During a cold, afternoon walk I saw a few sakura in bloom. I think it’s still around one percent. Maybe in another week it will get closer to full bloom. Here are a few today. The first two were shot in macro mode up really close. I love how that feature works. The warmer weather should rebound tomorrow.

Because of last week’s earthquake, and the sudden extreme cold (it snowed yesterday!) Tokyo has been on a possible power shortage alert. While peak usage reached 103% I think there were no power failures though.

In other news, my Facebook account has been disabled for the fourth time! Again, there was no explanation, and no mention of violations. I received a code on my iPhone, then uploaded a photo and ID to verify identity yesterday. Now I’m just waiting. It’s annoying because it cuts me off from various friends and also disables my Messenger account. Anyway, by now people know how to reach me otherwise (email, iMessage, LINE, WhatsApp, and text to my U.S. number too).

I’d really like to just get away from Facebook, but the problem is everybody has accounts there, and people are resistant to creating new general social network accounts elsewhere. And if I post miscellaneous tidbits of this and that to my blog it would swamp subscribers. On the plus side, it’s felt nice and quiet (except for Pao’s hyper-reactivity to sounds outside) and I could relax and get more work done.