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Camera Roll
Another couple of months in photos from my Instagram Stories. Week by week the seasons change while daily life remains “same-same but different.” Scroll to see nature (including my best ever photos of a snail and a grasshopper) and art. Always plenty of cats.
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Late Summer in Inaka
Every summer on the 2nd Saturday of August, seven local temples parade their mikoshi to Oyama Fudoson to pray for rain to swell the rice before harvest. I think it worked this year. We’ve had rain. A lot of rain. Earlier this week, Typhoon 15 made landfall in Ibaraki prefecture and also dropped a heavy…
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A: One board at a time
Q: How does an old lady tear down a barn? This morning was unexpectedly cool and I went out to (attempt to) weed the garden. Before long, I was sitting on the ground facing the barn. The naya is scheduled to come down in the “sometime soon” future with a rough start date that came…
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Outside the barn
Plans are moving forward to demolish the barn over the summer. My favorite crew from Monaca Royal Construction Enterprise could be here any time now – they are loosely scheduled for “sometime in June,” when they are done with their current project. So it was a bit of a race to make sure we had…
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Diderot Effect, barn edition.
How a new car is getting us to address the old barn. Tod has been interested in all-electric vehicles for a while. When the US war with Iran compromised petroleum supplies, he started to consider buying one more seriously. An EV for local trips makes sense when gasoline is 5x more per km than electricity.…
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Sunset Hanami
I don’t know why I never thought to set up our hanami in the family cemetery on the hillside. Fortunately, Tod did because that location has the best view westward. I appreciate the Kawasaki family graves. The newer ones are overseen by a jizo statue and the old ones are clustered together at the side,…
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Pressure Cleaning
Not pressure washing, but deadline pressure to do a cleaning and reorganizing task that I’ve been putting off for too long. The studio. With a guest arriving this afternoon, I decided that Wednesday would be the ideal day to pull the studio apart and rearrange it. My art supplies and tools are pretty much where…
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Lawrence Bacon
Once a year, we buy a slab of pork belly at Costco and ask our friend Lawrence to turn it into bacon. He learned to cure and smoke bacon at his mother’s side in Georgia and has taken the art of cured meats to the next level with all sorts of exotic charcuterie he makes…
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New Year Snow
Although it’s not much accumulation, enough snow fell in overnight to cap all of the trees on the mountain. It looks like a wonderland out there right now. I can even see it through my loft window. Last night, a red lunar halo indicated snow and I was delighted when it started fluffing down big…
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Studio for Happy Experiment and Discovery
It’s taken me a year to get the studio shed under control. A couple weeks ago, Tod helped me cut some shelves which I immediately filled with all of my botanical inks and glass labware. I made a lot of inks this autumn and I want to paint with them but the clutter of bottles…
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