5-8-2011

So this weekend, we've already been doing all of our most notable activities other that going to estate sales and antique stores (though we did get this blurry mahogany dresser from 1903 recently). Since it's Sunday, it's pretty much required that we go to (barefoot) "We're Glad We're Not Mothers Day" b-b-b-br-br-brunch. Sunday brunch is nice like a relaxing nap in the shade.

Look how pretty my yard looks. I don't just take pictures of mushrooms. Sometimes I take pictures of pretty stuff. Nicole is much better at this than I am though. Here are some pretty pictures of pretty flowers that she took. She took this picture of a squirrel and this picture of poison ivy too. Sometimes poison ivy can be pretty when it's growing all over a picturesque forest. Yeah, more taking pictures of each other in nature. We also found a ton of unexpected mushrooms. I also found this unexpected giant mushroom. It was like the mother of all the other baby mushrooms around it. So naturally, in celebration of Mothers Day, I cut its head off and took it home with me. Really we went for a drive to do more appropriate Mothers Day stuff. We took Nicole's mom to our favorite ice cream place ever. I've written about Jeni's on my blog before, but that was always in Columbus. Now there's one close enough to my house that I'll probably need an ice cream intervention by the end of the summer. I think Nicole would just enable me. After ice cream, we decided not to cook the giant giant mushroom. It got put on the side with these other special ones since I was cooking all of the rest of the unexpected mushrooms for a much more gratuitous application.

5-7-2011

We're still in the mode where all we do (other than make fires in my backyard) is go running (which is impossible to take pictures of...so you can just imagine how funny I looked after running seven miles this morning), find mushrooms in the woods, take pictures of them, and go on Cheeseburger Tour. So yeah, that's pretty much all I have pictures of. I guess this is kind of artsy and unrelated.

Today's Cheeseburger Tour is visiting Joey's South Side Burgers. We didn't know anything about this place before going there, but we thought it looked cool driving by so we figured it would be a good place to try. It is. I had an "All American" burger, and it was. Their burgers are simple, good quality beef with standard toppings...but made really well. A lot better than their onion rings, but I'm not holding that against them. I would definitely go back again.

Time for a million picutures of mushrooms:
I found these all by myself.
Nicole found this
This guy is little.
Sun beam.
Conjoined twins.
Really, they grow that way.
Hiding one.
Nicole is engaged to a mushroom.
I like how the grey ones look the best...especially when there are a lot of them.
I use my knife for scale when I find giant ones.
Bunches.
The blond ones are coming soon.

This is kind of interesting (to me anyway). You can dehydrate morels and they pretty much can last forever in their dried out state (even if they kind of look like shrunken heads.


Also, since I'm mostly shooting film in my Leica on the weekends, I took the opportunity to take a picture of my whole beloved Nikon arsenal all together.

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.