Over the years I've posted many sunsets from the Shogunzuka Overlook (将軍塚) in eastern Kyoto, from spectacular to quiet but nice to the most common: downright bland. It's been a source of occasionally dynamic views for a long time, but the practical reality is that for every one time I show something from up there, I've visited and returned empty-handed many times.

Overall, the median experience is, basically, a waste of time.

I tend to keep track of the sky's potential for a nice sunset throughout the day, all while mentally juggling my schedule to see whether a trip up to the overlook for the sunset is even possible. I've properly predicted most of the great sunsets I've seen, but that's only because my ever-optimistic view almost always “predicts” a great sunset... it's just that I'm wrong 99% of the time.^*

In the face of such predictable failure, some might consider my repeated visits to be “persistence” or “perseverance”, but I think it's more “hope”. Some day it'll pay off.

On a visit up there a week or so ago, the first views as I approached from the parking lot were promising, as seen above.

The weather was dynamic, with occasional wisps of rain being swept in on the wind from a cloudburst sweeping across northern Kyoto, and this gave us a weak rainbow for a moment.

The two guys in the lower left are trying to take the classic “sun held between forefinger and thumb” shot. The head of my shadow at right is the center of the rainbow's arc.

Having come to see the sunset (which is, by definition, in the opposite direction of any rainbow), no one else seemed to notice the rainbow, so I mentioned it...

As for the sunset, it was okay, but mostly petered out. A few HDRish views...

Oh well, maybe next time, I hope.

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*	Engineers in the early days at Yahoo! will recognize this as Zod's foosball technique... predict a winning shot every time, so that the one time a month he actually does win, he could “told you so” gloat about it for the rest of the month. 🙂

As I mentioned the other day, we made the hour drive from Kyoto to the mountains of Takatsuki to visit a small food/entertainment area where the main attraction for us was picking (then grilling then eating) shiitake mushrooms.

As one might expect, the mushroom area was like an old damp basement, but with more light...

There's a limit of five mushrooms per person, so you have to take care in how you select and pluck a mushroom, to maximize your take. If they were stuck together, they were considered one mushroom, so we tried to find groups.

They sell out pretty quickly, and we were later than we'd like, so we didn't have all that much of a selection.

At some point while rolling around in the basket the big group of mushrooms Anthony had picked broke apart, so our plan fell astray. It was a good lesson in what can happen when you try to be greedy. I doubt they actually enforce the five-mushroom limit with the strictness of the Soup Nazi, but we didn't want to flout the rules and stopped our foraging.

We then moved over to the restaurant where we order meats and veggies to grill along side our mushrooms...

The mushrooms were not the same class as seen in “Feasting Like Indulgent Royalty on Matsutake Mushrooms” but they were still quite tasty.

The intermittent rain had let up and Anthony was itching to get some energy out, perhaps by kicking around a soccer ball, so we paid the ¥220 per person to visit the Yamabiko no Mori (山びこの森) play area without really knowing what to expect...

We then tried the roller slide seen in the previous post.

We called it a day when the rain picked up, but not before one more swing on the way back...

We had a fun trip today to a small food/entertainment area in the mountains of northern Takatsuki City (高槻市), an hour or so west of Kyoto. The main objective that I'll post about another time (Update: here) was the picking of (and grilling of and eating) shiitake mushrooms (椎茸), but we also had fun at a play area that included a slide of rollers for 80m (260') down a hill.

UPDATE: for more information about visiting this slide, see this follow-up post.

It was wet and dirty, but YOLO, so we gave it a go.

I waited to catch Anthony at the bottom for his first run because the slide shoots you at high speed off its end, into what was today a wet mess of dirty dirt and painful gravel.

For his second run he said he could handle slowing himself down, so I watched him pass with the camera...

For another run I positioned myself halfway...

The rain picked up noticeably at this point, so we headed home.

This call to mind some other mountain/roller/slide things we've done in the past, most notably the Slippery Green Slidy Day of Fun at Bluma no Oka five years ago, and a big roller slide in Otsu.

Continued here...

Recent versions of Firefox inexplicably removed the ability to set a custom search engine, which one used to be able to do easily via the keyword.URL configuration. However, you can accomplish pretty much the same thing by installing a new search-engine profile that you craft yourself in an XML file.

Here's a sample profile file, for a custom Google search...

<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/"
              xmlns:os="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<os:ShortName>Google Today</os:ShortName>
<os:Description>Search Google for items added/updated in the last 24 hours</os:Description>
<os:InputEncoding>UTF-8</os:InputEncoding>
<os:Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="https://www.google.com/search">
  <os:Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
  <os:Param name="tbs" value="qdr:d"/>
</os:Url>
</SearchPlugin>

You'd copy this to an *.xml file and update the highlighted areas for your needs, adding/removing “ParamR 21; tags as appropriate for your search. (The “tbs” parameter in the example is the one that limits results to those updated in the last day.)

Place the file in the “searchplugins” folder of the Firefox profile, restart Firefox, and you can then select it as the search target. On my OSX system, this sample might be named

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/profilefolder/searchplugins/googletoday.xml

The other day in “Getting Back Out with the Camera a Bit” I mentioned that I stopped by the famous Itsukushima Shrine (厳島神社) on Miyajima Island (a bit south of Hiroshima, Japan). I arrived at sunset on a gloomy day that was already dark, and stayed for just half an hour.

Deer roam the area freely, and are quite docile. This is in stark contrast to Nara, where the deer are extremely aggressive, taking your food right out of your hand or shopping bag if you're not quick enough to protect it. I should write up a post about that.

Some jerk used a stone lantern to dispose of a soda bottle. I've seen this kind of thing daily in this country for 20+ years, but it still boggles my mind each time.

As darkness quickly descended, incandescent floodlights conspired with the deepening blue of the overcast sky to make for some increasingly rich results.

This shot is color balanced for the incandescent floodlights lighting the scene from camera left. That color-balance choice accentuates the blue of everything else lit by the fading post-sunset overcast sky. It seems that something about the ridge tiles (their material, finish, shape, or angle) causes them to be highly reflective of that deepening-blue sky, giving somewhat of a neon effect here.

For what it's worth, here's a daylight view from the same location six years ago, during a higher tide (and aiming a bit further to the right)...

More daylight shots from the general area can be seen in this blog post from the time, and via the “nearby photos” link under most any of these pictures.