A cute little scene unfolded before me at the Nagaoka Tenmangu Shrine (Nagaokakyo City, Japan; 長岡京市の長岡天満宮) yesterday while killing time before Fumie's ballet recital. The captions represent what I imagine is being said or thought...

It's been a while since I've posted one of Anthony's LEGO creations (the most recent having been on "Battle at an Abandoned Castle, Made Possible by Warehouse19.se"). This one is a recent McDonald's restaurant scene...

Last week I did what I suppose is my first purposeful portraiture photo shoot. I've done plenty of impromptu portraits (such as these or these), and I've found the use of the word "impromptu" frees me from the worry of having to be good: it's impromptu, so hey, if I come away with something nice that nice, but it's not expected.

This time was different, meeting with the express intent to capture some father/son photos. But the subject matter, a friend Tetsuo and his younger child, Issei (一星), made it difficult to get a bad picture. A general rule that [...]

Anthony still really enjoys his LEGOs, making "mockups" like the Clones vs. Droids Battle I posted last year. It's been fun to see his play progress from simple add-ons to toys when he was three years old, to mimicking airport security after some flights when he was four, to car repair and advanced flight design and intergalactic speeders to a full cityscape to complex combinations of Lord knows what.

Now at nine years old, he still enjoys his LEGO and saves almost all his allowance for it.

A month or so ago he was very happy to find Swedish retailer [...]

Last week Anthony got together with a friend, Kenny, for some play by Kyoto's Kamogawa river...

The water level is about the lowest it ever gets (compare to almost flood level), which allowed the boys to climb down and throw rocks...

Of course, the first thing on the agenda was throwing rocks, which all kids seem to love...

They were skipping stones and I joined in, and to my great surprise one throw skipped all the way across the water in a long arc (touching down a dozen or two times) with such velocity that it reached the other side, [...]