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Professional Designosaur
I have been a designer for a very long time – 40 years or more. Today I realised what a dinosaur I am. Recently as I was working on a client project, I encountered a strange way of indicating bleed in an Illustrator template – a layer of 20mm rectangles on the edges and overlaps…
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難しいけど
Japanese is hard. I struggle through conversations with awkward pauses, misplaced modifiers, and incorrect verb tenses, not to mention my garbled pronunciation. “I’b leaning moor. Good spek…homework maikey. Existence toward Javanese.” That’s how I sound. The ideas are there but meaning is open to interpretation. Wide open. I am lucky to have people around me…
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Camera Roll
Life is flowing along from rainy season into summer. Every day brings beautiful, memorable, and wonderful moments. Here are a few from recent weeks. There were two notable human interest articles in the local paper – a profile of me now that I’m on the Oyama Senmaida board, and an interview with Iku-chan about her…
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Tanada Yoga 2025
Today is International Yoga Day and I celebrated by leading two yoga classes. At 7 am, my daily Zoom class practiced “Common Yoga Protocol” which is the Indian government’s programme for the event. And at 9 am, I hosted a yoga session at overlooking the rice fields at Oyama Senmaida. It was glorious to be…
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Herniated Disc
In mid-March, I injured my spine in an unexpected movement where my legs twisted and my torso did not. Ouch! I hoped it would heal itself, but after eight weeks had passed, it seemed to be getting worse rather than better. So I went to the doctor at the beginning of May. The orthopedist’s exam…
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No Kings Protest
Our last day in the US coincided with the No Kings protests and I was happy to find that there was one scheduled in Gloucester, the next town over from where we were staying. I signed up. I spent some early mornings turning paper plates and cereal boxes into protest signs. I had conversations with…
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After six years…USA
Last week, Tod & I travelled to America for the first time since my mother’s funeral in 2019. It’s actually our first overseas travel at all since that time. The pandemic set in; Tod had a busy job; then we built a house…a lot has happened that kept us happily in Japan. I really didn’t…
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Okugome Ochre
My friend Mark brought me a pickle jar full of bright orange sludge that he scraped from a tunnel near Okugome Dam. He saw the color and thought I might like it. Yes, indeed! And now I have a new earth pigment. I’m calling it Okugome Ochre. It’s actually a lot more difficult to identify…
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Coreopsis colors
“Hey! Look! Oooh, yay!” I made Tod stop the car so that I could collect armfuls of freshly mown coreopsis from the ditch where they lay. Easy pickings on our way back from running errands. Coreopsis are on the invasive species list in Japan. It is illegal to plant them. They grow heartily along the…
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On the Board
大山千枚田保存会 has its first foreign director. Last night at the Annual General Meeting, I was appointed to the board of directors at Oyama Senmaida. It’s an honor. For the next two years, I will help to shape the direction of the organization. 理事会のメンバーに選んでいただき、心から感謝しています。大山千枚田のために精一杯頑張ります。この機会をいただき、本当にありがとうございます！ I’m delighted. Sometimes I wonder if my enthusiastic foreignness and awkward language…
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