Anthony's cousin Nao (七音), a little healthy girl, was born on Monday to his Aunt Namiko and Uncle Shogo (Uncle Shogo being Anthony's mommy's brother), about nine months nineteen hours after they exchanged vows. All are doing well.

Anthony felt that she was heavy, because, it turns out, that he felt the weight of responsibility in holding someone so tiny. As for me, used to lugging around an eight year old, Nao felt about as heavy as a helium-filled balloon.

As I mentioned three months ago in "Anthony Lego World #27", 8½-year-old Anthony likes to build complex scenes in LEGO™ (of which he has a lot). Recently he made a big Clone Wars battle scene. He took a bunch of pictures of it, as did I, then we went through and picked the ones he wanted to show. The captions are also his, for the most part.

Before the detail shots, here are a few I took to show the overall scene, with two opposing sides (clones vs. droids) separated by a bridged river and embankment...

Now come the rest [...]

Anthony's friend Gen stayed over last night, so this morning they had an early start on play. They built a complex world of PlayRail and LEGO. It seems to involve rapelling Star Wars clones...

Actually, that one bowl of soumen was for all four of us, but before eating they hammed it up for the camera, at my request.

Then it was back to the LEGO / Star Wars / train play...

Yesterday we went with Fumie's folks for an early dinner at the Kiyamachi branch of Hiro (京の焼肉処 弘), a small upscale yakiniku restaurant, overlooking Kyoto's Kamogawa river.

From April to September, ninety or so restaurants along the river erect terraces over the small side river that parallels the larger Kamo river. It's quite nice if you're there early in the summer (no mosquitoes yet), and early in the evening (smokers haven't arrived yet).

The weather was wonderful and many people were enjoying the recently-relandscaped park between the stream and the river...

The dining over the river in this area has [...]

We tried a bit of grass skiing the other day, at a mostly-deserted ski resort in northern Hyogo Prefecture, about three hours away by car. It was a bit of déjà vu for me because like the last time I tried to go skiing in Japan (with a former girlfriend 20 years ago), we found that even if I cut off my toes my feet were way too big for the rental boots, so I couldn't do it. That time, I spent the day in the lodge while others skied, but the next day we did an activity that I [...]