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Orange Grove
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The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013)
One day, while gathering bamboo stalks in the forest, a farmer is amazed to find a mysterious sprout that grows incredibly fast right before his eyes. The plant flowers and opens to reveal a tiny little girl inside of the flower, whom the farmer believes was sent from heaven for him to take care of, so he takes the tiny girl home with him. Once home, the farmer’s wife holds the little forest nymph and she turns into a baby, which the couple care for. They, with the help of the neighborhood children, name her Princess Takenoko (“Little Bamboo”). Their baby grows fast, and before they know it, she is…
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New Sennelier Oil Pastels!
My daughter bought me new Sennelier pastels for my birthday a couple of weeks ago and I just love their smooth texture and beautiful colors! Sennelier is regarded as one of the best brands of oil pastels, and one of my favorite oil pastel artists, Misako Flodin, uses them in her drawing videos, so I was very excited to try them out. There’s a world of difference between using good quality oil pastels and cheaper brands, as I’ve learned over the years, and I can already tell that this is going to be one of my favorites, if not my very favorite brand. I haven’t been able to draw much…
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Tokyo Story (1953)
In Tokyo Story, an aging couple take a trip from their city of Onomichi to Tokyo to visit their adult children and grandchildren. The movie opens with scenes of every day life in Onomichi: ships passing, children walking to school, and a train chugging along at the base of the mountains. In the Hirayama house, the aging couple are getting ready for a trip to visit their two oldest children, Kōichi who is a physician, Shige who is a hairdresser, and their widowed daughter-in-law, Noriko, who was married to their middle son, Shōji. Their youngest daughter, a teacher named Kyōko, lives with them and helps them get ready. The opening scenes…
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Ocean Waves (1993)
Ocean Waves is a coming of age tale about a student named Rikako Muto who transfers to a new high school. Rikako is talented in academics and sport, but comes off as arrogant to many of the students at her new school. However one of her classmates, Taku, thinks that Rikako is unhappy after leaving Tokyo. Taku gets entangled in Rikako’s life after Taku lends her ¥60,000, which she fails to promptly repay. When Taku gets a phone call from Rikako’s friend Yumi, who is stressed because Rikako tricked Yumi into getting a plane ticket (which was paid for with Taku’s money) for a concert when the real destination was…
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Prairie Moon Friends: Deer 3
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Frank Lloyd Wright Allen House, Wichita, Kansas
Inspired in part by the prairie landscape of the region and in part by Japanese architecture (he was also working on the Imperial Hotel in Japan at the time), Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style Allen House was designed in 1915 and built in 1917 for Henry J. and Elsie Allen. The house is located in the historic College Hill neighborhood in Wichita Kansas at 255 N. Roosevelt, Wichita, KS. Get tickets and tour dates and times at the FLW Allen House site here.
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Ran (1985)
Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (乱, meaning “chaos” in Japanese), an epic film inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear, tells the story of an elderly warlord, Lord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai), who decides to retire and give his empire to his three sons: the eldest, Taro (Akira Terao), who is to rule, his second son Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu), and his third Saburo (Daisuke Ryu). Hidetora’s announcement of this takes place in the opening scene on a idyllic day in the mountains with his sons, his men, lords from neighboring lands, and the fool. Hidetora envisions that his sons will rule as a strong unit, giving an example of three arrows and how they…
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Onyx Cave, Eureka Springs, Arkansas
Just six miles east of Eureka Springs is Onyx Cave, a flowstone cave which opened in 1893 as Arkansas’s first show cave. Flowstone is also known as “cave onyx,” which is not the same as onyx. Two of its most notable cave formations are the Dragon and the Elephant.
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Eureka Springs, Arkansas
