Category: General

Happy Holidays 2025

SPOCK: On my planet, to rest is to rest — to cease using energy.  To me, it is quite illogical to run up and down on green grass, using energy, instead of saving it.

Star Trek, “Shore Leave”, stardate 3025.2

Unlike my 2024 post, I intend to really take time off this time.

The truth is, is that I am deeply burned out. My wife and discussed this recently, and the chaos of preparing our firstborn for college, and our second-born ready for middle school, plus work demands have left us deeply exhausted. When we described it to one another, we quickly concluded that we were not depressed, just burned out. As parents, we had been running at full speed for almost two years, and now that things have quieted down, the fatigue finally caught up to us.

So, for the rest of 2025, I want to just sit around and do nothing: no personal projects, blogging, etc. I do plan to do some light reading (including some new books I picked up), play more solo The One Ring RPG, watch more Star Trek,1 maybe finally finish painting some figurines that have sat half-completed for a year. I have one more blog post in the works, but otherwise, I’m taking some much needed personal downtime.

Just some of my unfinished painted figurines…

Thank you all for your understanding, and I wish you both a happy holidays and a wonderful new year!

1 I also recently picked up the Star Trek Adventures role-playing game from Modiphius as well, but I haven’t progressed very far in learning the game yet.

Blog Update for October 2025

Hello dear readers,

It’s been quite a few past months: graduation, getting my daughter setup for college, and also getting my son ready for middle school, plus lots of interesting side projects, and some work travel. This has been a truly chaotic summer, yet as Ohigan has passed, things are finally calming down.

The chaos of the summer meant that I was queueing up a lot of blog drafts. Like, 20 or more posts that were half done. It was hard to keep up the usual Monday-Thursday schedule because I got impatient and wanted to release some posts sooner than later before they got stale. In the same way, I’ve been making a number of updates over at the other blog too.

Thus, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been “cleaning house”: finishing blog drafts and posting them in quick succession. If you have been struggling to keep up, don’t worry things will slow down again to their usual pace. If you enjoyed the more frequent content, let me know. I still haven’t quite found a “sweet spot” between post frequency and finding new content to post.

Then again, maybe it’s better not to get locked into a particular schedule, and just post as needed.

Things will start to slow down again here on the blog (unless I get another burst of inspiration), and I have some fun topics coming up.

As always, thank you for reading!

P.S. I see a lot more international readers than past years (Ukraine, China, Italy, Denmark, etc), and I truly appreciate it. The purpose of this blog is (on the one hand) just personal musings, but also I want to share as much information about Buddhism and Asian culture as I can. The more we share the more we understand one another. 🙏

So, thank you everyone who reads. It is inspiring.

P.P.S. Features photo is from Star Trek, and referenced in a previous post. This is me fighting to keep up with my workload. 😅

April 2025 Updates

Hello Dear Readers, and Happy Earth Day! 🌎

Just a small update: Recently I was looking for some old Buddhist resources I used to rely upon a lot, and was shocked to discover that these resources have all but disappeared. Internet attrition has taken its toll, so many old websites I used can only be found on places like the Wayback Machine and such. This makes them pretty hard to find. Also, with modern web-technology, it is far easier now to post Japanese characters side by side with English text.

So, I’ve been working on a side project to “rescue” old information from obscurity and modernize it for easier study and (when possible) for other languages. So, the first one I have completed is Honen’s famous One Sheet Document or ichimai-kishōmon. I was able to use a good translation by the now-defunct JSRI (Jodo Shu Research Institute) and draw from Japanese-language sources too since I can now read such things, unlike 15 years ago. Please check out the link above. I also added Cyrillic text for Ukrainian/Russian Buddhists who might want to recite the document.

The other text I am trying to recover is larger, and taking more time: the Tannisho. The Tannisho is centrally important to the Jodo Shinshu tradition, but Taitetsu Unno’s fabulous translation is almost gone. I got a Japanese-language introduction at Tsukiji Honganji in 2023, and I’ve been using that, plus Dr Unno’s translation. It is only partially complete, but work is proceeding. I’ve also, thankfully been able to find more information in Japanese that helps explain the history, and so on.

