1-5-2012

When I was a little kid, I had a silver bomber jacket with an eagle patch on the sleeve. I called it my "astronaut jacket," and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Like I would probably still wear it if I still had it. Regardless of the fact that it wouldn't fit even one of my arms. Belive it or not, I now own a jacket cooler than even the astronaut jacket. For Christmas, Nicole's parents gave us running jackets made entirly out of 3M reflective magic stuff. This picture doesn't really even show how crazy bright they reflect when headlights are on you, but they're so bright that they literally stop traffic so you don't get run over by soccer moms texting eachother while drinking Starbucks in her SUVs.

1-4-2012

This is my attempt at making my evening look interesting and exotic. We really just got takeout and sat on the couch.

1-3-2012

This is self explanatory.

1-2-2012

It's the end of mini-vacation and my time off of work. Pretty soon I'll have to go back to the lifestyle where doing shots of whiskey at 8 in the morning is no longer socially acceptable. This is unfortunate. Time to leave the hotel and start the long trip back home. But first, a pit stop to use up the last of our Canadian currency. Canada was great and I even convinced a new friend to come back home with me. Say goodbye to Niagra Falls and hello again to America, land of the road tripping cat.

P.s. The above picture is of my good friend Victor driving back home the opposite way.

1-1-2012

So in 2012, I'm pretty sure this blog is going to have a lot of posts about running (and food), so please be prepared. To start the year off, I ran 10 kilometers (in honor of the metric system) along Lake Ontario (in honor of Canada). I'm kind of glad that I don't have pictures of me running very often because I tend to wear a lot of spandex and think I look pretty funny. The only thing worse would be pictures of me wearing spandex doing things other than running. That would really look funny.

Then we went to a creperie which reminded us of when we went to Paris last year. Look, another picture of Nicole eating. Here's a picture of Nicole showing us where we are. This is the kind of graffiti that I can agree with.

Look at this fancy building. It's full of funny looking men who sing strange songs to dinosaurs. Clearly, this is applicable to my interests. Also applicable to my interests were...pretty much everything in this museum. I mean really, if you know me at all you probably know what kind of embarrassing squealing came out of my face when I saw this. There was so much cool stuff everywhere that it was totally overwhelming. Nicole said it was "like they came into our lives" and it really was. I'll let you find at least three things in that picture that I've posted about before in great detail on my blog. Here's a clue. The puffball and fly agarics are two of them since they're mushrooms I've found and taken pictures of. I've never found this kind of magic mushroom before. I've also taken a picture of one of these before, but he's not as big of a deal this far north. They're more patriotic about this guy and these guys.

Nicole got to be a bear and meet a nice beaver. This is more cool stuff. I like looking at bones. These were creepy live lamprey. Speaking of bones...get ready to be really excited in...

Three...
Two...
One!!!

Saber tooth kitty. Freakin' dinosaurs! This is very exciting to nerdy people like me. I think I took pictures of all of the dinosaurs in the room, but I'm only posting some of them here. How can you not think this is the coolest thing ever though? I wish I was rich enough to have dinosaurs all around my house. Nicole wishes we were rich enough to have real silver for kitten tea party. Unfortunately, we're only this rich.

We've been a few places and seen a lot of museums, but The ROM is easily one of the coolest and best museum experiences I've ever had anywhere.

Awe, our time here is winding down and this is our last dinner in Canada. Every single thing I ate here was delicious.

12-31-2011

Even on mini-vacation, my OCD still makes me make sure I go running. At least I went to High Park to have a very scenic run to finish my 700 miles for the year (really since 4-11-11). I even ran though the park zoo and saw/smelled llamas, goats, reindeer, and a buffalo.

Toronto is really a pretty city to look at and I can only imagine how much better it would be in the summer when it's warm. This is the CN Tower that they built so you can see how pretty Toronto is from high up. