Normally, I don’t take a lot of pictures when I’m down here. Mostly it’s because I feel like I’ve been around this area so much that there’s not much to shoot but, having been traveling for the last half of the year, my eyes are still open to those special, little moments that photography is made for and I have been carrying around my camera and trying to remain in the present so that I can capture them.

Here’s a smattering of shots (with no specific theme) from the last couple days in Northern Virginia (aka NOVA):

Still Life with Black Squirrel.

NOVA Buildings.

Street Sign Shadow.

Mmmmm, Delicious Celery.

Cigar Store Indian; Old Town Alexandria.

Nudes Ascending A Staircase.

Harbor Ice.

Ducks In A Circle.

So, I present to you, a photo essay on the many moods of The Murph:

In the Lap of Luxury.

"Man, this laying around stuff is hard work."

Looking Pensive. Waiting for Santa.

Polar Bear Paws.

Looking Sleepy. This turtle stayed on his back for almost an hour.

After a hard evening of play, it's time to relax.

If you do come to visit, The Murph will be waiting for you.

I haven’t been around the house for many years and always seemed to miss out on the pasta-making festivities. This year though I timed it right and was able to be in the house for my first session today…There is nothing like eating freshly-made pasta. You’ll never be able to go back to the stuff from the bag/box again, knowing how easy it is to make and how delicious it can really be.

Living in the EH was like living in a pasta-free wilderness. Sure, I could go to the store and buy the macaroni they sold there but it always turned soft so fast that I couldn’t make it for lunch the night before. If I wanted anything other than spaghetti I was squat out of luck. The Japanese seem to think that when it comes to Italian food and noodles everything stops at spaghetti; there are “Italian” restaurants in Japan that serve nothing but that boring noodle. When people would find out that I was a vegetarian and that Italian food was ok, without missing a beat they would smile and say, “Spaghetti, ok?” and I would wince, smile and say, “Yes, of course.”

So it was always a special day when I would get a package from the States and in there, among the other comfort veggie foods from home, would be a plastic container with some home-made pasta. I would always save it, sometimes for weeks, waiting for that special day when I could make a red sauce and share it with someone who meant something to me…I guess those days of saving it for weeks are gone. All I have to do now is walk across the house to get some but it still hasn’t lost any of the importance to me.

I decided to document most of the procedures of making pasta today. I came in a little late, after the dough was made, but that’s not really that interesting anyways, right? So, without further ado, I present to you the way to make homemade pasta:

Cutting the dough into flattenable pieces.

Flattening out the Dough.

Hanging on the rack before cutting.

Flouring the dough before cutting.

I was in charge of flouring the dough so I wasn’t able to get any photos of it being cut into fettuccine (didn’t want to get flour all over my fancy camera.)

The pasta tailings. Nothing gets thrown away. These get put into the pot later with their regular-length cousins.

Cut and Drying.

Boiling Away.

On The Table.

Time To Eat!!!

And there you have it. From the kitchen to the plate in a few easy steps. Maybe if you come to visit, we’ll make you some.

 It was pretty cold out there, so we`d jump out of the car for maybe two minutes, shoot a few photos and then move on to the next spot. There really weren`t a lot of chances for us to just wander around, unless we wanted to freeze our asses off.

 Not my best work but here a few shots from yesterday:

Blue on Blue.

Still Life with Fence.

Tree Fingers.

 

Tiny Islands.

 

Who is that masked camerawoman???

  All in all it was a great day. I usually just go shooting by myself, so it was nice to have someone to bounce ideas of off of. I generally think of photography as more of a solitary pursuit but it doesn`t necessarily have to be. I`m looking forward to more trips like yesterday.

We had some real late snows and it never seemed to warm up for a long time. Then, right around June or so, we started to get some really hot weather, maybe a few days that were pushing the upper 20′s or so. They would go away quickly and it would return to normal but sometime around the end of July it started to just get really hot and remained that way, with temps pushing into the 30′s for a while until sometime in September. By then I was already gone and somewhere where it’s above 30 everyday but I was still checking the forecasts and talking to people back here.

From what I understand, things finally calmed down by mid-September and then an early winter kicked in; getting below 0 for a high in October or November, which usually never happens until the early part of the new year…When I got back here last Friday, I was greeted by a typhoon-like storm that made our descent into the airport a little harrowing for me. I am not a person who does turbulence very well and I was definitely feeling some tension in my body as we plowed through the snow, then rain and wind to touch down on on the tarmac. It was surprisingly warm the first few days, then the mercury dipped rapidly.

I took off for a few days in Sapporo, where it’s been flurries on and off the last few days. Here are a couple shots from yesterday:

Still Life with Awning.

Dead Leaves and Snow.

Bicycle Seat with Snow.

Subways and Cellphones.

Wine Bar Water.

I’ll be heading back to my home country next week but, because I’ll be on the east coast there, I think I’ll start updating this on a regular basis again and putting up photos. The weather there can be pretty similar in the wintertime so, hey! why not, right?

Keep checking back for more photos.

