5-6-2011

Have you ever learned about something which immediately made you question how you've made it so far though life without knowing about this information? I'm not saying it's quite as big a deal as electricity, or fire, or how to download music from the internet, but I genuinely don't know how I've never known about hobo pie irons. They're like the keys to a whole new universe of varieties of junk food...that are all as much fun to make as they are bad for you (which by default makes them delicious). You pretty much put whatever you want in it (in this case sugar, cinnamon, and apple pie filling), stick the whole thing in burning hot coals, and it comes out as a smokey little fire grilled sandwich. You can pretty much put anything inside of it, play around with burning things for few minutes, and it will come out amazing. So yeah, my Friday night was entirely devoted to doing 12 year old boy stuff like building fires with friends, eating way too much junk food, and finding giant night crawlers in my yard. Just wait until summer is actually here.

5-5-2011

Yay! It's the fifth of May and it's starting to look like summer might be thinking about actually happening soon. For some reason, I really liked seeing the last wood pannel station waggon still on the road so I took a bunch of pictures of it. As much as everyone else is probably sick of them, I also really like seeing pictures of mushrooms. I look at pictures like this before bed every night as I drift off to sleep.

5-4-2011

Filthy running legs.

It's not a dream. Since we did such a good job running tonight, Nicole made cupcakes to maintain the caloric status quo.

5-3-2011

This has been a very successful season of finding morels for us, and it's not even that far along yet. The grey ones are just now starting to come up, and today we found more "pecker heads" (I just want to point out that I'm uncomfortable with this term), than we knew what to do with. Actually, we had a pretty good great incredible idea of what to do with them. The idea required cooking four pans at once, Nicole's fancy apron, and a naked white pizza (that Nicole couldn't resist eating a piece of in the car). Please welcome Best Thing I Ever Ate Epic Mushroom Mealtime How Expensive Would This Be in a Restaurant Pizza.

5-2-2011

The weird floaty stuff in kombucha is kind of scary sometimes. I drank it anyway.

5-1-2011

Yeah, you may be sick of me posting pictures of mushrooms all the time, but the only other thing I really did all day was try on running shorts, and I promise you would be a lot more sick from pictures of that than of tiny mushrooms. I try my best but I really just post pictures of whatever random things I see each day, and it's not like I stumble across leprechauns hanging out in the woods all the time. Besides, these are the grey variety and I think they're the coolest and best looking ones.

Speaking of best, we realized that through all of our Cheeseburger Tour documentation, we never really devoted a post to Swensons. Swensons is why we started doing Cheeseburger Tour in the first place, and it will always be our favorite "drive up and people run to your car" cheeseburger place no matter what. I love fried food like Nicole loves cotton candy, and I've given my heart to these potato teasers. Meaning, these bites of deep fried cheese, potato, and jalapeno pepper will someday give me a heart attack. To help them along in their cause are two allies...the plain double cheeseburger, and the two special sauce possessing Gally Boy. You can tell which one is the Gally Boy in the bag because they stick an olive into it. When I die from Swensons, I want them to stick an olive into my casket.

4-30-2011

We thought today would be a good day to shoot film cameras. Nicole decided to try out the Nikon FG that I got for $5 for the first time, and I used my grandfather's Leica M4. No matter which cameras we use, we always just end up taking pictures of our cats doing stuff like and making funny faces. Nicole was using a macro lens, so she could get super close to things to take closeup shots of cool stuff like morels. I just take pictures of Nicole. I wouldn't mind if all we ever do is hunt for mushrooms and wear funny headbands while taking pictures in the woods forever. We did find the biggest snapping turtle I've ever seen in my life. Nicole took pictures of it while in her picture taking stance. We keep secrets.

Ok, so we don't just go mushroom hunting all the time. We also go to carnivals and fairs. Especially if there are appearances by the Mantua Paotato (anarchy?) Queen, brides in a monster truck, and games. The Geauga County Maple Festival has all of this in celebration of maple syrup, maple sugar candy, and deep fried foods on sticks. I love everything about this. Nicole likes elephant ears, lemonade, and classy looking danger. For some strange reason, no one really wanted the sausage. This is why I shoot color film. Speaking of anarchy earlier, I guess smoking pipes is punk rock. Ok, I took too many pictures that I can't explain well. The only thing to know is that the very best thing about the whole festival is real maple cotton candy. If you've ever read my blog before, you know how Nicole feels about cotton candy. She loves it almost as much as I love this ring.

