Looking in my photo archives, I see we've done this type of thing a few times before. We did it last year, and the year before as well. It's almost as if we do this every year. 🙂

I'm not all that happy with the photos... the lighting was horrible (mixed incandescent and fluorescent) which makes for a white-balance nightmare, and for the dark, candle-lit shots.... I dunno.... I just expected more from a D700 that can take pictures in the dark. One of the problems was nailing focus... the lack of a good focus screen on the D700 is [...]

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A month or so ago, Arthur gave us a black, blob-like, ugly little caterpillar perhaps half an inch long, and told us how to take care of it. It didn't move for the first two days, so when Arthur told me that it was just preparing for the "next stage", I figure that would be "decomposition".

But it eventually started eating the orange leaves we put in (kindly provided by Arthur), and went in cyclic fits of eating, rest, and the occasional little caterpillar poopy. Anthony named her "プリプリちゃん", (puripuri-chan) which, as far as Anthony is concerned, translates to something [...]

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I mentioned in Anthony's First All-by-Himself Letter a few days ago that while writing his first full-fledged note all by himself, he'd made a grammar mistake in writing the わ sound as わ when, due to its grammatical use in the sentence, it should have been written as は. The alphabet is remarkably regular, with only a few special rules like this. Few as they are, they need to be learned and absorbed, so we lightly mentioned it to him in passing.

I didn't expect it to be something that he really "got" for a while, but he wrote it [...]

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