I saw something that I thought was quite interesting when I was driving south towards 塘路 (Toro) this morning though. This area is a huge draw for many different kinds of birds all year round. They tend to come and go with the seasons (we’ve now entered crane season) but there are always various birds of prey hanging around, especially in the late “summer” when the farmers start cutting their fields of grass which makes it easier for them to pick up on the field mice and voles scrambling about for stray grains. Now, I’m not a fancy, ivory tower ornithologist  so I honestly can’t say if they are hawks or falcons or something else (although a bit of research might do the trick) but they certainly are impressive birds.

Normally, you’ll see a few hanging around here and there, by the fields or around 塘路湖 (Lake Toro) or any of the other small lakes we have in this area, but they seem to be mostly solitary creatures and prefer to hunt alone. That wasn’t the case this morning. I counted more than a dozen that were all congregated on the thin strip of road that snakes around the north side of the lake. Most of them were perched up in the leafless trees, their raptor-precise eyes fixed on the lake or the ground around them…Maybe it was because the snow provided an unspoiled canvas that made it easier for them to pick out their tiny prey or maybe they were waiting for the ワカサギ (wakasagi-smelt; people like to ice fish for them in the winter and then fry them up whole) to surface or something-I don’t know.

What I do know it that it was an impressive sight, made all the more so when, as I was straining my neck to look up the hill to my right, I spotted something much larger and even more impressive. It was a Stellar’s sea eagle. I’ve actually only seen one once before, maybe last year when it was perched on a road sign calmly looking down on the road below. Tha bird was massive and this one, while a bit farther away, was just as impressive. Count in all the various ducks and geese that I saw too and this morning was a vertitable cornucopia of feather-ful fowl.

The cranes have started to really come back. They have finally returned to the field that they are normally seen in around this area and are happy to have the old lady feeding them at least once a day. I could never figure out why they had picked that seemingly random field until I saw her out there one day with her bucket. She seems able to walk among them without causing any alarm but if anyone else tries to get close they quickly take off for farther pastures.

I plan on getting some good photos of them this year so stay tuned.

Gunbayama under a November blanket of snow.

This will be my fifth winter here and this is the earliest it has ever snowed. Usually, if we’re lucky, we might get one blizzard or snow event in December so this may not bode well for the rest of the long winter. Based on the shitty, non-existant summer that we were treated too, I can only imagine that a long and precipitation-filled season is ahead of us; although that might not be so bad for those who live here and like winter sports…

I guess it’s time to kick the soy-hot chocolate season into gear!

I had only been up Akan Fuji once, a few years back for my birthday, which seemed kind of strange because it sits right next to 雌阿寒岳 (Meakan-dake) and wouldn’t add much more than an hour or so to get to the summit. Regardless, this would be my second climb up to the top and I was looking forward to it. So, around 6 I got up and got ready, then left with my friend at 7.

Unsuprisingly, we were the only people at this trailhead (seldom used by most because it’s up a long dirt road and there’s a greater chance of running into bears-gasp!) and it was as quiet as could be-cold too. We were all bundled up but about 10 minutes in we were shedding layers as fast as we could. The day only got warmer from there…We were treated to beautiful views of 阿寒湖 (Akan-ko = Lake Akan) and the surrounding area. Unfortunately, my camera is at the Nikon repair shop (hopefully getting cleaned up properly) so I wasn’t able to take any of the classy pictures that you’d expect. The ones that follow were taken with my friend’s little point and shoot:

Akan-ko.

Akan-ko and Oakan-dake.

A panorama of two shots from the top of Akan Fuji-Meakan to the left.

With the crazy Halloween party season over, I may be able to get back to updating this blog on a semi-regular basis. The last two weeks were filled with no less than six Halloween parties, both at school and otherwise, and I was busy trying to keep everything straight.

In these past two weeks it certainly has gotten a lot colder and it’s already dark at 4:30 when I leave the office. All the leaves are gone (save for the stubborn oaks) and the タンチョウ鶴 (Japanese red-crested crane) are slowly starting to make their return to this barren land. For some reason, they choose to winter over here and they are a major tourist attraction, one of the few that this area can claim, and people from all over Japan flock (no pun intended) to gawk at them.

Since I see them on almost a daily basis, weekly in the summer time as there are always a few pairs who never seem to leave (and even some lone wolfs), I don’t get too excited about their return. They are quite graceful creatures in flight but are generally pretty ordinary when walking around and picking at the ground…This year their arrival was heralded by a group of about 30 or so that decended on a field just north of my town. Oddly enough, in all the years I have been here I have never seen them land in that particular area but they have been there all this week. Maybe it was the freshly-sprayed manure that has kept them coming back. Mmmmm, good.

Anyway, that was a digression, but I promise to hopefully have some decent (dust-free?) photos of them up this year; although a 200mm is still quite lacking in capturing intimate wildlife portraits.

This past Tuesday was 文化の日 (National Culture Day), which meant a day off from work and a chance to go for a hike. Thankfully they hadn’t closed the gate yet at Nishibetsu and my friend and I were treated to an enjoyable late autumn-early winter hike. Had more dust problems this time so the body is on its way to the service center to get a good cleaning. If that doesn’t do the trick, it’s getting dumped and I’ll have to shell out even more money for something better. I’m not impressed Nikon…

Photos are below:

Icy Limbs.

Lonely Berries.

Shari-dake in the distance.

Icy Limbs #2.

Mashu-dake in the distance.

The approach to Nishibetsu-dake.

At the summit.