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Birthday flowers
A log of what’s blooming today, a love letter to the plants 555, and a birthday gift to myself of walking around outside at dawn with with a cup of coffee and a camera. Before I even leave the house, I see flowers from the windows. The late-blooming camellia in the front garden is going…
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Package design
When I was a younger woman, I was fascinated by package design. I loved the way cardboard boxes could be fashioned in surprising ways to safeguard their contents. Tetrapacks were lovely little puzzles which I finally solved; see my Tetrapocket pattern from 2006. I seriously considered a degree in industrial and package design. In my…
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Birthday Week
My sister and I, and her daughter have birthdays all within the same week. So of course we refer to this as Birthday Week. There is a lot of cake baking activity. And though my family are far away, I have nearby friends with birthdays this week, too, and I try to keep up the…
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Patio time
Today Monaca Royal Construction Enterprises (MoRCE) and I finished up the hardscaping project. I am very happy with the result. It wasn’t easy. For the patio, we experimented our way across substrates. It was simply dry mortar for a few initial tiles in the southeast corner, but wet mortar is stronger, so we switched. Hand…
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Stone Path
To my surprise and delight, the Monaca crew turned up the day after they brought the stones. Their other project was put on hold and they got started on my hardscaping. I sketched out a concept and we started with a big irregular stone that is already a canvas for little nature mandalas and other…
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Spring Hiking
Sunday was the Spring Mineoka Walking event at Oyama Senmaida. We had 29 participants on a 7.5 km course along the country roads and up the mountain. My main role was doing a warmup with everyone before we left, then walking at the end of the line with the slower, chatty walkers. It was fun…
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Bonichi Shimbun
Today I am on the front page on the local paper, the Bonichi Shimbun. And at the top of the digital edition, too. On Monday, I was interviewed about my activity at Oyama Senmaida, specifically how I am working with Ushimura-san to update their English language materials and planning an English version of the website.…
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Hardscaping begins
I was excited to find the Monaca Doken yumbo parked in our driveway when I came home from lunch today. And a little while after that, my fav guys turned up with a truck full of stone slabs to supplement the ones I already have. They first changed the bucket for jaws, a process that…
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Chakra Balance Yoga
In Satoyama Yoga I honor the Spring Equinox with a theme of balance classes for the month. Many involve standing balances, we test our dynamic balance, and we also try energetic balance using the chakras as a framework. I feel about chakras the same way I feel about horoscopes, psychic readings, auras, and fortune telling…
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Matsuri-zushi
Today I joined the Oyama Senmaida sushi-making workshop. It’s not regular sushi. This is vegetarian sushi rolled in special ways to form pictures. It’s like the origami of sushi, really. In today’s class we made a camellia and a snail. For the first 90 minutes, we prepared all of the parts we’d need, cutting sheets…
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