8-16-2011

A mandatory day off from running means I need to do something fun to distract myself from wanting to be outside. What's more fun and distracting from doing something healthy than stuffing my face with pizza and pasta? At least these were both exciting and mushroom-themed foods. The pasta had locally harvested chantrelle mushrooms, and the pizza had truffle oil. I thought about running at dinner, so I had to get something else unhealthy and distracting. There was nothing mushroom related in the crème brûlée .

8-15-2011

My job looks coolest when it's painted so we can make it disappear.

In other (Monday pepper) news, I think I figured out why my two habanero plants had such different colored peppers. One of the plants grows red habaneros. This is a nice surprise since the tag it came with has orange ones in the picture. The peppers on the other plant, which didn't come with pictures at all, are starting to turn orange now too, but I'll save pictures of that for another day when I don't have anything interesting to post on here.

8-14-2011

This is not a carwash. and this is not the tide coming in. This is what Nicole and I go though to get Sunday breakfast. If we went to church as often as we go to breakfast on Sundays, we would probably be a lot better people. And a lot healthier. We go to breakfast a lot. And drink lots of coffee.

We also went to see my friends at a craft show. After my rant the other day about art walks, I should point out that I think group craft shows are a much better idea. Attracting a big mob of people to an organized event of small, independent sellers is probably the best way to sell stuff like this. Especially if the sellers are actually talented and have cup cakes. I don't think there's any exhibition format best suited to sell awkward yoga in the middle of the room though.

8-13-2011

After five hundred and eighty-nine days of posting weird pictures, it's probably pretty clear and Nicole and I live a pretty odd lifestyle and do a lot of strange stuff. As a matter of fact, we do so much strange stuff that it's kind of hard to out do ourselves with new life experiences to post on here. Today, I think we out did ourselves. Like we out did the whole blog. I've painted all kinds of atypical stuff, from shoes to boxcars to rocks, but I've never even though about painting a belly full of baby. Much less paint said belly to look like a football helmet. There really isn't much I can write to describe the experience other than that as soon it even presented itself as a possibility of happening, I knew it was something that I've never known I wanted to do so badly my whole life. Almost done. These are pretty awesome parents. Greatest dad.

I'm not quite sure how a day can get any better from such a high point, but attempting to at least keep things as awesome as possible, we decided to go downtown and look for parking for a few hours. When Nicole gets frustrated about not finding parking, she tends to knock over buildings until the police show up. She's actually really strong. Ok, so only part of this story is true. We actually didn't go downtown just to find a parking space. We really went to try out a new ramen restaurant. We tried to go there before, but they have really weird hours. At least they have very good food and a nice view.

8-12-2011

Maybe it's just the elitist, art school snob in me, but nothing makes me feel like a total yuppie more than going to an "art walk." Well, maybe shopping at Trader Joe's, but this is pretty up there too. In any case, since my friend Paul had new work I hadn't seen before hanging in a restaurantbar, Nicole and I decided to go here instead of the same place we went last Friday night (not a Katy Perry reference). Paul is by far one of my favorite local painters. Look how awesome this little stuff is, and that's just a tiny detail of one of many big awesome paintings. Paul deserves big awesome shows in big awesome galleries. I think that's my main contention with "art walks." They're too democratic. They either put good artists in...um...less than ideal spaces, like dark bars where you have to stand next to people while they eat to look at things. Or they put a bunch of really really crappy work in "galleries" since the individual artists wouldn't ever be able to attract a viewership on their own. I'm a hater. I know. I do like the shopping aspect of art walks though, and I managed to find the kind of art that I like. This is the kind of art that Nicole likes. This is a sculpture of me and this is a sculpture of Nicole. This is a phone call I totally did not expect to have to make tonight.

8-11-2011

Remember when I used to not eat meat? Yeah, I kind of forgot about that too recently. Well my friend Antoinette stopped around the same time as I did, and hadn't eaten a cheeseburger since way before that. Pretty much ever since we stopped eating meat, we started talking about "breaking veg" and eating cheeseburgers together. This was kind of a big deal and very very awesome. The End.

Pepper update: Look how orange they got over night! They look so cool half ripe like this.

I always write about how pretty the places we run are, but how I can never take pictures. Well tonight, we went to a new place where I'm sure we'll be running a lot really soon, and I did have my camera. I can't wait to be looking at this while I'm hyperventilating.

8-10-2011

I found this creepy little monster shell on my way back from lunch. Here's a cropped close up to really show off the creepy.

P.s. I decided to keep him as a pet in my office.

I have bonus pictures. Mostly because my peppers are turning orange.
See, orange.
Turning orange.
Peppers.

