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Mediatinker is 25 years old
A quarter of a century ago, I wrote my first blog post back when Mediatinker was an experiment hosted on Blogger. Today’s Weather in Tokyo: hot and humid. (It is summer after all!) It was quickly followed by a second post where I described the state of my urban garden. And here I am a…
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Fresh Indigo Blue
Yesterday, the Cotton & Indigo Trust gathered at Oyama Senmaida for summer gardening and our first dye harvest. The indigo is thriving! The seedlings we planted have bushed out. The cotton has been attacked by insects and weeds, but there are a few flowers here and there. It’s backbreaking work to maintain the fields, and…
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One Last Om (for now)
My “Yoga Era” may be drawing to a close. Today I made a difficult decision for the benefit of my well-being and paused my Satoyama Yoga classes indefinitely. Unfortunately, my herniated discs are not healing easily. Even when I take great care to avoid poses and movement that hurt, I still end up straining my…
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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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