Anthony went jogging with Grandpa a couple of times last year, finishing one lap around the lake the first time, and three laps the second time.

Yesterday Anthony said that he was going to run six laps with Grandpa today, and to encourage him I told him that if he could, I'd give him a toy on the first leg of our flight back to Kyoto tomorrow. (I already have the toy and had planned to give it to him... it's just that now he thinks he's earning it 🙂.)

It had finally let up after having rained all morning, [...]

A certain kind of trees around here (cottonwoods, I think) have seeds that float lazily in big white puffy puffs. When I was a kid, we called these "Santa Clauses", and if you caught one, you made a wish then sent it back on its way. I taught this to Anthony.

They're fairly common, so whenever I was out with Anthony and he tried for one, I tried to photographic the sequence. This gave me much-needed practice with quick-response manual focus, and after a bunch of tries, an okay result with what should be in focus almost in focus....

They're [...]

After cleaning the boat, we could finally go out for a ride...

Anthony wanted to row, but I didn't want to let him do that while three-year-old Josh was in the boat, so we saved that for another time...

Yesterday, Anthony attended the birthday party of his five-year-old honorary-cousin, Katie Patterson. (Katie's daddy has been a friend of our family for 30 years, so has acquired family-member status).

The party was at a fun-center with bowling and other games, and crazy lighting that changed colors every few seconds. You didn't really pay much attention to it... one quickly learned to tune it out... but the camera doesn't, of course, so the lighting is wild and different in every shot. We were near the wash of sunlight coming from some windows, so that helped even things out a bit, but [...]

In the "Loose Tooth" post a couple of weeks ago, Anthony was wearing a T-Shirt he'd made with his Aunt Natalie. Natalie is an elementary-school art teacher, so is always full of fun ideas for kids. For the conflagration of cousins earlier this month, where all my folks' six grandkids got together for the first time, she made up personalized aprons for the kids, got blank T-shirts and fabric paint and stuff, and had an event the kids loved.

The letter stamps were actually pretty difficult to use, because (for reasons I can't quite imagine) the letter's mirror-image was shown [...]