Today was Fumie's birthday, and her folks were kind enough to host dinner and cake. Dinner was huge, so mercifully the cake was small, though I think the same number of calories as a jumbo "party size" were somehow packed in nevertheless. The frosting was actually rich, creamy cream... sweet, but not overpoweringly so like most frosting. It was excellent.

Happy birthday, honey.

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Recovering now from a third cold in about as many weeks, the photo above represents my backlog of email and blog comments that I have not gotten to in the last month. If one is from you, sorry.

Feeling good enough this evening finally to want to write something (but not enough to want to deal with email), I'll begin the foray into Day Three of our very snowy, fairly photogenic four-day trip over the new-year holiday. My previous post on the trip closed out Day Two, and summarized the 14 posts that came from that day's snowy adventures.

While [...]

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Picking up where the previous post, "First Look at Snowy Shirakawago Village" left off, we had re-forged a trail through thick snow back to relative civilization....

While we were looking at the menu, the proprietress went outside to clean the snow off the part of the roof that threatened the entrance to the cafe (using a rope tied to the roof ridge, as described in yesterday's post). Anthony was interesed in anything involving large clumps of snow, so he went out to watch.

The big stick proved to be too big for Anthony, which was just as well because he [...]

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For something a little bit different, here's a free audio book, "イノシシ" ("Wild Boar"), story written by seven-year-old Anthony Friedl. Unabridged reading for you today by the author himself.

I'm really impressed with the quality of the recording, both in technical terms, and in Anthony's clear reading voice. More on the recording later in this post.

The Story

First, here's the story (unabridged! :-)), with my attempt at a translation:

イノシシ イノシシが車にぶつかり タイヤがパンク 車もパンク ほかの車はびゅうんびゅうんはしり 自分だけのこってた。 Wild Boar A wild boar was hit by a car tire's flat car is totaled other cars go zipping by only [...]
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This is the final installment about taking Anthony skiing, where we he skied for the first time, and together we did lots of sledding, and had fun watching others sled and crash. As the day was winding to a close, a mini snowball fight turned into batting practice....

I'm sure I made a comical sight taking these shots. Normally when I take shots while pitching to him (something I've done several times, but apparently have never posted) I normally hold the camera in the right hand and pitch with the left, but for whatever reason I didn't do that this [...]

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