We went for a drive yesterday on the Hieizan Driveway, a scenic toll road through the mountains north-east of Kyoto that's a mere 20 minutes away. It gets quite up there, offering some spectacular (albeit hazy at the moment) views....

Some places along the road still have quite a bit of snow, so we stopped at times for Anthony to play. This particular place is over the prefectural line (in Shiga prefecture), which is why this post's title has a "sort of"... it's not really Kyoto. Anyway...

There's just something about sticks and snow that little boys just can't pass [...]

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When we got Anthony new clothes for the winter, we happened to get him some turtleneck shirts, and (of course) I think he just happens to look really good in them :-). This photo is from a month ago, a month after his last haircut (which appeared in "Shorn").

He still hasn't had it cut since, so it's been two months and his head is currently a shaggy mop of cuteness.

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Posting about Christmas now is a bit late, but I'm still trying to recover after watching the last week of the year evaporate, so here we are.

We started things off with a present from my folks for Anthony, which turned out to be a little Curious George ornament in which George is reading a George-related Christmas book.

It turns out that we actually own the George book featured in the little ornament, so I tried to grab a quick snap of the two, but it was difficult to zoom up close enough to make the page in the ornament [...]

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NOTE: Images with an icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size. Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 6400 — full exif Before Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ […]
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Early last month, at the start of a most photogenic fall-foliage season in the Kyoto area, I posted "First Taste of Fall Colors at Shiga's Amazing Kongourinji Temple", ending that post with this photo:

I had intended a quick followup post to explain the "300 meters of sorrow and anguish await" caption of that photo, but I was precluded from doing so by a subsequent succession of visits to other amazing places (including the Konzou Temple, the Kotou-in Temple, the most impressive Yoshiminedera Temple, the Sanzen-in Temple, the Sokusouji Temple, the gardens at Shouzan, the Iwato Ochiba Shrine, among others). [...]

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