasp. It was just about a year ago that I first learned of [...]

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