6-9-2011

I've been doing this post a picture every day thing every day for like every day. So some days you just have to deal with pictures of my cats Sienna and Mushroom running around the house and fighting. That's all I got.

6-8-2011

Summer time is here for sure now. Dinner and drinks with friends on one of our favorite patios followed by warm night time walking. I totally blew the focus on this, but this is a blurry kitty sized deer baby. Above is where little kids go to make out at night in our neighborhood.

6-7-2011

I make a conscious effort to live my life as stress and care free as possible. Sometimes days like today make that a pretty difficult task to accomplish, so I'm pretty much alright with just sitting on my couch in the dark and trying to hide from real life for the evening.

6-6-2011

So it's taken me a few days to calm down enough to talk (blog) about this, but the other night my pepper plants were ravaged. Apparently their rapid and unprecedented growth attracted a little too much attention from the shadier residents of my neighborhood (we primarily suspect the groundhog, but various deer are also now on the No Fly List). Since I couldn't just relocate the plants inside our front window (our cats chew plant leaves like tobacco), the only "logical" place to put them is on the roof right? But roofs are slanted, so I had to engineer and manufacture an appropriately angled base for them to live on. This involved an iPhone app to determine the pitch and a lot of sawing and screwing last night. Pause. I believe in fancy architectural terms, I just built a "terrace addition" on to my house. I may actually see returns on the over all real estate value of this construction investment. Since most of the buds that I was so proud of were gobbled up, I also purchased another habanero pepper plan to try and recover from the losses. Naturally this new plant is named War Machine.

Exactly one year ago, I posted about how I'm weird and only wear super obscure jeans from Japan. In honor of these jeans' birthday, I'm posting about how I refuse to machine wash them and only wash them by hand in the bathtub. That water looks disgusting I know, but it's not (just) filth. The loose indigo they were dyed with falls off and oxidizes to turn the water this color. At least that's what the internet told me and I'm going with it.

6-5-2011

Whenever I have to wake up for something at an outrageously early time in the morning, I always think that it feels like getting up to go fishing when I was a little kid. So when I had to wake up at an outrageously early time this morning, it was pretty awesome that it was to actually go fishing this time. This is a large mouth bass' large mouth. Whenever I catch a fish it feels pretty much exactly like this YouTube video. This fish is bu'iful. We also caught a much larger species of fish. Actually, this one was pretty huge. Totally unrelated to anything, this makes me like CVS and look, a baby deer.

Totally unrelated to baby deer (I hope) are tacos. If you've read my blog (a lot) before, you probably already know that greasy, street food tacos are my favorite food pretty much ever. I always try and find them wherever I go when I'm out of town because Cleveland apparently has a ban on authentic tacos. For a while now, I've heard rumors of such tacos in Akron, but I never investigated due to my non-meat eating. Today, my curiosity overcame my desire to be healthy and we went searching for taco trucks. Holy OMG this-is-a-big-deal. I though I pretty much had to fly to Arizona for good tacos with corn tortillas, cilantro, onions, lime and real salsas. Driving to Akron is way cheaper. This view is pretty much all I ever want to see. I want tacos right now.

Since we were already past the boundaries of our typical habitat (who am I kidding...we go everywhere all the time anyway), we went a little further to visit Nicole's parents and pick up some mouse traps. We have the strong suspicion that there's a mouse in our house and possibly its children and spouse. We aren't excited about the prospect of playing exterminator, but to prepare us, Nicole's dad took us to visit his barn mouse and mouse babies. I was mad that a mouse decided to move into garage without paying rent at first, but these are kind of cute and I really don't want to kill things that look like this...so maybe they'll just go away.

After leaving Nicole's parents we continued our insatiable quest for tacos, which brought us here. Beyond "charming" decor, and fancy spiced chips and really hot salsa this place gets points for having horchata (another thing which doesn't seem to exist anywhere in Cleveland). I don't know if anyone has ever overdosed on grilled meat and tortillas, but I gave it my best shot to try and be the first.

More totally unrelated things, I figured out how to make my nerd shoes even nerdier, and look at the veins popping out of my bony arms! Why am I being so butch and building things with my bare hands? I'll show you tomorrow.

