Around the neighborhood

 A frequent sight these days, a survey crew is preparing for construction work on the sidewalk near Yaotome station, which you can see in the distance.

 This is the way that the time schedules are displayed on the Yaotome station platform. People will take photos of the schedule with their keitai, cell phone. Most keitai in Japan have a setting on the camera called Business. This function analyzes the content of a picture and tries to straighten out the lines. If you take a picture of a schedule with this function, the picture is altered so that all the lines of data are alined even though you took the picture at an angle. It is pretty neat.

 Here a crew has started work on repairing the damage to the local photo shop.

 Beyond the torii of the little shrine between my condo and the main road, you can just see some of the scaffolding around the back of the building that holds our Seiyu supermarket, and a number of other stores, as well as a skating rink.

 Even though the rainy season is still in full force, the fruit trees seem to think that it is summer.

In the Seiyu complex of buildings, the store nearest the street is a large size clothing store, and it is the first one to be open for business again. Work seems to be progressing rapidly on the rest of the complex but there is still no official indication as to when things will reopen. We are especially interested in the supermarket because we now have to do all of our shopping at Ito Yokado and Silva in Izumi Chuo, and they are almost two kilometers away.