Why I Oughta...

A couple of days ago, I posted about how I planted an unknown Japanese Maple that I bought from the orange big box store .  I know, I know.  But...it was just something I did.  That is the fourth Japanese Maple in our backyard, but it also was the 'gateway' to even more.  My research into what that tree could be turned into a lost few days digging around the Web.  In terms of numbers....This Spring (2023), I've now planted three Japanese Maple trees - a small Emperor 1 , that unknown red laceleaf upright and this small, low-grafted Waterfall Japanese Maple .   Doing the research about those three Japanese Maples on the Web lead me to a new (to me) place:  Mr. Maple.  Their site is MrMaple.com  where they sell a huge variety of Japanese Maples in 1-gallon nursery containers.   The guys at Mr. Maple make it easy to sort by growing zone (I'm 5b), sun-exposure, species (Acer palmatum, Acer japonicum and Acer shirasawanum, etc) and habit (upright vs. weeping vs. columnar vs

We were out and about when I parked the van next to a normal-looking car.  But, the license plate was anything *but* normal-looking.  It was a diplomatic license plate.  What do I mean?  Instead of having a state listed on it, it instead read: CONSUL.  And had a seal in the top left from the US Department of State.  Here is a photo of it below.   Note...I'm posting a photo of a license plate that I normally would blur out, but since the photo doesn't show the vehicle, nor am I stating the location, I feel pretty good about sharing this photo.  Kinda cool, right?  I went online to figure out what the story is/was with the plate and I turned up at this tool from Quartz:  a Diplomatic License Plate Decoder .  Pop in the plate number and you discover this is from a Japanese diplomat.  And...based on the location, that *totally* makes sense. From Quartz's tool: I learned something today.  What do they say?  Get smarter everyday.  Done and done.

This past March, I posted a photo of a couple of Tawashi Scrubbing brushes that we bought from the Daiso (dollar store) up in Niles .  We recently went back and I found a couple of different scrubbing brush products that I brought home.  The first one, is what you see at the top of this post: they call it a toilet brush, but if you look at the photos, you'll see that it is designed to clean the Toto toilet washlet .  The other scrubbing product - below - is also for the toilet.  But this one is for the bowl.  They bill it as having 'pumice abrasive'.  With two exclamation points.  I haven't used either of them yet, but you can bet that I'll report back on the outcomes here.  I mean...who isn't sitting on the edge of their (washlet) seat just wondering if these dollar store items are any good?  Gross?  Or the good kind of gross?

A few days ago, I posted photos about my first Nanoblock build of the Kaminarimon gate from Japan and today, I'm happy to say that I finished the build.  I put the penny in there for scale.  The LED is piped from the base to the little lantern in the middle that is suspended from the roof structure.  The two little people are cute, aren't they?  Time to move on to the next set - the Shinkansen bullet train . If I had a shelf in my home office that this could live on, I'd put it up there.  For now, it is just sitting on my desk.  Until it gets wrecked by one of the kids.

On one of my trips to Tokyo, I brought back a couple of sets of Nanoblocks for the kids including this one that is an "Optical Fiber LED+ Kaminarimon" that features 420 pieces.  Nanoblocks are like Legos, but much smaller.  Like...really tiny.  That tiny-ness is a key product attribute making the sets - when fully built - taking a much smaller footprint than a Lego set.  But, that tiny-ness also makes these decidedly NOT FOR KIDS.  Or at least...not for my kids. This thing lingered on my desk for a couple of months because the kids couldn't make it work - their hands couldn't make the tiny parts work for them.  So, I decided to take over the project and get it started. This set is Kaminarimon - which Wikipedia tells us - is a very special site in Tokyo . On the scale of difficulty, this one measures 3 out of 5. It has an LED base that is powered by a pair of AA batteries or by plugging in a USB cable and that lights up the base panel that you see below.

