Stilts

The stilts at the bird park were little birds. I have never seen stilts before, and had always imagined them to be larger. But next to the ducks and ibises they looked delicate and spindly.


I was charmed and also a little worried by their legs, which looked like they might break at the slightest provocation, like if a bit of food was thrown too hard.

(Also, as everybody knows, bird knees bend the wrong way.)


But it was their faces that got to me. What funny little faces those birds have!

Grumble

Here is a story on why daylight saving time doesn't work in Japan. I remember someone telling me years ago that Japan had tried daylight saving and it hadn't worked, and why, and it sounded absurd.

It is still absurd. And it still won't work, especially if only some people do it.

I have not been posting much recently, and that is mostly because it is too hot. I do not mean that it is too hot to write (I do have air conditioning in here) but because whenever I sit down to write anything, all I want to do is complain about the weather. I suppose I need to get it off my chest. So here comes my official summer grumble, and after this I will shut up about it.

It is UNREASONABLY HOT. I am sure it did not used to be this hot at night. The Man and I used to have air conditioner wars all summer. We used to argue over whether to have the air conditioner on at night. He didn't want it; I did. We had this fight all the time.

In the last few years we haven't been fighting about this, because it has become rare for the night time temperature to fall below 26C during the summer. The last week or two it has only gone below 28C once or twice. At night the humidity shoots up as well, so it feels even hotter. AND THAT IS NOT REASONABLE.

It is so ridiculously hot, in fact, that people have been dying of it. So, you see, I am not just being fussy.

Actually, while I am about it, I have another little grumble, and this time it is possible that I am being a little unreasonable. The Man's recent illness (which he has not quite recovered from but he is much better than before, thank you for asking, and no thanks to the weather) has had an unexpected and wholly mysterious side-effect: he has stopped snoring. I do not mean he is snoring less than before, I mean he no longer snores AT ALL. While this has, of course, made our nights rather more peaceful, it has also given me another thing to worry about. Every time I wake up in the night and find myself basking in unexpected silence I start to wonder whether I am lying next to a corpse.

And that is not a nice thought AT ALL. So far it has not turned out to be true, of course (I would have told you), and I feel somewhat irrational complaining about his newly quiet sleeping habits. I used to complain about his snoring. Why can't I just enjoy the silence? But I am finding the whole thing rather disconcerting.

Why can't he at least snort now and again, to reassure me?

Hornbills

According to Wikipedia, "hornbill behavior in captivity is described as high-strung."

One of the hornbills we met at the Bird Park was showing signs of being high strung while we were there. Actually, it looked as though the top part of its bill was injured, and the keeper told us something we did not understand – that it had been in a fight with the other one? I didn't catch that.


Anyway, we fed it a little fruit.


After that it lost interest in us. We were apparently so boring we had caused it to collapse.




Later, when we passed through this part of the park again (it was so much fun we did it all twice), the supposedly collapsed hornbill was furtively attempting to get bits of food out of the slightly opened drawer you can see in that second picture. And succeeding, actually, until his (or her) keeper noticed and closed the drawer. I did not get a picture of that, though. Sorry.

I do not know whether this hornbill was the male or the female, but apparently the male is in love with the female, but she thinks she is a human being and is in love with her keeper. (And the male dislikes the keeper intensely, seeing him as a rival.) Because of this doomed love triangle it appears highly unlikely that this pair will break with convention and breed in captivity.

The other hornbill was in a different enclosure (emotional tensions run too high when they are together), and posed for me to take a picture.

Feeding time is ALL DAY

The toucans made sure we were aware that the food was REALLY CHEAP! LOOK! JUST 100 YEN! and encouraged us to buy some.

Over here! Look!


Naturally, we bought some.


Toucans, it turns out, are surprisingly gentle with those great big beaks.

Toucan

Toucans are altogether absurd looking birds, and the ones we met yesterday were ridiculously friendly.

Bird and flower park

Today a friend took me to the Kobe Kacho-en, also known as the Bird and Flower Park. (Or perhaps it's Flower and Bird Park.)

We met a lot of very friendly birds, and I took a lot of photographs.

The first birds we met were these stilts and ibises. . .



. . . including one who apparently fell into a pot of red paint.



More photographs will follow tomorrow.

Oops

Ornament in shop window

This caused my friend and I to do a huge double-take today.

Good grief!

What's so good about grief, anyway?

Gramophone

If I lived in a place where I had space to display this sort of thing, I would have bought it. Well, I would have asked the price, at least. But I don't, do I didn't.

