zak = pom

Before leaving for Hawaii, I noticed these juice bottles at Seijo Ishii.

They said "ZAK".

I thought, weird, why would you name a juice ZAK and then I remembered that pomagranate is "zakuro" in Japanese.

Then it all made sense.

"ZAK" is "POM".

We recently tried the mixed version, pomagranate + blueberry with breakfast...yum!

around the neighborhood

The other night, I was having fun with Photofunia...Wouldn't it be cool to get a Mini cooper like this? (with cappuccino art, macarons or dark chocolate Hello Kitty on it...though it would be hard to choose which one I would want, which one would you choose?)

Yesterday was such a beautiful, sunny day. I decided to eat lunch at MOS then walk through Suigetsu Park.

While walking through the park, I found this elderly couple having lunch on the bench between these weeping willows.

The leaves aren't changing much yet, but I did find these stinky gingko nuts...they smell like stinky cheese...blah!

I also saw a pomegranate that the birds partially ate.

And a semi-rant...if you are going to make your child wear a helmet, don't you think you should too?

Today, our building is having some work done so I have to be out of the house for most of the day as they will shut off the water. On top of that it is supposed to rain for most of the day, hopefully it won't be too cold out.

Have a nice weekend!

around the neighborhood

Friday I had an errand in Ikeda, it was a sunny day, actually it was super humid, but still sunny, so I decided to walk back from Ikeda to Ishibashi (where we live).

The walk usually takes me 30 minutes if I don't stop along the way.

But it was so hot that I stopped here and there along the way and 30 minutes turned into 2 hours.

One of the places that I stopped at was Suigetsu Park.

There were many dragonfly about. In Okinawa, I heard that when the dragonflies swarm about, a storm is approaching. I don't think there were too many to be a sign of a storm coming, but I was excited to capture some with my camera (I guess that is why it turned out to be 2 hours...)

Anyway, there was the akatombo (red dragonfly)(photo up top). It actually came close enough for me to get a good shot of it with my macro lens on.

These blue ones are called shiokaratombo. Actually I didn't realize this, but dragonflies are kinda huge! and have scary eyes.

And then I saw this one, a black and yellow one, I think it is called oniyanma.

The zakuro (pomegranate) have started to flower and begin to produce their fruit. I didn't know that the flower turns into a hard flower and then forms into the fruit.

And oniazami (thistle), you can see these huge thorny plants (weeds?) all over the place. Definitely bigger than the ones I've seen in Hawaii.

At night you can hear the frogs croaking in the rice fields. I think in a couple of weeks the semi(cicada) will start their chirping.