6-4-2011

Every weekend requires eating breakfast somewhere. Today, we ate at Jim's Open Kitchen which is called that for a pretty obvious reason. Now yesterday I said that the main picture was for a reason. The reason wasn't that I ate the crayfish though. The reason is because today we're going creek hiking and crayfish hunting with friends. So expect lots of pictures of crayfish. Some have interesting markings. All of them like to give one claw crayfish high fives though. Actually, they seem to lose their claws kind of a lot. I think it's pretty forgetful of them to accidentally misplace an appendage, but you don't have to feel bad for them; they can grow little replacement ones. Look how quickly it grew back!. We found huge ones like this one and tiny stuff like this clear shell from an insect molting and this baby butterfly. We also found tons of gross leeches but made sure that they didn't find us. I wore my new nerd shoes, which I'm well aware make me look ridiculous, but I think they're the best thing ever for walking on wet rocks. So this post is going to get a little "Discover Channel when the pack of lions eat the poor cute zebra baby" now, so sorry in advance if you're squeamish. I think it's cool. So as we were walking, I saw a weird fish pointed diagonally coming straight at me over a rock. I'm not an expert on fish propulsion, but I didn't think that they're able to move this way. As I got closer, I saw that it was a water snake dragging a catfish out of the water. The catfish was almost as big as the snake, but it didn't care and really wanted to eat it even though it couldn't figure out how to fit the fish into its mouth. I think we watched it try for about an hour while we built a corral for the biggest crayfish we caught. Then we let them go home. Here' are some pretty waterfall pictures to make up for the snake and catfish. Pretty. I made the waterfall less pretty. On the way back though the woods, I used this waterfall as inspiration and peed on the rocks. Oh yeah, we saw a giant carp (in the creek not my pee), but I could only get a picture of its scales.

Hiking and creek walking are some of my favorite summer time activities...almost as much as drinking gin and tonics on a patio. Another activity that we're continuing into summer is Cheeseburger Tour. This one was made out of buffalo and I promise it tasted better than it looks. The ultimate activity for this summer is Jeni's Ice cream though (yeah, it's an activity now not a place). I think I have a picture of Nicole eating ice cream from every weekend for the past month. To keep things interesting, they're getting bigger and bigger.

6-3-2011

So what kind of idiot eats way too much at a Chinese buffet then runs five and a half miles? The same idiot that's too fat and tired to write a good blog right now. So yea, Chinese buffet...the main picture will hopefully make more sense tomorrow, but this picture doesn't really require that much explanation. They have a 25cent gumball machine full of cheap plastic toys that I've been collecting on my desk. Today I got all the ones that I wanted (plus a rubber band gun that doesn't really work, but kind of rules as a concept). On the topic of running, in less than two months, I've run this many miles. I'm pretty proud of myself. I don't know if I'm exactly "proud" of these new shoes I got today considering I was kind of making fun of them on 1-26-11, but I'm pretty excited to try them out for hiking and eventually running. Ok, I'm going to go be lazy now. Bye.

6-2-2011

Supposedly there have been sightings of a black bear around where I live. I say supposedly because I feel it necessary to personally confirm seeing the bear first hand...and possibly pet it. So tonight we went searching in the woods to catch the bear* or at least find one of its prints.** Clearly we were successful.

We were also successful in collecting a hand full of worms to go fishing with. Unfortunately, catfish are apparently more elusive than bears.

* This may not actually be a bear. There's a chance that it might be a wood frog pretending to be a bear.
** This raccoon print was definitely made by a bear.

6-1-2011

After a full year and five months, I think any remaining delusions of my non-meat eating are on their very last legs. I still lie to myself and order vegetarian things like mushroom sandwiches, but I allow them to put bacon on it. Amazing bacon. I want another one right now.

Speaking of vegetables, my pepper plants are starting to grow little buds. I think this is the first time that I've ever intentionally grown anything that's progressed this far. One time we had potatoes that grew roots in our cupboard, but I don't think that those count. What definitely counts is the cat grass that Nicole has been growing (which pretty much grew over night) so the cats can graze like little cows.

5-31-2011

So I've been waking up every single morning, driving down the exact same highway, parking in the exact same lot, and working in the exact same building every weekday for five straight years today. I would say sitting in the exact same seat, but I moved offices once (though I might have brought my chair with me actually). As a prize, I got myself a fat free frozen yogurt kids cone. This means a few things:
1) I'm really lame.
2) I'm getting really old.
3) Baskin Robbins doesn't sell alcohol.

5-30-2011

So yesterday I mentioned my love of 3d animated children's movies. I also posted a picture of my friend Joel, who essentially is Poe from Kung Fu Panda. The only logical result of this combination would be to have an interactive Kung Fu Panda marathon. We watched the first movie and Nicole cut up green onions when they cut up green onions in the movie, and we all ate noodles along with the movie. Then we immediately when to see Kung Fu Panda 2 at the theater, but I didn't take any pictures because that would be weird (I feel like I've written this all before like two days ago).