I was sitting at the gate in my American Airlines plane waiting to back away when this ANA plane taxi'ed by our gate.  A NA is a Japanese carrier that is doing a "Star Wars Project" as they call it.  I've flown a few times to Japan (Narita), but I've only flown either United or JAL.  This BB-8 livery is one of three in the Star Wars fleet:  they also have a R2-D2 and C-3PO versions . If you're interested in seeing it, the fine folks at Flight Radar 24 have provided this tracking link :  Follow the BB-8 777-300ER with registration JA789A . For you #AvGeeks, t he BB-8 livery is on a Boeing 767-300 .  This plane is awfully cute - but I think it is pretty clear: the C-3PO livery is the *best* one of the three, right?  Check out the release on the ANA Star Wars site here for full details including the cabin details that match the livery: From ANA's Star wars microsite - showing the cups, aprons and seat headrests all C-3PO-themed. This is not my

I've posted a few times about Japanese bathrooms here on the blog.  Actually, I've posted about toilets in general a few times - which, I suppose is weird.  But, not that weird? The oldest toilet-related post was when I was first exposed to Japanese-style toilets at Google in 2011 .  That same year, I marveled at a toilet that Menards was selling that claimed it could flush a full bucket of golf balls .  Yeah...full bucket! Then just this year, I shared the functionality of the toilet I came across in Tokyo that played bird chirping noises to sort-of, umm, muffle or suppress or combat whatever noises are being made.  And most recently, I posted a photo of a child-restraint made by Toto that is in the corner of a public restroom that you can strap your child in while you go about doing your own business.  I've been so moved by my experiences with Totos that I had one installed in our house in Downers Grove. Today, I'm continuing the celebration of toilets and J

I've posted about the street trees of Tokyo a few times here on the blog.  In those posts, I've talked about the hard pruning that they do to *some* of the trees, how others have a more columnar nature to them and what species they might be (a lot of Ginkos!).  On my most recent trip, I walked down a fancy street in Ginza and saw some trees in full foliage.  And these trees aren't Ginkos.  Here's a close up of the leaves of the same tree you see above: Looking through the list of popular trees on The Street Trees of Tokyo site , I made it all the way down to below the top 30 to find what I think these trees are: Pretty sure it is a  Popular .   And...the Lombardy Popular is columnar variety . 

On a walk to the train station for my return trip to NRT aboard the Narita Express (a close cousin to the "Tragic Express" - the return trip of the Magic Express from your Disney resort hotel to MCO), I came across this McDonald's advertisement showing off three sandwiches.  The bottom one has a face-like quality with the bacon 'tongue' sticking out and kind of smiling along the curvature of the burger.  But, the middle one.  See that cutaway in the middle.  That's not chicken.

Just a little bit over a week ago, I shared ANOTHER 1 post about the trees that I saw in Tokyo and talked about how I'm in the middle of a bit of a crush on Japanese horticulture.  That crush certainly is most-focused on trees (both deciduous and coniferous) that are typically columnar in shape, but it also extends to gardens in general.  This post is about a little hidden garden called the Gotenyama Garden that is right outside the Tokyo Marriott in Shinagawa.  The same place that had that epic honeycomb setup I shared back in July . The Cherry Blossom tree that I included in a post with some Nagoya-area trees back in April of this year is from the very top of Gotenyama Garden, but that was as far as I was able to *get* to in the garden on my previous trip.  Just a quick step outside to grab a photo.  This time, I was able to wander in there a bit further.  And it is pretty great! Starting with the image you see at the top that shows one of the intermediate levels of a

Another post in the series.  Pepsi J-Cola post here .  These are, from top to bottom, Singapore Hotel Lounge, JAL in-flight service and Marriott Courtyard Lounge.  Two skinny Red Bull-shaped cans.  One normal, 12 ounce can in the middle. 