That’s about it. I hope to rescue more resources soon, in particular some of Rennyo’s ofumi letters, but it’s slow and time-consuming, and my own resources are somewhat limited.

March 2025 Updates

Greetings, dear readers. Just a couple small updates:

  1. The blog has been updated and (afaik) all links to Amazon.com have been removed. For a variety of reasons, I’ve been meaning to remove them for a while (I regret using them in earlier posts), but in light of recent events, Amazon deserves none of our business. If I can deprive it of even a little income, so much the better. So, they’re links are finally gone.
  2. I am trying out a new schedule to help smooth out the cadence of blog posts. Tentatively, I am trying to post every Thursday and Monday at 10am local time. I will try this for a few weeks and maybe adjust as needed. I am open to feedback as well. Feel free to drop a comment.

Thanks all and happy March!

Happy 6th Blogoversary

I had almost forgotten: this blog is now 6 years old as of today. 🥳

This wasn’t the first blog I wrote on the subject, but I used to have bouts of Imposter Syndrome, followed by a habit of deleting old blogs, then inevitably starting new ones anyway. So, I think I am on blog number four or five.

That said, I am older, slightly wiser, and recognize self-doubt more than I used to. Instead of imposing a schedule like I used to, which wasn’t that sustainable anyway, I just write when time allows. It makes the experience more fun, and feels less like work.

As for the blog, I wrote three posts on the same day:

As for you, dear readers, thanks for making the experience worthwhile. The feedback, questions, comments and such are all appreciated, and even those who just read occasionally, it’s nice knowing that I have such a diverse audience of readers, and that people are genuinely interested in such topics.

Hopefully, like my other blog, this one will be around for a long time to come.

Happy 2nd Birthday, Cherry

Today is my dog’s 2nd birthday. “Cherry”, our beagle-pug, was adopted in early 2022, but her birthday is in January from what we can determine in her veterinary records. I wrote about her last year, but haven’t provided a lot of updates.

Our dog, Cherry, sitting on the sand on beach, wearing a pink jacket. She is panting happily.
Our dog, Cherry, sitting on a local beach. Photo taken a few weeks ago, as of writing.

The truth is, adopting a puppy was quite difficult. Before we had children, we had adopted dogs, but much older, calmer dogs. A puppy is far different, and the first year was pretty chaotic, amidst other family and parenting challenges. There are times where, frankly, I regretted adopting a puppy.

And yet, we are now celebrating her second year. Cherry has calmed down significantly, her puppy habits, such as nipping and eating everything off the ground, are over, and more importantly, we’ve learned to communicate enough with her so that when she’s hungry or bored, we can easily determine what she wants. Thus, Cherry gets less frustrated, and so do we.

She has her moments: she is pretty clingey, and barks really loud at seemingly trivial things, but her behavior overall has markedly improved over the last year. We have also settled into a nice pattern together.

Most importantly, the kids really like her. My youngest was utterly terrified of the dog for the first few months, and would do his best to avoid her, but now he constantly plays with her, and is happy to have her in the house (sadly, he is slightly allergic, which we never anticipated). He is also comfortable meeting new dogs too, which was a surprising benefit. My eldest who was the most vocal about adopting a puppy, handles her very well, and can take care of her in our absence, so we have some freedom to run errands, and take a break if needed.

In short, Cherry has become an essential member of the family, as we originally hoped. It took longer than expected, but in the end it has had a pretty positive outcome.

Which brings me to my point.

A four panel comic from the classic "Peanuts" strip. Violet complains about how terrible Snoopy is, but Charlie Brown defends his dog, and Snoopy in teh last panel gives him a hug.
A classic Peanuts comic strip, dated Janaury 12th, year unknown.

I found this Peanuts comic strip online,1 and wanted to share it here. It’s easy to think dogs are stupid and annoying, since they can be pretty obnoxious, obtuse, and demanding at times. And yet, we can learn a lot about ourselves caring for dogs (or anyone) and that can teach some important lessons. Cherry was pretty frustrating as a puppy, but I am glad we didn’t give up, and stuck with it. It taught me some important lessons about humility and forbearance (easy to conceive, hard to practice in real life), and the kids learned some valuable lessons about caring for others.

So, did Cherry make our lives better? Yes, I think so.

