“Hey schmuck!” my dad explained, “will you put some pictures of your kids on your…[he hesitates to actually utter the word "blog" because it sounds silly and isn't in the OED]…” “Blog?” I supply helpfully. “Indeed.”
I have been remiss, with work impinging on my hobbies, but here is one big post to round out the year. I don’t know the origins, but in Japan it’s a tradition to go kite-flying on the new year. Genbo picked out this big kite at Cosco a couple days ago, and he was raring to give it a fly. So, we went down to the lake to try it out. With us was Ikuko, daughter of our potterfriend Kamada-san.
The feral side of Genbo rears itself in anticipation
Testing it out
Ahh…To be four….
This beret is the hat Genbo is supposed to wear to daycare, but he doesn’t like it and I can’t blame him.
Zoe, however, looks fetching in it
…Or without, of course
Don’t know what’s making her laugh and him look so forlorn, but it makes a cute tableau.
Such a typically Genbo expression when things don’t quite go his way
There wasn’t really enough wind for the kite, which is pretty big and heavy. We all had fun running around with it, though.
Maki gives a sporting try
Even little Zoe….
“Go Navy!”
Throwing rocks into the lake…
This is Genbo plotting what he would do if there were actually enough wind for the kite….
It’s impossible to imagine Zoe playing with a doll. A few nights ago she went to bed clutching a train book, and she often watches raptly out our window, and when a train goes by, she’ll scream “TRAIN!” and gesticulate wildly, ’cause she just has to share the excitement.
In fact, out of the dozen or so recognizeable words that she can utter, a full quarter of those are taken up by train-specific words. There’s the onomatopoeia kan kan, which is the sound of a railroad crossing, there’s the general word for train, and, this kills me, somewhere she picked up the word for “steam locomotive.” Yes, out of the 12 words that her little brain figured it most important to master first, one of those is devoted specifically to steam locomotives, as separate and distinct entites from regular electric trains.
Of course, the first word that she mastered was “bye bye.” It was the same with Genbo. The word accompanied by the wave. I see it as a poignant reminder that our relationship will be full of goodbyes. First I’ll say goodbye to the baby, as she grows into a little girl. This is already happening. Then I’ll say goodbye to the sweet girl as she becomes a woman, and she’ll leave home (I’m not Japanese, so I intend to kick my kids as far out of the nest as possible). And then, finally, another permanent goodbye at the end. My end, godwilling, but either way.
(And this was just supposed to be a post about trains.)
Taken at the same time as I took, this photo. These are two of my favorite flower photos ever, so the pixies much have been hanging out with me in the woods that day
(Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, a pretentious poet once said in German, so click to enlarge if you aren’t chicken…)
This is taken from a bridge going over a river and under a railroad trestle right by my house. I cross it nearly every morning by bike as I bring Genbo and Zoe to daycare, she in front and he in back. I always take a moment to appreciate how the concrete (with subtle shading of mold that I actually find quite pleasant) frames the tree and the park and mountain beyond. Of course, with winter approaching, it doesn’t look as verdant as it did when I took this photo, which was last summer.
This past weekend we took a trip down to Osaka to go to the Kaiyukan, which is supposedly the biggest aquarium in the world. Or maybe it just has the biggest tank; sometimes these details can be hard to pin down (a tendency accounting for more than a few grey hairs on this translator’s head).
I’ll have more pictures from the aquarium later on (promises, promises…), but these are from the harbor that the ferry we took from the aquarium landed at. I like the menacing look of the anchor in the first one, and the color in the late afternoon sun of the big…thing…in the second.
These are also the first pictures here that are geoencoded. Using a one dollar application on my iPhone to record longitude and latitude information, and a plugin for Lightroom written by my friend Jeffrey, I can now geoencode all my photos. What this means in practice is that you can click a single button to see the location of each photo on a map.
Tonight I’ve been fooling around with iMovie, playing around with editing my D90 video. Below is a little something I just put together from footage (interesting archaic term that, from when motion pictures were captured on lengths of film!) taken from my balcony. I handheld it, and this isn’t a bad effort for that, but I really would like to get a decent tripod with a video head for panning. It will have to wait, though. The music is me playing the intro to a piece called Izumoji on shakuhachi.
