Kyoto Animation's subcontract work - Part 1
Before Kyoto Animation started producing their own anime (with Munto OVA in 2003) resp. started serving as a prime contractor, the studio had mainly been known for the high-quality subcontract work with major studios like Pierrot, Sunrise and Tatsunoko entrusting them with crucial episodes. It’s interesting that they often worked on early shows of directors who are big shots today, such as…
My Christmas Tree Is Up
My family has a few holiday traditions that just kinda happened without us realizing they’d become traditions. One of these is putting up our Christmas tree before Thanksgiving and as you can see above, we did it again this year – though it was more difficult then normal.
First, the tree farm that we’ve been going to for the past 4-5 years decided this year that they weren’t going to open before Thanksgiving. They had a nice farm with lots of good trees but we didn’t want to wait so after several hours of internet searching we found a place that would be open early. If we hadn’t been able to find one, we would have had to resort to our artificial tree 
.
Next, the weather was horrible yesterday – around 40° F and raining. So not only was I soaked finding a tree, the tree had to dry for hours before we could decorate it. And there was also the issue of finding a tree that’s much narrower then we normally get (smaller open space this year) yet find one that actually uses our tall ceiling (9 ft.) the best. Our trees have normally only been 7 ft. and really round. Luckily, we found one and after trimming 2 feet off the bottom and a foot off the top – it fits perfectly in the space.
Comparing Recent Autumns with pics
I got my first digital camera in the spring of 2005 and the ability to shot so many pictures was an awesome feeling. Recently I got to thinking about how some autumns seem to come quicker then others so I went looking through my pics and this is what I found:
Halloween 2008
Halloween 2007
Halloween 2005
Chillin’ By The Fire
Yeah for new content!! 
My dad got an outdoor fire pit for his birthday and we fired it up a couple of days ago on our driveway. It’s amazing how interesting watching a fire is – we ended up spending a couple of hours watching it burn. Since we wanted the gift to be a secret, we didn’t get any firewood ahead of time so we only had some scrap wood around the house to burn.
Click for the large version, they make nice desktops – the bottom picture is my current desktop.
Book Review: American Gods by Neil Gaiman
As much as I enjoy watching anime, nothing beats losing oneself in a good book. I’ve been an avid reader since learning how to in first grade and at all times I am reading at least one book. Recently, the anime Earl and Fairy showed the main character leaving a saucer of milk out for the fairies of the area. This act reminded me of one of my absolute favorite books, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and that’s all it took to convince me that it was time to reread the book.
Final Series Score: 12/12
Rereadablity: very high
Pros: the story is both fantastically mythic and utterly believable at the same time, the characters – gods and humans alike – feel like real people that I could meet if I knew where to look, Gaiman’s writing style is meaty yet simple to read and uncluttered with needless writing tricks, many surprises and twists that will keep you reading, stands up well when rereading it
Cons: nothing
Pretty vacation pics/wallpapers
I’m going to copy a couple of posts from my anime blog to give this blog a little starter content.
My family and I took a little vacation this past weekend (late september) to Lake Erie and if I had to sum up the experience in one word it would be – awesome. We’ve been to the lake before, over the last dozen or so years we have often gone to the beach at Presque Isle in Pennsylvania, but spending 3 whole days so near to it was great. While there I had the chance to take a bunch of nice pictures and being the sharing type, I’m going to post a few of my favorites in convenient wallpaper sizes.
