• Daily Life

    Gifts Galore From The Garden And More

    Spring has really kicked into motion, one of the upshots being that our garden presents us with a new gift nearly every day. Our garden is providing us with a series of new flowers one after another. Hardenbergias have been giving me great delight for a few weeks now, particularly because I grew all of our four thriving plants from seeds I brought back from Australia. But our biggest surprise this year has come from the white paperbark teatree, which we picked up in a bargain basement bin at our local home center and have now been rewarded with a…

  • Daily Life

    Decidedly Unpheasant

    Having passed a lot of Japanese green pheasants along the Tama River in the past couple of weeks, I decided to burden myself with a cumbersome camera. Of course, I got almost no sight of the avian creatures! That’s not quite true: I saw plenty of pheasants, and heard even more, but wasn’t close enough in most cases to get a good shot. It was bleak and overcast when I left home, and I noticed scattered rain. My pedals (I think) are giving me trouble, too. With my inability to find a new job, it’s adding to my constant stream…

  • Daily Life

    Final Blossoming

    Cherry blossoms are about to end their blooming season in Tokyo and I was luck enough to cop a few shots of them on my morning’s ride. The photos I took this morning were of yaezakura, the late-blooming, multi-layered blossoms whose appearance follows the peak of the hanami flower-viewing period symbolized by the someiyoshino flowers for which Japan is perhaps best known. Now I am waiting for more blooms in Kangaeroo Corner. I can see that we should get some azalea in the next few days. And I am absolutely thrilled at the way the bottlebrush is shaping up with…

  • Daily Life

    Blowin’ In The Wind

    Tokyo spring tends to be windy, and it is blowing up a gale in the suburbs of the Japanese capital right now. This morning I got to fly for a few kilometers, backed by a tremendous tailwind. Of course, barring a meteorological miracle, where there’s a tailwind, there’s almost always a headwind that needs to be addressed. So, while the first stage of the ride literally flew by in no time, the home straight was a much greater grind. Still, it did allow me the time to stop and take a look at the late-blooming cherry blossoms, with a stretch…