Another thing that I love is fire. We haven't built a fire in our back yard in years, but we had friends over to have fun and burn up the mountain of sticks that have been living on my deck for all those years since the last time we built a fire. I was pretty happy about burning sticks and made Nicole take weird pictures of me to celebrate.

4-29-2011

Nicole and I are too fancy even for fancy restaurants. From now on, we only eat at ristorantes. Ristorantes are the direct opposite of furniture movers who some how have a liquor licence. Even though I appreciate the honesty that they'll be tanked the whole time they're moving your sofa, and that they're friendly enough to invite you to "comeenjoy diningroom," this just seems like a bad idea to me.

4-28-2011

Are you hungry? Would you like some turkey before we go mushroom hunting? Mushroom hunting spots are top secret, but I'll let you in on some privileged information...we go to a tropical island with palm trees to find them. I found this weird looking shriveled up one all by myself. This is a big deal, because sometimes they're super hard to find (can you see it?), and I'm pretty sure I step on more than I find. Even Nicole is surprised to find them sometimes and she's much better at it than I am. She found these and I found this. Once you spot one, it's a lot easier though because they tend to grow in teams. I capture their teams. Have you seen Avatar? I captured the giant mushroom equivalent of "home tree" and brought it home to introduce the giant Mushroom to the big mushroom we found. This is what our mushroom cache currently looks like and we've already eaten two trays worth.

4-27-2011

We all know that it's adorable, but is suicidal bunny cake vegetarian?

4-26-2011

I'm sorry if my readership (all two of you) is getting sick of seeing pictures of mushrooms, but for the rest of morel season, that's pretty much all I'm doing with my freetime other than running (which I'm sure you're also sick of seeing pictures of).

4-25-2011

I got running stuff for running stuff.

4-24-2011

I go to church a handful of times a year. Today is one of those big exciting days. Baby Lily was about as excited to go as I was. At least it was a pretty walk after we parked. I think we parked somewhere over there by Wolverine. I'm glad this didn't happen to our car. After church, we went here for our more common Sunday ritual of b-b-br-br-br-brunch. Baby Lily was also very happy about Easter brunch. She showed off her baby bunny teeth and told us all about the religious history of the holiday while dressed as the pope. My mom really wanted this picture. Then she wanted a nap while we made an ill-fated trip to furniture Costco. Baby Lily is too cool for Costco. I think this says something political, but I'm not quite sure what. I know that this says the cheesesteak place we wanted to try was closed for Easter. Then is was back in the car for a long long drive home where we only stopped at magical rest stops where children hover to appreciate the indigenous wildlife.

4-23-2011

After a few miles of huffing and puffing under pretty bridges, we went to this place for gourmet perogies (I'm not sure how gourmet you can actually make a perogie, but they took it as far as it would go). We didn't go to become Freemasons, but we did the next best thing. We took Baby Lily to go see the Crayola Factory for the first time. Beyond lots of crayons and paper to color on, they give you these tokens that you can put into various machines and get supplies out of for fun crafty projects. Baby Lily's hand print came out pretty well, but her foot print came out a little funny looking. She wanted to make a dental mold, but she doesn't have enough teeth yet. So we taught her how to vandalize (clear) walls and crawl though (colorful) sewers without faceplaning instead. She was only good a the first part. She's very good at waving, unlike my mom who isn't so good at taking pictures. There was a bunch of informational stuff like stories about racist crayons and the one hundred billionth crayon (pictured here), and the biggest crayon in the world, but I really just looked at all of the colors and didn't read that much. There were colors everywhere. Even places where they're too old to be. Speaking of out of place things, have you ever been to Ferrari church? Or had good Thai food (I ordered for the name alone) in the middle of nowhere? Nicole likes Thai food, but she likes eating mushrooms better. I like eating cheesecake my sister made. Bunny likes eating Baby Lily.