And so, today I wanted to celebrate her life as a 2-year old puppy and say thanks, and happy birthday!

Edit: birthday photo

1 to be honest, I am not 100% sure I have permission to use this, but I feel it makes an important point, so I’ll risk it anyway.

Happy New Year 2025

Hello Readers,

It’s 2025, and I am happy to be back. The break wasn’t as restful as hoped (too many holiday obligations), but I did accomplish most of my goals, and got to celebrate my firstborn’s 18th birthday which was an important milestone for us parents. I also played lots of Fire Emblem: Engage,1 and watched plenty of old Star Trek episodes.

Anyhow, for the first temple visit of the year, the priest stated that according to the traditional 60-year Chinese calendar 2025 was the sign ki-no-to-mi (乙巳), which can be roughly translated as “yin wood snake”, which implied change coming to fruition, like a tree growing its branches. For context, last year was “yang wood dragon” (ki-no-é-tatsu, 甲辰). Which implied much turmoil, like a baby dragon bursting from its shell.

While I might be speaking from confirmation bias, I cannot help but feel recent events in the last few years reflect this. But, I suppose it’s up to individual interpretation.2

Anyhow, I have some fun posts coming up that I finally finished while on break.

Hoping you all have a great year, or at least stay out of trouble. 😅

1 Engage doesn’t have the emotional depth of Fire Emblem: Three Houses (I doubt few games would), but it has grown on me, and I enjoy many aspects about it, and will likely play through it again.

2 I consulted the Yi Jing for the year, and my own personal fortune wasn’t great either. Warnings of not “stepping on a tiger’s tail” and such.

Happy Holidays 2024

Spock sitting in an orange room, facing right, his fingers steepled as he meditates on a problem.

On my planet, to rest is to rest — to cease using energy.  To me, it is quite illogical to run up and down on green grass, using energy, instead of saving it.

Spock, “Shore Leave”, stardate 3025.2

Dear Readers,

Wishing you all a restful end of year, and a happy 2025!

I am going to take the next couple of weeks off myself and recharge, spend time with the family and so on. But, I also have a personal to-do list I made for myself to capitalize on the downtime and get some things done, including:

  • Finishing a novel I’ve been reading
  • A bit more Buddhist practice
  • Finishing the next installment of the Journeys of Xuan-zang (part 5 is interesting, but taking way longer than expected to finish)
  • A couple bonus projects if I have time.
  • A bit of studying

So, unlike Spock, I’ll be probably busy, but also productive on a personal level. I mostly gave myself some really easy “softball” goals so I don’t burn out on my time off, but then again, maybe I should trim this list down and have more time to just space out.

I’ll let you all know in 2025. Until then, take care!

P.S. Related post from a few years earlier.

Fixing Email Subscription Settings in WordPress

A while back, I mentioned that I was trying to fix some problems with email notifications when I send updated blog posts, and after considerable trial and error, I started to realize that part of the issue wasn’t how I wrote the blog posts (though I can always improve), but how I was receiving them in email.

I subscribe to my own WordPress.com blogs over email so I can test things, but I also subscribe to other WordPress.com blogs as well for personal enjoyment. No matter what blog I subscribed to, the text would come in as plain text, which is hard to read since blogs tend to use a lot of rich formatting, links, images and so on. It’s readable, but not a great experience.

Finally, after contact WordPress.com support, I finally found the setting that adjusts this:

if you go to your WordPress.com account settings, you can then adjust Notification Settings, and from there you can choose “Email delivery format”. Once I did that, I finally got HTML emails from blog posts. I can’t tell you how nice it is to finally have readable email updates.

I hope this helps someone!

August 2024 Update

Hello dear readers, just some quick updates on this blog.

First, the family and I got back from Japan a few days ago. Jetlag and fatigue are in full-force, plus getting back into the routine here. So, I have been a bit busy and unable to blog much.

Second, I have been mostly posting blog updates on my 100poets.com blog because of topic relevance. If you’re interested you can read some recent postings here:

Anyhow, I have a few fun things coming up from my travels that I will post here. It just takes time to upload photos, write things out, proofread (never my strongest skill), and so on. So, hang tight, and I hope to be back on a somewhat regular cadence soon.

Thanks!