We popped down to Hiroshima this weekend, and spent the night in Miyajima, near the Itsukushima Shrine. A typhoon is coming, so last night's sunset was not too shabby.

厳島神社の鳥居、昨日の夕方。台風19号の影響で奇麗な夕焼けでした。今日、雨が始まる前に京都に戻りました。

The shrine is notable for being in a tidal plane with a huge difference between high and low tides (the difference yesterday morning was 3.41m -- more than 11 feet), so the look and feel of the area changes dramatically throughout the day. It's prettier when the water is up, but it's more interesting when the tide is out because you can walk around out past the gate.

Posts from [...]

(Recent posts have been filled with fall colors, so for some balance, I'm dipping into my cherry-blossom archives)

For the last few years I've had a Synology DS1511+ NAS unit... an always-on "network drive" that sits in a closet at home that I can access on my home network from all my computers at home. I use it for local Time Machine backup, as well as a local CrashPlan repository for various backups. (I also use CrashPlan to keep backups offsite.)

The Synology unit has five drive bays, which I initially populated with 3TB Seagate Barracuda drives.

That was a [...]

More from the archives as I wade through my photo library, this time a gross discovery in November 2012. On our way into the Rurikou-in Temple (瑠璃光院) in Kyoto, Damien and I discovered a weird wire-like "thing" twisting and withering energetically on the steps.

I had never seen anything like it. My first thought was that it was a piece of wire that was caught by the wind or something, but it quickly became apparent that it was alive. It was too thin and hard to be any kind of worm I'd ever heard of, so I was dumbfounded.

It [...]

A followup of sorts to a four-year-old post about a dumping ground in Kyoto for no-longer-sponsored temple monuments. Wandering through my photo archive, I came across this set and thought to post a few more from that outing...

There's a certain sadness about the whole place, but this kind of monument, of a history written in stone discarded halfway through, seems particularly forlorn. It chronicles deaths starting in 1919 with a 2-year-old girl, and ends in 83 years later 2002 with (I think) her sister-in-law (of sorts).

I'm probably totally misunderstand what I think I'm seeing, but it looks like [...]

Continuing the story of my last post, "Revisiting Kyoto’s Fall Colors: Shugakuin Imperial Villa Last November", on a day with friends last November in Kyoto, Japan filled with photographic delights, the story had ended with our finishing a visit to the Shugakuin Imperial Villa. We had some time before lunch, so we paid a quick visit to the Saginomori Shrine (鷺森神社).

A small wall has "wish plaques", where people write their wishes. Presumably, the shrine will burn them later in a ceremony (like this small ceremony, or this very large one).

People often wish for happiness or for health, but [...]