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Anchovy disambiguation
I don’t write a lot about my work here, which is mainly random design projects for small business clients. My most active client is Rainbow Tomatoes Garden, my family’s tinned fish business. I design fun things for them from package labels to infographics and beyond. My brother-in-law, Dan, has a million cool ideas and I…
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Making White Vinegar
It is expensive to buy white vinegar in Japan. The default Japanese vinegar is made of rice and white vinegar is a niche import. The prices tell the story: Since I want white vinegar for my botanic color projects, as well as for cleaning and cooking, I decided to make my own. It’s a simple…
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Senmaida De-lights
Today I helped out at Oyama Senmaida for the first time. The annual illumination event is over – I wrote about the torch lighting in October – and today we removed all the LED lights, cleaned them, and packed them away for next time. The work itself was not too stressful – I filled three…
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Harvest #1
I mentioned yesterday to Kawasaki-san that the monkeys were snacking on the Kobayashi mikan. I’d seen them in the tree and found orange peels scattered around the garden. When the monkeys start eating your fruit, it is probably ripe. Not one to put things off, the Kawasakis turned up this morning to harvest. I grabbed…
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Demystifying our Mikan
555 is chockablock with citrus trees. There is a yuzu in the front garden, a kumquat over by the hatake, and our Kobayashi mikan. We added a lemon and a lime to the mix this year. And there are four mystery citrus. Probably some kind of natsumikan, a sour orange that ripens in early summer…
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More Maura Walks
Maura’s visit to the vet yesterday did not include taking his stitches out. We have to wait another week. I almost cried; I am sleep deprived from adventuring. You know how in fantasy novels, the author glosses over the long arduous journey: “They made fast for Thoradil, changing horses and riding through the night, arriving…
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8mm wonders from 1976
A school mate from Pennsylvania posted a couple of 8mm transfers to YouTube this week. What a time capsule treasure of fashion and location. In one of them, I found both myself (age 10) and my sister (age 7). I had to watch a few times to be sure that girl on the film was…
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The Dragon is Roaring
January 1st: Magnitude 7.6 earthquake rips the land, topples buildings, blazes neighborhoods, and cuts off power to a hundred thousand of households in Ishikawa prefecture. Tsunami waves over a meter high hit the coast. January 2nd: There is a fiery plane crash at Haneda when a JAL flight from Hokkaido hits a Coast Guard plane…
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Chasing the first sunrise
The Land of the Rising Sun makes an event of the first sunrise of the year, with news articles and maps highlighting sunrise times and the scenic places to see it. The earliest sunrise in mainland Japan (excluding the top of Mt Fuji) was at 6:44 this morning on Mt Kiyosumi in my own town…
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Happy 2024
Wishing you all the best in the year of the Dragon. And here’s a peek at the creative process and rejected designs for this 11th in the “Elephant as Zodiac Animal” series:
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