Fumie grew up going camping several times a year, and has fond memories of it. We're not really the "outdoorsy" type, but we thought it'd be nice to give Anthony the same experience, so we're heading camping for a few days. We borrowed her folks' tent, and her dad and I (and Anthony, of course) practiced setting it up in the living room....

I went to Costco yesterday – there's one an hour south of Kyoto – to get some supplies, but ended up buying a tent. It cost only $120 but is about the size of Rhode Island. The [...]

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"Golden Week" is about to start here in Japan, a bunch of national holidays in short order that, along with a weekend or two, gives people willing to use them a long vacation. I work for myself so it doesn't matter to me on that level, but now that Anthony's in school, we have to match our travel to the national schedule. (For a laugh, see this humorous but sadly accurate description of Golden Week.)

We had been planning to bring Anthony to Tokyo Disneyland today, but that plan got scrapped with recent events, so instead I'm showing some pictures [...]

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Fumie's grandmother was born and raised on Amami Ooshima, an island far in the south of Japan, part of a long drawn-out chain of islands that delimits the boarder between the East China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The island's main local specialty mean is keihan, a shredded-chicken rice/soup dish.

Fumie's grandmother lived in the Kyoto area for 50+ years after WWII, but she kept her Amami roots and continued to prepare keihan for her family when she had one. Her daughter, then, having grown up with the dish, continued to prepare it for her own family when she had [...]

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As we've been expecting any moment since her stroke at the beginning of the year, Fumie's grandmother (Fumie's mother's mother) passed away Friday afternoon. She was born Kine Ueda on Amami Ooshima (an island in southern Japan) in 1924. She was 84.

The last time I talked with her was while looking at maps and satellite photos of Amami, prior to my first trip there during the new-year's holiday, as she talked about the place she left as a teenager and longed to return to. She last visited about 10 years ago, but a mild stroke soon after left further [...]

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A friend had this little toy pinball game, seen here on my knee (via my old crappy cellphone camera). I was struck by the emotional depth of the directions/commentary on the back, seen here...

Just in case you can't read that fuzzy picture, here's the full text:

Intelligent Marble Intelligence add lucky A GAME OF MARBLES Marble is a kind of game that is very modern now. It collects excitement fasciration. It's a very interesting game. It can cot only trains lover's skill and intelligence but also is a vest way for lover to make friends it's an intelligent game [...]
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