After 430km of driving, I'm ready for a snooze...

Today was a laid back Saturday for me. Anthony was on a trip with his grandparents and Fumie was working on ballet, so I stayed home to try to make a dent in the unending backlog of stuff I'm behind on. But with the blossoms starting to come out in force and the temperature approaching 20°C (66°F), I couldn't resist to step outside a bit with the camera. The mood outside was wonderfully relaxed, an uncrowded, low-key version of the cherry-blossom joie de vivre that I've written about before. It was really nice. I expect next weekend will be the [...]

Well, perhaps not the first in all of Japan, considering that the cherry-blossom season can start in early January in the southern islands, and also not first considering that some varieties of cherry have been blossoming for weeks already here in Kyoto, but this morning I found the first cherry blossom in the local area, which is populated with Japan's "standard" Yoshino Cherry.

I was happy to have noticed the one single blossom among all the buds on all the trees around. By the time I returned from some errands, more had appeared, but this was the lone blossom at [...]

March is a time of hope in Japan... hope for a good cherry-blossom season, hope for a nice spring, hope for the coming new school/fiscal year (the school year and most companies' fiscal year start in April). Maybe this week has more worry than hope, but hope will return.

I mentioned the other day in "Surprising Early Cherry-Blossom Preview Hits Kyoto" (about a snowfall that made the cherry trees look as if they are in bloom), it's about time for a "Cherry-Blossom Preview" type post, and I linked to some preview posts from earlier years. I'd still like to do [...]

Another one from the outing last week that also produced the previous post about the carving on the wooden gate. This shot is part of the wall of the little relaxation hut in the stone-lantern gardens behind Nishimura Stone Lanterns in Kyoto Japan. The hut can be seen in previous posts, here and here.

I thought I'd give it a try as a desktop background, but since I'm still really digging the "stark tree" desktop background that I posted the other day, today I'll try it on my portrait-oriented second monitor (as mentioned in "Going Vertical"), using this next version....