The Journal of his Delights

I was bicycling home yesterday, not in a hurry and admiring the scenery, when it occurred to me: life is good.

I like where I’ve found myself and who I’m becoming. Yes, life will (always) continue to present difficulties—the challenge of learning my way as a writer; the inner work that’s so important to me, which is hard; and the fact that I still don’t have bookshelves for my apartment—but in a perverse way, I enjoy these (and the other) bumps in the road. Each is an opportunity to test myself against.

Isn’t life remarkable?

Yesterday, the entire office was invited to spend their lunch break working on the Flutterfrog. It went surprisingly well, and I’m sure the extra hands were appreciated. Here are some pictures that Chris made:

The full slideshow can be found at Flickr.

This is a test of PhotoXhibit for Wordpress. If this works, you’ll have a pleasant flashback of my visit to Dazaifu.

Update: It works! If you click on the images, you get a cool lightbox feature. Even better, you can move from image to image from within the lightbox. Just move your mouse to the upper right or left till the Next/Prev buttons show.

I brought my camera to the demonstration/torch route, and I thought I’d share a few of the images.

Point Montara Light Station is approximately 25 miles south of San Francisco, and the hostel there has been my base for the past week. There’s nothing quite like waking up in the morning, grabbing something warm to eat/drink, and heading out to watch the ocean roar against the rocks for a time.

I hope to be here for a couple more days as I continue the home-hunt. Speaking of which, there’s one place in particular that I think would suit well; a 1-bedroom apartment on a lovely street and within walking distance of downtown Redwood City. I submitted an application today, but there’s some competition and it’s not certain I’ll get it. *fingers crossed*

It’s been a long day, and I don’t have much else to add. Here are some pictures from the hostel though. Enjoy…

P.S. The lighthouse is still in duty, and you can see it lit up at night.

I’m back in Los Angeles. I flew in yesterday on a remarkably easy flight given that it was the weekend before Christmas.

I found some photographs from my trip (with Lowie) to Dazaifu, and I’ve uploaded them to Flickr. There’s a short slideshow - take a look. The pictures from Komyozenji, a zen temple, are especially beautiful, I think. The mediation hall had that hushed feeling of sacredness, and the fall colors in the garden were just amazing. It was crowded too. Everyone and their uncle was there with a camera, but somehow it didn’t intrude too much onto the peacefulness of the place.

I hardly took any pictures of Tenman-gu, a shinto shrine dedicated to Tenjin, the kami of scholarship. Even though the grounds were much larger and more “impressive”, it didn’t strike me in the same way that Komyozenji did.

Later in the day, we went to the Kyushu National Museum. What a fantastic piece of architecture that was. Very modern, but also incorporating traditional Japanese materials and styling. A wonderful combination of old and new. And the museum itself is very well done with some interesting exhibits on history in Asia.

A small sample from the slideshow:

It’s up and you can find it at Flickr. I have a number of photographs of the parade that didn’t make it into the slideshow. If you’re interested you can just go through them on my Flickr main page.

Sunday, my Japanese class went on a field trip to Karatsu for the annual autumn festival celebrated there. Approximately 10 students of very mixed Japanese language ability and three teachers (with their boyfriends) attended.

I really enjoyed myself. There were a lot of food stalls with the predominant theme being “food on a stick”. As you’d expect, that meant a lot of yakitori. But not just yakitori, there was corn on the cob, crepes, omelets, and even a lone kebob stall. There were also games where you could win prizes. The highlight was the parade where 14 “teams” associated with a particular float came running by pulling their float.

There were many families in attendance. Also quite a few young people really dressed up for the occasion, not to mention what appeared to be a number of dates. There were three young women (pre-teen) who were standing next to me along the parade route. They were attempting to be surreptious (but not succeeding) in examining/talking about the hair on my arms. I was very, very amused.

Afterwards, our group went to a restaurant and enjoyed a nice communal meal. Plenty of good conversation, although I’m afraid I need back off on the cream puff stories. I’m likely to develop a reputation for being a glutton.

Some sample pictures are below. I’ll try and post a slideshow tomorrow.

I’m in a Japanese language class that meets every Wednesday, and last Wednesday was a “field trip” to a cafe. It was a fun night, and you can see some photographs taken by Yumi-sensei here.

And yes, that’s CC enjoying the huge parfait.

The other day, I completely and accidentally stumbled across a small religious procession, and then later that night, also accidentally, wandered into the Nakasu Shrine which was celebrating the same religious holiday. The shrine in Nakasu is one of the major shrines in Fukuoka and where the Yamakasa Festival begins.

I looked afterwards was totally unable to figure out the holiday. In any case, I was very happy to run across both, and made photographs, which you can find at Flickr. You’ll note that I’ve created a second slideshow for Fukuoka. That’s probably the pattern I’ll use from now on, i.e. just adding slideshows so that regular visitors don’t have to slog through the old pictures to see the new ones.

Sample images are below: