Fumie and I spent today, our 9^th anniversary, being sick, me mildly and Fumie miserably. Yuck.

This is a photo I took at the Kyoto Botanical Gardens about a year ago, during the first field trip of Anthony's preschool life. It was the same trip with the funky echium wildpretii plants of an earlier post.

I love the rich colors in this shot, although how rich they appear to you depends on your browser, your OS, your monitor, and many interrelated settings. If things are set up to show accurate colors (as I've worked to ensure my setup is), these colors are incredibly rich. What you see is what the camera saw, without any freaky processing or even mild saturation enhancements. Just spectacular colors.

Today was Kyoto's Aoi Matsuri festival, but instead of enjoying that, Anthony and I went to the store to look at (but not buy) toys.

The most popular little toy cars in Japan are a line called tomika from the Tomy company (“tomika” sounds like the way a Japanese would say “Tomy Car”). They're about two inches long and well made, and at only 378 yen (about $3.15) each, they're a good value. They've been around approximately forever.

Over the years, Anthony has accumulated many. He has all manner of cranes, police cars, ambulances, busses, construction equipment, garbage trucks, dump trucks, etc. etc. etc. Some are shown in the snippet at right, and you can see two Tomika fire engines in the photos of his construction site from the other day.

The company keeps things interesting by releasing a few new cars each month. (In case you'd like to see, the current offerings are on their site over three pages: one, two, three.)

So anyway, today I noticed that one of the new releases for the month was a car from the Disney movie “Cars”. I recognized it because we watched that movie in our own car, while parked and waiting to board the ferry from Hokkaido two weeks ago.

I noticed that this particular Tomika was different from the others in two ways:

1. it had no moving doors, windows, hoods, leavers, booms, buckets, masts, or any of the other moving parts that kids immediately search for and love.
2. it was double the normal price.

That movie had been heavily hyped in Japan, even before it was released some long time ago, so I'm sure Disney is just raking in the cash. I've held a minor amount of Disney stock for more than 10 years, so I guess I should be happy, but this kind of thing makes the parent in me (and the human in me, for that matter) just roll my eyes and vow to never buy one of these ultra-hyped spinoff products.

I may buy the movie — we'd only rented it earlier — but that's a different issue.

While viewing the amazing cherry blossoms in northern Kyoto last month, despite all the attention on the blossoms, there were plenty of other botanical signs of spring, and I took a moment away from the blossoms to enjoy them as well.

In an earlier post, I showed some of Kyoto's brilliant spring colors, but those of today's posts are a bit more subtle. Among the weeds around the little river that flowed through the area were a number of different flowers....

Out of focus behind the white flower above were scraggly bushes with pink blossoms of some kind or another....

The bushes heavily laden with little white flowers could be quite large and impressive, even among the cherry blossoms at full glory. Here's a larger bush of them where the small river empties into the big cherry-blossom-lined Takano River, half a mile away.

The new leaves of a deciduous tree have their own richly-green beauty, especially when contrasted to the heavenly-delicate white of the surrounding cherry blossoms.

But in the end, it was a day for cherry blossoms, so I'll end with another shot of an epicormic shoot of cherry blossoms, at ground level, in a crevice of an old tree.

(I didn't know the concept of epicormic, much less the word, until Peter's comment on one of my blossom photos posts. Peter, Wiktionary doesn't have an entry for “epicormic.” Perhaps you'd consider adding it?)

On our stroll through Kibune (hamlet in the mountains of northern Kyoto) last month, we came across the most impressive rain gutter and downspout I've ever seen. It was clearly made of solid copper, and looked as if it could withstand anything man, beast, or nature could throw at it.

I thought the flowers to the side were interesting as well, although my pictures didn't come out very well.

During our drives around the countryside on our recent trip to Hokkaido, I noticed a fairly large number of abandoned houses. I love them for their photographic opportunities, and because I find them to be quite intriguing.

I wonder who built the house? Who lived there? Were kids raised there? (How did they like it, and where are they now?) Why did someone leave it? What's happened to it since? Who owns it now, and where are they?

Mostly, I wonder about who might have lived in it first, when it was new. How wonderfully peaceful it must have been, and being new, just plain old wonderful. (The windows look to be of single-pane glass, so perhaps some of the wonderfulness wore off during the long, cold winters this area gets.)

I look at the decorative woodwork above the door (that you can see in the large version), and see that one of the diamond shapes is partially broken. Who broke it? Was it broken while people were still living there? Who built the decorative woodwork, carefully crafting a simple accent that lends a measured flourish to the dignified simpleness of the house?

I can see from the way the electricity meter is installed on the house (on the outside wall of the entryway) that the house must have been built before electricity was available in this area (about 8km from the center of the relatively small town of Kitafurano — 北富良野). I wonder when both those events happened, and how exciting it must have felt for those living there to get electricity.

Oh, how I'd love to rummage through what's left of the house now, to see traces of who had lived there, and to see how the house was constructed. It was set a fair distance from the road, so I couldn't get very close. (It's not like there was anyone around to complain if I looked around, but it wouldn't have been right.)

Most roads we saw have some highly-visible marker or another to indicate the edge of the road, most likely for the snow plows. The most common were the arrows above the road, as in the picture above, but the arrows are bright red and white. In the picture above, all but the furthest are still wrapped in plastic, likely having been only recently installed.

By the way, the mountain peak behind the house is Mt. Furano, six miles away. At 1,912 m (6,272 feet) in elevation, it towers almost a mile above the house. The peak above the roadway is Mr. Biei, about 8 miles away, with an elevation 140m higher than Mt. Furano. These are among the highest mountains on Hokkaido, and part of the same group with the highest, the 2,290 m (7,514 ft) Mt. Asahi, 20 miles to the north. (These are all small by comparison to Mt. Fuji's 3,776 m — 12,387 feet.)