Oideyasu! Please take off your shoes.
I'm upgrading for the first time in nearly three years. Hope to see you, comment spam-free, on the other side. MySQL is backed up, so are files. here goes...
Daiki and Gregory wrestling in front of the tree, Yoshiko's apple and pecan pies, and the turkey.
Lots of snow fell on Kyoto overnight and though the day today, the most I've seen since I came to Japan. Greg (age 1 year 10 months) and I went to the park and made a snowman. A little keitai phonecam video. Just after this video ends it started snowing hard, very hard, and I had to carry him home because I was scared of him falling. Tomorrow I'll probably find that there is no snow accumulation in Osaka. That's what happened last week. It doesn't seem like there should be that dramatic a difference, but there always is.
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An office building with a highway going through it.
When they moved me to the third-floor "Interchange Office," I knew my days with the company were numbered. After a month of cars barrelling through my office at full speed, my nerves were shot. But the worst was the trucks -- every so often one of the larger ones would clip the corner of my desk, and everything would go flying.
Snow fell Saturday night and Today (Monday). Up here in the north a lot of it remains, but when I went through Kyoto station on Sunday there was hardly any, certainly not accumulating in the street. I've been away from the computer for most of the past 4 or 5 days.
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Water that runs out of the tsukubai basin (well, maybe it's not really a tsukubia; it's not used as such, anyway) filters through the stones and drips down into a huge clay pot buried in the ground, and then down into the soil. In the pot, however, equilibrium of water inflow and outflow is maintained, and there is a certain water level, so that the water dripping in from the top hits the surface of the water and resonates with a sound most pleasant. bamboo poles are provided so that you can put your ear to one end, while the other is just over the pot. The sound you hear is like this.
The tree with a trunk so smooth that monkeys (saru) slip (suberu) and fall from it.
Yoshiko and Greg at the Kyoto Botanical Gardens
It's getting cold, so very cold, here. I dug my slippers out of the back of the closet and found my gloves today. Of course, nothing Greg wore last winter is going to fit again, so we've been buying new winter clothes, and still have some buying to do. if you are a college student wondering how you can make a fortune in this crowded world, I recommend you get into the baby clothing racket. Parents are suckers. Grandmas are even bigger suckers.
Today I had my first-ever "Ningen Dokku" (human drydock), a full body checkup with a full lab workup, ekg, lung, hearing and vision exams, upper G.I, lower G.I., and even the dreaded side-to-side G.I. in which I chugged half a liter of pencil shavings in dishsoap and was spun in 3 dimensions on a swiveling table.
I found out that I am exactly 195.2 cm tall, that my heart rhythm and blood pressure are "normal", and in fact every parameter that they could report on the spot (laboratory test results will come later) I fall within the parameters of normal, which somehow seems odd to me.
The only thing that came unexpectedly was when the whole thing was over, the consultation doctor gave me all the good news, but then he was hemming and hawing and I knew there was something else, something awful or ominous. I waited and waited for him to spit it out, but he kept going on about systolic and diastolic and all that.
So I just stopped him and told him to give it to me straight, I could take it. After all, I had a truly awful disease as a child and had always expected more medical calamities.
He scanned over the charts and printouts, drew in a long breath, and the room grew so silent so that I could feel my thoughts reflecting off the walls as he composed his explanation.
And then he just said it, in words so simple it could not be mistaken, but words so chilling that my marrow froze, and I saw it, written in my own blood across the sky:
I'm the real Slim Shady.
Yesterday I took Greg to the park, and it started snowing. He was amused by it, but once I buckled him back into his childseat to go home, he got quiet and his nose started to turn red. He saw snow last year, but he wasn't even one year old then, so he understands it better now. Today it snowed pretty hard, so that cold air is coming in from China. We read a Richard Scarry book that includes a snow scene, and when we got to that page, Greg pointed out the door to show he knows what snow is all about.
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This roasted sweet potato (yaki-imo) vendor in downtown kyoto has customers lined up outside his tiny shop. Japanese sweet potatoes (called satsuma imo before roasting) are purple on the outside.
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Last week Jeffrey Friedl invited me to go hiking with him, his mother-in-law and friend Katsunori Shimada. We went up to the top of Daimonji-yama, and then down to the place where the fires are lit. the day was quite hazy, so there wasn't much view out over the city, but the mountain trails provided plenty of close-up scenery. When we got to the "Hidokoro" where the kanji "dai" ( 大 ) is lit every August 16, there were several people picnicing there at each fire platform.
