I thought I'd share this picture that I ran across today (that I shot last fall) of a gardener mowing the lawn.

Here are a few random pictures from our end-of-year mini trip (related posts: Ryokan Food, and Anthony in a Yukata).

I'll start with the first picture I took, from the driveway of the ryokan, just after we arrived (about 40 minutes after sunset). The wind off the ocean was really really REALLY strong -- I had to struggle to close the car door against it -- and cold. It was facing into this wind that I snapped this shot before heading in. (If you squint, you can see the next landfall, Indonesia, about 2,500 miles away.)

During an outing on [...]

Over a year ago, I posted an entry on how to raise a bilingual child, describing the approach that Fumie and I are taking with Anthony.

These days, Anthony is quite fluent in both languages, at least as much as one would expect of a four year old. I make a point to quietly correct his grammar when I hear the same mistake over and over, such as the "I is" that he says a lot these days. I'm careful never to ram it down his throat, and he seems to pick up the changes, eventually, so I think we're [...]
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Here's our New Year's card (nengajou -- 年賀状 -- description) this year (sans contact info).

My friend Shimada-san used my camera to take the picture, but I'd set the fill flash a bit too strong, so there's some feeling to the image that we're standing in front of a backdrop in a studio. However, it's a bridge near our place, as the end of this post from a year ago shows.

Our timing was lucky... within a minute or three after taking this shot, the sun had set enough that it was only on the mountains in the background.

Here's [...]