• Traveling Along, We're Adventurers

    Gomi Day

    It was “gomi” (garbage) day in Joi Ito’s community – a day when everyone gets together to clean up trash and unwanted junk that’s been illegally dumped. On my trip to Japan (this was in about 1993), I went hiking on Gomiyama – in other words, I found a trail that went up through the bamboo forests behind one of the shrines in Matsuyama on Shikoku.

  • Home Improvement

    Sharing the Joy

    The mailbag is open at Velcrometer, where a reader mentions that “Dr. Jellyfinger” may have had a cousin, “Mr. Hamhands.” I’ve been reading your entries for a about a year now and I have to tell you how much joy my husband and I get from of your entries on Dr. Jellyfinger. You see, it seems that we live in a house owned by his cousin, Mr. Hamhands. Now that’s interesting, I think that Dr. Jellyfinger’s great-nephew-in-law might be the former owner of this house, The Rev. Izontha Prize Doolittle. Rev. Doolittle apparently spent so much time looking up to…

  • Home Improvement

    Some Weekend. Do-overs?

    Now that the weekend is over, the deluge clears off and the sun comes out… too late to do anything outside now, of course, and everything is soggy underfoot anyway. What fun we’ve had today – first I had a screaming shrieking hissy over my inablilty to get Front Page (insert sympathy shrieks here) to do what I wanted it to do for the Holy Moly web page. Then at the height of the fit (and the top of my range and volume) the power went out and all the various UPS‘s started beeping and chirping along with me. Which…

  • The Road Goes Ever On: 3 Weeks in Britain

    Again with the “well, finally”

    At long last another entry has gone up for the September trip to Britain. It only needed some images and some tweaking but of course it had to lie around being a draft for more than a month. Well, it’s there now, and there’s really only one big entry left, which will cover the rest of our time hiking in Yorkshire, and the 2 nights we spent in London at the end of the trip. And then the thing will be done, aside from a few things that come after our return home.