Rick's b.log - 2011/08/23
It is the 3rd of May 2024 You are 3.144.161.116, pleased to meet you!

Epic storm!

Monday, most of the day, on and off thunderstorms. I was emailing Nikko and the Livebox was plugged it, unplugged, plugged in... ☺

It started to rain really heavily about half five. Then it cleared. This was followed by an interesting looking sky that had a wrinkle all the way across it, like a zipper.
I went to put the kettle on. Mom called me back and said that I might want to look at this. What!? I called from the kitchen. Well, as I came back, the zipper had been opened, to unleash a swirling black sky, like ink in water, with extremely strong gusts of wind. I'd not have been surprised if this unleashed tornados.

Then it started to rain.

Then is started to rain.

Here's a video, with some annotations:

Following this, we've gone from days in the middle-upper twenties and some in the thirties... to mid-tens. Try 15. Meh.

Japanese stamps

I'm not a stamp collector, it's just a little souvenir of another place. I'm not fussed if the stamp has been franked or not, or has ruffled edges. I would just like some nice looking stamps. In comparison, the standard "Marianne" (French stamp) is boring and the most god-awful colours. I guess all the nice colours were used up in increases in the cost...
...this is, of course, assuming that you even get a real stamp and not something spat out of the printer on to a sticky label.

At a vide grenier on Sunday (yes, yet another!), I found a person selling stamps, €0,15 apiece. And astonishingly, he had Japanese ones...

An important temple... maybe the gateway (called sanmon)?
It isn't Chion-in, I'm not sure where it is.

Buddhist winged... something or other? (anyone?)

A crane.

A nice flower - some sort of daisy.

It came from the sea, and it doesn't have tentacles. ☺

This last one is interesting. I know it is Japanese because of the Kanji written on it, but nowhere do I see the word "Nippon". The United Kingdom is the only country in the world permitted to not place the country name on the stamp, this being a nod to the fact that the postage stamp (Penny Black) is a British invention. The monarch's head suffices to identify the country.
However, this stamp...

Sakura?

Your comments:

joe, 27th August 2011, 11:37

I think that most of the countries have different sets of stamps for collection and for postage.  In Australia we have them too, surprisingly the postage ones are of the kind you described but look nice. Where is the link to PayPal donation?

opal, 16th September 2011, 12:51

Hello,    I collect stamps and have plenty of doubles. Drop me your home address - I will send you some. Most of doubles are issued in Ukraine and Itally (before EU).    As for your small software business - I guess there must be some marketing steps to take to get your applications sold. Have you tried to do some promotion ?    Regards

Janice Muir, 20th August 2016, 22:28

The white flowers on the blue background are Nippon daisies.    On the Cherry Blossom stamp, the two leftmost characters spell Nippon.