My Aunt Jeannette came to Kyoto this week with a tour group from The States. We're not related by blood, but by virtue of her having been friends with my folks since I was a kid. I don't think I'd met her since I was 10 or so, but I recognized her right away when I went to her hotel to touch base yesterday.

Anthony and I tagged along with her tour today. Anthony took to her easily, those friendly feelings perhaps eased along by the Fireman George gift she brought.

I had a "snuggle chat" with Anthony this evening. [...]

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One lovely side-effect of using Adobe Lightroom as the hub of my image workflow is that I now have all the shots I've loaded into it available at my fingertips (which at this point is everything since last summer, currently about 12,500 images that have survived the delete key).

I came across the wonderful photo set from when Nils and I visited some temples last fall, and realized that I hadn't posted many of them. At the time, I did post a bunch of fall-foliage desktops, and a few about our visit to Konpukuji Temple, as well as one post [...]

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As Nils suggested the other day, I visited the hiking trails behind the Westin Miyako Kyoto Hotel today. The trails are extremely simple (with mild stairs the whole way), and because it's all shaded, it was substantially less strenuous than moving around inside the gardens at the water treatment plant of recent posts.

I brought Anthony with me, and it was thoroughly enjoyable for both of us. (It was much better than when I bought him on a multi-kilometer, much more difficult hike up the Daimonji Mountain last December, where I had to carry him most of the way. Sigh, [...]

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We ran out of milk at lunch time, and in stepping out the front door on the way to the convenience store, for some reason the view struck me in a way I hadn't noticed before. So I got the milk, then went back to take a picture.

Living so close to it, the gate certainly has appeared plenty of times in photos on my blog, including:

Two views (snowy and sunny) of the main gate of the Heian Shrine Fire Department Parade, and my new D200 Camera The main gate of the Heian Shrine, from a different angle Weddings [...]
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Continuing with my cherry-blossom pics from last year, here are more from my trip to Daigo Temple last April.

Last year's cherry-blossom season was pretty bad in the sense that the trees didn't all bloom in unison, but each at their own straggly pace. In the picture below, you can see that many of the trees on the right side have yet to bloom.

The area around Daigo Temple was very crowded, yet oddly nice nevertheless. This is in contrast to the ugliness some areas become during cherry-blossom season (the subject of one of my very first blog posts). At [...]

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