Garuda: A Guardian Spirit

This carving is, say, 4 feet wide and 3 feet high. It's from Bali, but hangs on an outside wall a couple of blocks from me. It's a guardian spirit. That's why it looks so fierce, to scare evil away:



There are situations where this is good advice:



In my experience such experiences rarely happen in cyberspace. But who knows what'll become of cyberspace when the Glorious GNF goes off. Gotta' be prepared.

Whoops:



Looks like they didn't have a garuda and someone failed to lift the plow.

Pigeon & Shadow

Pink Weeds on Saturday

Blue Thursday

Revolutionary Sunday: Secret Plans of the Vanguard

And this is where those plans are being incubated and hatched:

The Highs and Lows of Life in Japan

Yesterday the tsuma, onechan, and imoto got caught outside in a typhoon. Despite being pelted by rain and almost blown away by wind, they weathered it and caught a taxi home, so everyone's fine. But wow. Typhoon season isn't even supposed to start until September. We had both noticed a lot of dragonflies flying around during the day, which apparently is also a bit weird.

Moral of the story: after successfully entertaining 30 Japanese 3-to-5-year-olds with a bilingual participatory reading of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, be very, very careful! The weather can totally change in less time than it takes to flag a taxi.

Oh, and onechan has to learn that umbrellas are far more replaceable than she is--she literally tried to run out onto the street in the middle of the typhoon to chase down her umbrella and was only saved by two women who happened to get trapped under the same gate as the girls.

Ah, one more: don't head toward the recently-reclaimed-from-the-ocean bay area to catch a taxi if there's even a remote chance a typhoon might swoop down on you from the ocean.

Whoops, a final one: this is what sucks about being in your office an hour away from helping your family--or maybe the moral is that writer's block and procrastination are dangerous.

As if you didn't know that already!