With multiple visits to Tokyo now under my belt, I have come to realize that there are plenty of things that I am drawn to during my stays including the hospitality, the crazy products, work (of course) and maybe most significantly:  their horticulture.  Mostly their trees. I've posted a bunch about the trees of Tokyo starting with my first visit where I saw the Cherry trees in full blossom in 2017 .  Earlier this year, I posted some photos from a Spring visit where I saw some workers pruning street trees into a columnar shape and had the good fortune of seeing the deciduous trees without their leaves.  I also posted this photo of a carefully crafted pine tree outside of the Peninsula Hotel close to the office I was visiting.   The pruning they do starts young as I found a few very thin pine trees close to a building that have begun their pruning/training.   And...where I saw the most interesting collection of trees (mostly White and Black Pines) was in the outer gardens of

I stayed at the Tokyo Marriott on a recent trip for just one night, but this was the second time I stayed there.  However, this was the first time I had time for breakfast.  The previous trip, I had an early departure time and had to run out before breakfast.    At this Marriott - which has some terrific gardens that I'll post about another day here on the blog - is a converted hotel, so it wasn't built as a Marriott .  So, the layout isn't traditional, or at least traditional in my mind when it comes to a hotel layout.  The check-in desk is buried about half-way "back" in the hotel and is small and cramped with a low ceiling.  In "front" of that check-in desk area is a giant atrium.  In the center of the atrium is the restaurant where they serve breakfast.  It is free for certain Marriott  Rewards Bonvoy Members, so when I showed up, there were plenty of folks eating there.  The breakfast offerings are pretty robust and they have quite a few West

This was a bottle of beer that is in between a normal 16 ounce beer and a bomber bottle.  Had it up in the lounge at the Nagoya Marriott.  Not very memorable, but documenting it here in the beer diary amongst the crafts and other macrobrews. 

Not only do they make toilets (excellent ones at that, btw), they also make this child restraint system.  So Moms and Dads all over Japan can sit on the pot in peace. 

You can see over the rooftops in the photo above a look at Mt. Fuji that I snapped outside the Shinkansen Train (the bullet train!) from Tokyo to Nagoya one night on my trip.  This was the third time I'd taken that trip, but the first time I was able to see the mountain.  Between night time darkness and/or clouds, it wasn't visible to me on the other trips.  Mt. Fuji is a World Heritage Site and one of Japan's 3 "Holy Mountains"  and is home to a pilgrimage that has taken place for centuries .  Those of you keeping note at home, you'll notice that I've used this photo as the header of the blog for now.  On mobile, I think you only see the sky in the top left portion, but on desktop, you get the full mountain.  Around the archives of the blog, you'll find similar photos of t he Rocky Mountains from Denver and from the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs . 

My trip to Japan (with brief stops in Tokyo on either side of a few days down in Nagoya) coincided with the Cherry Blossom Trees being in bloom.  This was the second time I've visited Japan during the Cherry Blossom bloom with the first one being back in 2017.  Here's a post showing the trees then .  I loved the experience so much that I decided to try to find a flowering Cherry Tree to add to our own backyard.  I ended up with this Kwanzan Flowering Cherry Tree .   The trees this time weren't as full as I think we came a little bit later (late March/early April) this time.   You can kind of see that in the photo above.  It has already bloomed and has lost some of the flowers.  In the photo below, you can clearly see the blooms had mostly fallen off already.   Doesn't mean it wasn't as beautiful.  It was and these photos don't do the trees justice.   This marks the third straight year for Cherry Trees with 2018 being a visit to DC for those alon

I think the "J" stands for Japan or Joy.  Or both.    That's what one side of the can reads:  Japan & Joy Cola. I had this in Nagoya one day on my trip.  No Coke Lite that's for sure.  Nice can, though.   If my Dad was still in the business of collecting bottles and cans, I might think about bringing one of these home for him.  Alas, he isn't.  So, I didn't.

View from my room at the Marriott Nagoya .  Not quite a sky bar.  But a nice view.  Saw more from here on this trip than I saw from the ground level.