• Daily Life

    Many Happy Returns

    Don’t be fooled: This post has absolutely nothing to do with birthdays. It’s about doing things again for the first time in a while. The whole day was a series of events reminding me of the past. We started by cleaning the estate garden. We live in what is basically a retirement village that has cheap management fees, and they’re cheap because residents have to keep the common gardens and grounds maintained. When the cleaning was over, it was back on the bike. And I was back with a camera bag on my back for the first time in many…

  • Daily Life

    Budding (and Blurred)

    Spring can’t come quick enough, not just for me, but also for the blossoms in Kangaeroo Corner. For weeks now there have been signs of flowering in the garden. The silver wattle (acacia dealbata) has shown signs of budding since at least the middle of February, looking to repeat its wonderful bloom from last year when the tree turned into a series of puffy, yellow flowers. Next to it, the golden wattle (acacia pycnantha) seems poised to burst forth in a blaze of aureate befitting its third year in the garden and flying the flag as Australia’s national flower. Also…

  • Daily Life

    Kangaeroo Corner’s Critters!

    Courtesy of a great act of kindness, this post is the result of receiving a gifted camera. An old mate read my previous post and generously passed on a camera he had not been using. I took the camera out in the garden this morning and got to snap away. I was very pleased with the results. I’ll need to study more on how to use the Sony NEX-7, having been an almost exclusively Nikon user for the past 35 years. It’s glorious weather today, which helped with taking photos. I turned the camera on some of the critters in…

  • Daily Life

    A Pheasant Start to the Morning

    I got a delightful start to the morning with a not-quite-chance encounter with a beautiful green pheasant near the Tama River. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been fortunate enough to cross tracks with pheasants in a few places. They’re beautiful birds, the males are at least, and I loved being able to catch a glimpse of them, sometimes up close. And being a photography aficionado, I was keen on getting a good shot. I’d tried with my mobile phone camera, but the photos weren’t much chop. They were grainy and out of focus, and it was hard to get…

  • Daily Life - Strine Strife

    Where’s the Whist Amid the Wisteria?

    Being greeted by the sublimely serene sight of fully blooming wisteria in the outer suburban wonderland of Yakushiike Park only to have the calmness crushed by the piercing squeal of a little prick abusing and haranguing me for riding a bicycle in the park wasn’t really what I had been expecting at 5 a.m. As the angry man hurled invective at me, I felt my blood boil and the urge to smash him in the face was becoming almost uncontrollable. He screamed loudly, fiercely and incessantly as I tried to take photos of La Cangura amid the flowers. I envisaged…

  • Daily Life

    Warming Up

    After yesterday’s spectacular start and the promise of a 20-degree day, I woke with great expectations of another brilliant beginning. Anticipations of even greater things arose with the warmth being decent enough to enable the year’s first early morning ride in shorts and short-sleeves (albeit with a heattech T-shirt). Wanting to get higher quality shots of the expected glorious sunrise, I loaded up with the heavy DSLR camera. And it was with great delight that I headed up the Tamagawa Cycling Road and noticed a bit of patchy cloud cover. This was delightful as the presence of clouds creates greater…

  • Strine Sports

    Nature’s Double Delight and Not a Skerrick of Proof

    Nature turned on a absolutely glorious morning – albeit a freezing one. There was a huge moonset in one direction and a delightful sunrise simultaneously in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, the only camera Kangaeroo was carrying was on a smartphone. This rarely takes decent pics at the best of times, let alone trying to get a lunar shot, which is challenging at the best of times with the most sophisticated equipment. Then, blessed with a delightfully colorful sunrise and otherworldly cloud pattern on the return journey, positioning and timing rendered photographic evidence impossible. Kangaeroo was not in a good spot…

  • ストラインと日本語

    Beautifully Breaks the Tama River Morning

    Mornings can be hard to get up for, particularly in the cold and dark of winter. Yet, some things make it worth waking early for. Waking, then moving, can be a great way to start the day. It can get the body working and warmed up before the mind takes over, or even put the mind in a decent space. In Kangaeroo’s case, it’s handy. The mind is rarely friendly. Winter 2021-2 has not been particularly constructive. Moved to a home last year, renovations kept it dark….for three months. Work is not going well. Laid off three times in 2021.…

  • Strine

    Saturday Night Shibuya

    After many years of not blogging, a website fix inspired me to get back into it. For several years, I had been keen on photography but let that fall by the wayside, too, mainly because carrying a camera around everywhere is bloody cumbersome and I now cycle a lot, which makes me focus on reducing the volume of stuff I carry. Yesterday, though, I took my camera with me and shot a few pictures for the first time in a long while. I’m really rusty, but liked some of the results. Related posts: The Strine Why Atorkin: Natchrule Strine An…