Here's one that gave me some trouble! On the old wood, I kept seeing the first kanji as 木 tree topped with a ⺮ bamboo crown, but no such character exists! The top radical is actually 此 (archaic but it means "this" or "current"; it's the こ in この・ここ・これ). The name is 柴田 Shibata (or rarely Shida, Shiba, Shihada, or Shinoda).
柴 is read しば, サイ, or シ. It means brushwood or firewood. You probably know it from the dog breed 柴犬 [しばいぬ or しばけん] Shiba Inu. The name comes from their use in hunting, to flush game out of the brush.
田 is read た or デン. It means rice field or rice paddy.
(FWIW, my Shiba mix has *zero* drive to hunt small animals. He might actually be scared of them. Straight up pretends he can't see them, even cats and rats and giant toads. He will absolutely hunt a bug though. And he is very ineffective at it! Which is good because I don't want to deal with what happens if he should ever catch that bee.)
@shreeky any excuse to talk about my dog! Here is the boy himself! Insisting I keep the door open so he can gaze longingly outside and contemplate his kingdom.
He is generally not a successful hunter, but he did once catch a beetle after stalking it for ages. He took a single bite, then spit the mangled corpse out in disgust and looked up at me reproachfully, as if to say, “How could you let me eat something like that?”
He didn’t stop chasing bugs, but now he does it with less élan. He mostly snaps at the air around them—maybe because he doesn’t want to eat them so much as to scare them off, or maybe because (we think) he might not see super well. He had a rough start to life and still has a lot of difficulties but he is a perfect child and we love him so much.