Isn't it lovely, though?


Here is the label. I liked the label, too.



Oh, whoops. I just noticed that this is a 'graphophone,' not a gramophone. My title is wrong.

What is the difference between a graphophone and a gramophone, anyway?

Ebisu

Ebisu is one of the seven lucky gods.

Bad driver

"Coursh I'm not too drunk to drive. Shomeone nicked my shteering wheel, thash all."

Old postcards

My friend ended up buying this album of old postcards from the time of the Sino-Japanese war. On that last one, the caption on the right hand postcard says, General Nogi on way to the Palace.

Iguanas

At the flea market today there was a guy with his pet iguanas in his bicycle basket. They seemed pretty interested in what was happening around them, and kindly posed to have their pictures taken.





More photos of the flea market will follow, eventually.

Misc

I wonder why the English Yahoo weather site and the Japanese Yahoo weather site give different temperatures for the same place?

I wish the English site was the correct one, especially for the nighttime temperatures. It isn't, though. The thermometer in this room reads 30 degrees Celsius (86F) right now, at almost two in the morning, and that's with the air conditioner on. Outside is a LOT warmer. I know, because I just went out there to check.

We are well into two or three shower a day weather, and tomorrow I am planning to go to a flea market. Outside. Where there is no air conditioning. This probably makes me some kind of idiot.

The heat is tiring enough without being ill as well, and this weather is not helping The Man, who has been unwell with a nasty throat infection. Poor Man. He needs to get a badly impacted wisdom tooth seen to, too (possibly the source of all his problems), but it will mean surgery, and he wants to be well enough to cope with that. Whether or not we will be able to travel anywhere this summer is still up in the air. We will just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, he is on a fattening diet, to try to regain some of the weight he has lost, which has left him looking like a famine victim. You could play the xylophone on his ribs. To encourage him, I have been sampling some of the fattening goodies he has been indulging in, and so far the person who has gained the most weight around here is me.

In other news, today I have been amused by Fail Blog.

Hymns

Here are two cormorants singing hymns to a heron in an attempt to convert him. (Cormorants are terribly annoying like that.) The heron, a devout Buddhist, is not impressed.

Big river

Today I cycled to the big river to see if I could get any pictures of the cormorants, herons and egrets that hang out there. I got a lot of pictures, and I got very hot. (The bits I missed with the sunscreen are now very visible.)

Unfortunately most of the pictures aren't very good. Most of the birds have moved further up the river to places where it is hard to get close enough for good pictures. The only halfway decent pictures I got were these two, of a flower amongst the weeds alongside the river, and of a dragonfly.

The dragonfly picture isn't all that good, actually, but I'm just pleased to have got it at all. Dragonflies tend not to sit still for very long, and I had to be quick.





One of the reasons I went to the big river today is that I did not sleep well last night. This is because I finished classes for the semester on Tuesday, and without work, I become lazy. I spent yesterday sitting around congratulating myself on finishing another semester without falling out of my tree completely, and didn't do anything much. This meant that when bedtime came I was not tired. Also, it was very hot, so I spent the night tossing and turning and sweating and cursing to myself until The Man got mad and kicked me out of bed, more or less.

That wasn't very nice, so I decided that it would not happen again tonight. I determined to wear myself out by doing something physical.

I think I have succeeded in wearing myself out, but I am not so sure about the heat thing. I think I am going to feel even hotter tonight. In fact, I suspect I am going to spend the night lying awake and cursing the glowing, patchy spots on my shoulders and legs.

The rare and remarkable Odd Shoefish

Event

There was something going on at this little park as I cycled past today. I think it must have been connected with one of the childcare centres around here, perhaps a festival or fundraising event, or both.

The reason I think it was connected with a childcare centre is the red trolley thing at the left of the picture. I have only ever seen these before filled with toddlers. The childcare centres use them to transport very small children to and from wherever they are going to and from in the neighborhood. The toddlers stand clutching the bars as the trolley is pushed by one or two of the childcare centre staff. This is always fun to watch when they cross the railway tracks. The toddlers clutch the bars and bounce wildly as the trolley bumps over the rails, and there is a lot of shrieking and giggling.

But there is always one infant who remains solemn and thoughtful, even at the most exciting times. A serious face peers between the bars and the child seems to be thinking, Why am I in this cage? What am I doing here? What is it all about?

This child will grow up to be either a mass murderer or a philosopher.

Duranta

This is currently flowering in a small way outside our front door.