We're back in Kyoto now. The 12 hours on the plane from San Francisco to Osaka went pretty well; Anthony was a good boy. Fumie presented him with some new toys to play with, and with them time went by quickly.
A long-flight travel tip: I had ordered a special, low-cal meal for the flight. I need to watch my weight, but the real reason I did this is because (at least on United Airlines), ordering a special mean means that you get at the very start of meal service, well before others (up to half an hour before others, depending on where you're sitting). And at least on United Airlines, the specialty meals are very good. Anyway, getting one meal at first, then two later, is much easier than getting three at once. It leaves one adult meal-free to be with Anthony if he's attention-needy, allowing the other to eat. It also gives a wider variety of food from which to pick things for Anthony.
Having arrived at 4PM local time (midnight California time), we stayed one night in the airport hotel, leaving the two-hour drive to Kyoto for after some sleep. The smoothness of our trip was broken a bit the next morning in the shuttle van when Anthony unexpectedly threw up, but luckily he seemed okay (perhaps just overly tired), and we were able to get things cleaned up fairly well.
Arriving back at our place after two months away was a joy, especially because we were able to leave it clean. It's so nice to come home to a clean house.
A day of sleep later and we're back on track. Our next step is to deal with all our luggage, and then I have something like 10,000 photos to process. I'd better hurry, because Fall in Kyoto is glorious.
To give a taste for Kyoto in the fall, here's one of my favorite pictures from last fall:
I played Ultimate Frisbee with Yahoo! friends last Tuesday and Thursday, and had a great time, despite suffering from being out of shape. I'd brought my camera, and ended up with about 1,200 photos by me and others. I've not even taken a first pass at all of them, but from what I've seen, most are throw-away, but there are a few nice ones.
As I was looking over some from the 2nd day, where only five of us played, I really liked the image below. It turns out that it's the start of a sequence that itself is very nice, I think.
mouseover a button to see that image
In this seven-picture, 1.6-second sequence, Rich launches an upside-down lob past Huey, over Dennis, perfectly to David (who, you'll note in the first image, is signaling for just such a shot). For it to count as a goal, he has to be standing within the small box created by the cones, and indeed he was. A beautiful shot.
I've not had a chance to write lately because we've been working hard preparing the Cupertino house for sale, and preparing for our trip back to Kyoto next Tuesday. Yet, there are many things I'd like to write about, such as Anthony looking through his legs into the toilet while “mid business” and proclaiming “I have a tail!” Or complaining that a simple plastic blank insert for a Decora switchplate (to fill the space where no switch exists) costs almost twice as much as a switch, which is a complex metal and plastic object.
(For that matter, I could complain about moronic web sites like Home Depot's which makes it impossible to share links to specific items they sell.)
I'd like to write about how fun it was to play Ultimate Frisbee with friends at Yahoo! last week. I got close to 1,000 photos, mostly throw-aways, I'm sure, but I hope there will be a few.
I'd like to write about Adobe's beta photo-processing software, Lightroom, and how I think it's a wonderful tool for processing masses of photos quickly.
I'd like to complain about how &!^@^#$ much it costs to sell real-estate. If my house were valued at $100,000, it would cost about $6,000 or $7,000 in commissions to sell it. But my house is worth about 15× more than that, and despite it requiring exactly as much work to sell as the $100,000 house, the commission goes up by 15×. It just makes no sense (but makes the real-estate agents a lot of dollars, that's for sure).
I'd like to write about how much I've enjoyed visiting friends, but how bad I feel about not having time to visit others. The time has just gone by so quickly.
I'd like to write about all that, but there's a lot of cleanup and house-fixing-up and packing yet to do.....
Here are a few more pics from our recent Portland trip.
Takeoff from San Jose
Riding in Style at Portland Airport
Being Silly
Checking Out Another's Ride
Butter Piano
Having lined up the butter cubes like piano keys, Anthony proceeds to play them
Helping Daddy Row
Exploring on the Other Side of the Lake
Throwing Rocks
Anthony Really Enjoyed the Rocks....
....Except When He Fell on his Rear
Ouchy Butt!
Butt Feeling Better, Anthony Plays Under Mommy's Sweet Gaze
Getting Sleepy
Enjoying a Treat After a Long Day
It's Tall
Mimicking a Waterfall?
Anthony's 4.5-month-old cousin Josh was here yesterday. My sister Marci came to pick over the stuff in our Cupertino house that we're not bringing back to Japan (which is most of the stuff -- ugh, lots to get rid of).
When looking at the copious pictures I took, I was struck by the perspective of the shot above. It was taken with an 18mm lens, which means that the size of something close to the lens becomes exaggeratedly large. In this shot, Anthony is about two feet closer to the lens than Josh (4 feet away instead of 6 feet), and so he looks much larger than Josh than he actually is.
As an aside, I'll mention that this is the reason that portrait shots are best taken with somewhat of a zoom lens, such as 110mm. Such a zoom requires that the subject be further away, making the difference in distance between their nose and the rest of the face irrelevant. A wide angle lens allows a shot to be taken with the subject much closer to the lens, meaning that the “extra closeness” of their nose can become significant, leading to an exaggerated schnoz in the result. It's actually not the wide-angle lens that creates the exaggeration, but rather, its wide field of view creates more fertile opportunities for exaggerated perspectives. The shot above couldn't have been taken with a zoom, but had I taken a bunch of shots with a zoom and stitched them together into a big mosaic of the same scene, the result would be the same.
In the next shot, Anthony is only a tad closer to the lens than Josh, so their relative sizes in the image are closer to reality.
A Perspective Closer to Reality
Josh has a sunny disposition, and is a very sweet baby.
Josh Kreta