Yesterday's post about the views from Shogun-zuka (将軍塚) overlooking Kyoto reminded me of when I was last there, with Anthony and some friends, KFC and Verena. Anthony didn't really care about the view, but he did find a butterfly....

Later, KFC took a picture of the butterfly himself. That photo didn't make the cut to his web gallery, but a shot of me taking the pictures above did.

After the baptism yesterday, Anthony and I got together with some other friends, and ended up going to Hieidaira (a small community nestled in the mountains, just over the border from Kyoto, in Otsu) to see some huge mushrooms.

Nils Ferry's wife Yoshiko and three-year-old son Greg were with us. I've met Nils many times (such as when he took me to some temples in his area to see the autumn colors last fall), but had never had the pleasure of meeting his wife.

The mushrooms were big and fuzzy....

Apparently, they start out as balls, then start to expand [...]

So, picking up where I left off at the end of my post the other day about last fall's Daimonji Hike, we were at the top of the (short) mountain and sat down for lunch.

At one point, Anthony and Kana-chan sat quietly eating lunch....

The functional part of the sentence above is "one point," because at all other points they were being crazy and silly, as this pair are known for.

It went on and on.

I was giving my relatively-new Nikkor 70-200/2.8 a try, prior to getting its autofocus repaired, using it manually. One of the shots was [...]

Still looking to cool off, so this time I'm going back to the fall when the leaves had just started to turn color, to when Anthony and I went on a hike up to the top of Mt. Daimonji (大文字山) one of the short mountains overlooking eastern Kyoto, Japan. We did it with his school friend Kana, her two brothers, and her dad.

I'd done the same hike the previous year, but without a four year old, much less two.

Kana and Anthony have a wonderful chemistry, as has been seen on my blog before (as they get caught getting [...]

On the same evening we took our family self portrait among the cherry blossoms, Anthony enjoyed his new bubble machine. He hadn't played with it since the day we had a nice hanami drive, and so was really in the mood to bubble.

(In the background, you can see Fumie and the bench on which we took the self portrait)

We're leaving for a trip to Hokkaido this evening. Will bring the bubbler....