Well, I fall further behind. I had been planning to post the answer to the What am I? quiz from the other day (none of the guesses so far are even close), but Fumie has been quite sick, so I wanted to get Anthony out of the house so that she could rest. I'd been wanting to try some nearby hiking trails, and I ended up with enough photos to fill at least five different blog posts.

We started out after lunch with the grueling seven-minute drive up to Shogunzuka. (We hit a few red lights, so it took longer [...]

Fumie's Grandmother, Kine Imai, passed away at the end of April. This past weekend was the second part of the funeral, the kotsuiri – 骨入 – the "placing of the bones".

A month or so ago, as part of the main funeral, the body was cremated such that there were still some rather large chunks of bone remaining. A typical Japanese (Buddhist) funeral includes a ceremony where family members use chopsticks to pluck certain bone fragments with symbolic meaning from the ashes, placing them into a small pot (as shown here), and we all did this, including five-year-old Anthony. It's [...]

Continuing with my series about my five-day camping trip with Anthony, I pick up the story after the rain and wind (and eventual hotel) of Day 5...

Day 6 was glorious, both in terms of weather and mood (a warm futon and a hot bath have a way of helping the latter). After a lazy morning, we caravaned back toward Kyoto, stopping after about an hour at Amanohashidate (天橋立), a thin, 3.3km long natural land bridge pinching off several square miles of a bay in northern Kyoto Prefecture, off the Sea of Japan. It reminds me vaguely of San Diego's [...]

More pictures from Kevin and Yoko Parrington's wedding.

Kevin is the youngest of 10 kids, and – according to the "life history" that he wrote about himself for the reception guests – the cutest of them all. Not all his family could make it to Japan for the wedding, so I thought I'd publish a few more pics right away, for their benefit...

Their time was divided pretty evenly between posing for photos and other stuff (where "other stuff" encompasses random little things like actually getting married, visiting with guests, cutting the cake, etc.). There was a lot of posing.

Continuing from Part 1 and Part 2 about our visit to Kyoto's Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社).....

A short climb from the pretty lake mentioned in Part 1, you come, surprisingly, across a couple of small buildings, one a restaurant, straddling the path:

We stopped for a juice, and to chat with the lady. She was 86, and the fourth generation of her family to own/run the little restaurant. The shrine owns the land, but for whatever reason, the family has these buildings. The building across the path was her house; she had been born there.

I found out later, from [...]