i'm trying, i really am

I think that a couple of those posts had a lot of duplicate photos - I was trying to get them up quickly and didn't take much time to check.  I have hundreds of mediocre photos to sort through to try to find the better ones, so I'm thinking maybe I should be a little more selective and spend the time writing rather than just posting as many photos as possible.

To keep on schedule, I should be running today, but that long walk two nights ago on my search for sumiyoshi taisha pissed off my left foot, and it's still complaining, so even though I see the mileage going way down in the weeks to come, I really can't risk an injury today.  And naturally, today the weather is appropriately perfect for a long run.  Aaargh.
Instead, it's early afternoon on Friday, I'm airing out the futon again, and drying some laundry on the roof.  Clothes dryers are pretty unusual here - there's one in the laundromat down the street, but it's ridiculously expensive.  I'm not sure if it's an electricity thing, or if it's just painfully obvious how unnecessary they are, but most people don't use dryers.  Actually, after having talked to another tenant (from Australia, I think),  I'm getting the feeling that we're the weird ones for using dryers most of the time.  Huh.  

The air in Osaka isn't the cleanest, as far as I can tell.  It seems smoggy some days, a little worse than Boston is most of the time.   Could just be the weather, though - it is pretty humid here even now, though the rainy season doesn't seem to have started yet.  I don't think I'd want to hang my laundry out on my own back porch, considering the traffic that passes by on Lowell street all the time. But, if I lived in a place with a little more distance from car exhaust, I would definitely do this at home.  There is something hypnotic about standing in the middle of a bunch of fabric while it flutters in the wind.

The guest house building is 3 stories tall, with a common room on the roof.  The clothes lines are outside its door.

These are from a much sunnier day last week - I'm less than a couple of miles away from Shitennoji, which I think I've already mentioned a few times on Facebook, anyway.  I like to go to temples at night, but it is good to go during the day too - there are always a lot of people out even on weekdays, and everything's not closed up like it is at night.

...and the inevitable photo proving that I really am here and not just lifting these from someone else's life.