Now I pretty much orchestrate my entire life so I can live like a perpetual twelve-year-old as much as possible, but owning a house pretty much requires doing grown-up things which work directly against my preferred lifestyle. Grown-up stuff sucks...except for days like today. We "discovered" a large yellow jacket nest in our font yard while mowing. The only mature and responsible thing to do is to pour gasoline down the hole to thoroughly soak the nest before setting the wasps on fire. This is the first "yard work" I've really enjoyed doing since buying the house. And this is what Nicole did with the foraged-though-the-poison-ivy berries from the weekend. It was a very good night.

8-9-2011

Lightning Bolt!
Lightning Bolt!
Lightning Bolt!
Death.*

*YouTube reference for less nerdy people.

8-8-2011

Running 10 kilometers for my "normal" runs feels great mentally, but I've never beat my paws up this much in my entire life. I even have mesh tan marks from from my Vibrams.

8-7-2011

Brunchday. On an excellent tip from Friday night, we tried out a new cafe named after both my favorite Harry Potter character and species of moth. Eating crepes and croissants all morning at sidewalk cafes is pretty much dress rehearsal for vacation this year. This one even had random opera singer street performers. Classy. Also classy were these kids and this car. I guess there was some sort of street festival going on. I'm not sure if this cop was considering getting a feather braided into his hair or arresting people for sitting on the sidewalk.

It's still berry picking season.

In case I haven't been posting enough creepy insect pictures, here's a fishfly that hitchhiked on our car home from dinner. There isn't a lot of information about them on the internet, but we did read that they're closely related to the dobsonfly. The dobsonfly is pretty rare to see in the wild since they only live for a week. Additionally, they can bite hard enough to draw blood at this size (about two inches long). I don't know if fishflies bite too or not, but for what it's worth, I thought that this was a dobsonfly while I was taking pictures of it and was scared the whole time.

8-6-2011

Every year, the suburb we live in attracts international attention with its festival celebrating multiple offspring pregnancies. They have a parade that involves candy throwing, reason enough to attend on its own, but Nicole and I have gone every year since moving here to watch the spectacle. It's become a tradition.

What's a parade without bagpipes right?
Mobs of twins.
Not all of them want to be there.
This costume(?) was my favorite.
It's a little like your eyeballs are drunk...everywhere you look...everything is twice.
It's a little creepy and a bit disconcerting.
This is fun though right?
They look like they're having fun.
They definitely are.
I'm not sure I want to know what they consider as fun.
This dude totally caught me.
I took pictures of these guys last year.

Beyond the parade, carnival lemonade is one of Nicole's favorite aspects of whole deal. If you've read my blog before, you know that we're pretty much on a diet of fair food as much as possible for the whole summer. Nicole encouraged us into embarassing breakfast even by our standards. Now lots of random pictures...I found twin poisonous mushrooms, and shot clowns in the mouth. I didn't ride any rides though. Nicole made new friends. I invaded a bus yard.

Also an annual tradition for us, wild blackberry season coincides with twin madness. We go foraging to pick berries. This looks harmless, but Nicole is really standing in a healthy field of poison ivy. She's very brave and daring when it comes to berries. I stay away from poison anything, and chase bugs around to take their portrait. The berry picking excursion was worth it though.

After some naptime, we went back for equally embarrassing vegetarian dinner. I'm a huge fan of carnival ride and carnival game people, but I'm a bigger fan of fireworks. Nicole and I ate key lime pie custard while we waited for it to get dark. Dark enough for glowing things like fireworks. We made sure to get close enough that we could see them launching right in front of us. The End.

8-5-2011

Nicole and I go all of the places and do all of the stuff. So I get pretty excited when we get invited to go to a place I don't usually go to sit by the water, eat food, and party all night at a place I hadn't even heard of before.

P.s. I want a boat.

8-4-2011

I know I post a lot about my peppers, but it's because I'm really excited that they're actually growing. I've never successfully grown anything before, and they're a ton of work for something so little. In any case, my very first orange Thai pepper if finally all the way ripe, and there are already more on the way! Since this marks the birth of my first pepper baby, I thought the only appropriate thing to do would be to eat it...raw. The picture above pretty well summarizes the experience (other than the gallon of milk I drowned myself in immediately after the shot). Hot peppers are hot.

My Thai pepper was the only really ripe pepper so far, but since some of my habaneros had some weird looking spots on them and the internet told me that you can still eat them when they're green, I decided to make something. Nicole got fresh avocados and I chopped up my green habaneros, a bunch of garlic, onions, cilantro, and lime juice, and made fresh, unripe habanero guacamole. I actually "cooked" something! (even though all the ingredients were raw and there was no actual cooking involved)

8-3-2011

Minivans this outrageous can only be grown in the suburbs.