Since today is Memorial Day, I think the only right thing to do as an American is to have the first barbecue of the summer. I really love grilling things, but didn't really cook out all last year, because vegetarian barbecues kind of just aren't worth it. Now we haven't really been doing Cheeseburger Tour much recently (which is probably a good thing), but that's our excuse for me eating meat two days in a row (which is probably a great thing). Nicole made fancy looking caprese cheeseburgers, but I think raw tomatoes are gross, so I just took pictures of them and ate cheese on mine. I don't think giant marshmallows are gross at all. Especially when they're used as an ingredient in next level s'mores. I think I could probably just use a hobo pie iron to cook all of my food for the rest of my life and be alright with that.

5-29-2011

A great perk of "fair season" is being able to sleep in late then go eat carnival food for breakfast. Since we've been running a lot, Nicole has been encouraging me to eat meat...which means I get to eat all the horrible-for-you delicious meat things that I've been avoiding for the past year and a half (and buy food from bored Kanye West). I swear we live like kids with no parents. This is breakfast. There was also a parade for breakfast. This is Lee Unkrich and an Oscar that he won for directing Toy Story 3. He also directed Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo. If you know how much of a nerd I am about 3d animated children's movies, you can safely assume that this was like seeing a Bigfoot for me. This fireman looks like he would be good at editing. These firemen throw candy. Nicole doesn't like this type of candy that hit her in the shoulder, so she literally threw it back at the parade people. Here's another picture of (semi-dangerous) candy throwing. Nicole does like ice cream, but that would have been way funnier for her to throw at the parade people. I like carnival game people. Walking down the row of game stations was a little bit like walking down a row of cages at the zoo...but for interesting people. Also awesome...ride people and this lady's shirt. The game stations were lined down a path made out of straw and mud (that kind of smelled like the zoo too), so Nicole thought it would be a good idea to wash her shoes in a river by the waterfall. Also a good idea, having a girl dancing on a stripper pole for little kids to watch, and these little cars. Speaking of going places in cars, this picture segues well into where we went tonight.

I feel like all of my friends work at tattoo shops. This is Jesse, and today is his shop's three year anniversary party. I think the theme of said party was Icing each other. Since I can't explain frat party-eqsque drinking games nearly as eloquently as Wikipedia, you can read about the game here if you don't know what it is. Long story short, if someone surprises you with Smirnoff Ice, you have to get down on one knee and drink the whole thing as punishment. I would rather get shot in the face with silly string or take a nap in a creepy alleyway (which my friend Pete actually comes from Florida once a year to do in this one specifically). Speaking of friends, if the four of you that actually read this blog (yeah, we're up to four now!) ever wonder how handsome the rest your fellow readership looks, you'll be glad to know that John is now helping to raise standards. Helping to lower quality of life standards, here's a picture of a crime in progress. We kidnapped Snoop Dogg.

5-28-2011

This is a long weekend, so the schedules get all weird for us. Weird like fancy brunch on a Saturday and having cookies for breakfast (actually, that's not so weird). These porn-y sake glasses at an antique store street sale are kind of weird, but it was way weirder listening to old people talking about them. All of this pales in comparison to the weird/awesomeness of this lady's hair.

I like hiking and taking nature pictures of things like frogs and birds and flying bugs and turtles and other flying bugs and snakes. We actually just went out looking for snakes because I'm apparently building a collection of pictures them with their tongues out, but we were excited to find all the other creatures too. The turtle was especially happy to find Nicole because it was stuck between train tracks, and Nicole was willing to save its life and put it back into the water (which is something she's done on these same exact train tracks for a baby goose on 4-25-2010).

We also did a bunch of other stuff that I didn't take pictures of, like go to a movie (though I think it would be fun to take pictures of people's reactions to things while they're watching a movie). I guess watching Thor makes you hungry for junk food, because on the way home Nicole and I both wanted cookies for dinner at one in the morning. The Happy Meal toy was just because the window lady was nice (and probably thought we were crazy), and is also foreshadowing the next movie we're going to go see.

By the way, I had to research this, so I figured I would put it on here. My main picture today is a Six-Spotted Green Tiger Beetle. Its mouth parts cross over each other like scissors. You can read about it here. It's cool.

5-27-2011

Have I ever mentioned that I live in the Midwest?