Yesterday, Fumie and I went to an event at the Heian Shrine where they had live viola/guitar music while you could stroll around looking at their cherry blossoms, all lit up by hundreds of flood lights. I didn't have my camera with me, but most of the tens of thousands of others who were there did. It was very crowded, unfortunately, just this side of oppressively so. (At about $15 per person, it wouldn't surprise me if they grossed at least half a million dollars just this weekend alone.)

It was beautiful. I'd been inside the shrine's huge [...]

It's a lackluster cherry-blossom season this year in that for whatever reason, the trees are not blossoming all at once but each at their own pace. Looking out the living-room window, for example, I see one tree that has been in full bloom for almost a week and the one right next to it just barely starting.

Yet, similar to the popular bumper-sticker adage "a bad day at golf is better than a good day at work", it's still a pretty darn lovely week. This morning I needed something from the convenience store, and when I stepped out [...]

Since the cherry blossoms are pretty much failing us so far this year in Kyoto, I thought I'd pull out a nice picture from last autumn that I've not featured yet:

I took this picture on the same trip that yielded many wonderful pictures from my friend Shimada-san, featured in this post from last fall. Some other nice pictures I took from the same time are on one of my pretty pictures pages.