I’m trying to keep these site maintenance posts interesting by including something completely unrelated. Is it working?
Last Friday and Saturday we had the annual Culture Festival at Yahata High School, so today I had a day off for having gone to work on the weekend. How did I spend my day? Well, if any of you were trying to read my blog, you may have figured out that I was fiddling with the code.
This entry has been in the works for over a month, and although I’m not completely satisfied with it, today is probably the most appropriate day to post it.
In my recent explorations of Japanese temples and shrines, I’ve often thought about my dad, Julian Pas, who passed away five years ago today. He was a scholar of Chinese religions, and as my sister noted in a recent comment, he used to explore Taiwan with a motorbike and a camera. I had known he was an avid photographer—that’s probably where I got it from—but until Sonya told me, I hadn’t known about the motorcycle expeditions.
There’s been a lot of family blog work this week. Namely, Lia has a new blog and after seeing what it looks like, Jarrod decided that he wanted a new look to his site. Now I have no excuse not to finally spend some time making mine look a bit more like something that I’d make, rather than the default that comes with WordPress. For those of you keeping score, WordPress is the blogging software that does the heavy lifting to run our blogs.
Tonight Lia finally succumbed to my haranguing and asked me to set her up with a blog. As you’d expect, it’s much nicer to look at than mine. It’s not working completely smoothly yet, but give it a bit of time. And don’t let that stop you from giving it a read.
I’m messing around with file names and locations. Things should return to normal shortly. Why am I doing this? Because I finally decided to put a copyright notice on all the files, and I figured that while I’m at it I’ll organize the images folder so that things are easier for me to find.
Regular programming will resume tomorrow.
UPDATE (11pm, 9 June 2005): I finished reorganizing the image files earlier this evening, then my server went down for a few hours. Things should be back to normal now.
Here’s another short photo post, so that I can attempt to catch up on my sleep. Miyajima, an island near Hiroshima in the Seto Inland Sea, is famous for its “floating” torii.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned cycling through southeastern Fukuoka. Tonight I’m a bit pressed for time so I’m only posting one photo and what I foresee as very little commentary.
Yatsurugi Shrine is in Miyata Town (宮田町), east of Kitakyushu. I ended up there completely by accident, on the tail end of a bike trip on May 5, 2005. I didn’t have a very good map with me, and had followed a couple of signs pointing towards a hiking area, and then got distracted by a series of torii. What follows are some photos in and around the shrine grounds. There are a couple of standard photos of the shrine, and then a lot of pictures of the pink flowers and greenery that took me completely by surprise.
A 10- or 15-minute walk from our apartment is a big park called Yomiya Park. It has the usual park things, including trees, walking paths, large open areas, assorted playgrounds. As well as a kyudo—traditional Japanese archery— range, and a couple of ponds filled with irises. The irises are in bloom, and this weekend was the annual Tobata Iris Festival.
A while back I wrote about Ogopogo. A few days later, I encountered something Ogopogo-like while out and about. Around the same time—on April 14th—I wrote about my assorted Iron Chef encounters. And the following week Lia told me that she’d seen a poster of the original Iron Chef Japanese, Rokusaburo Michiba, in the window of our neighbourhood 7-11 store.
At the time, I didn’t have a chance to take a photo and by the time I did, the poster was gone. Luckily, the poster reappeared and I was able to hurriedly take some pictures of it on the morning of May 3rd as we began a journey to Hikosan in southeast Fukuoka.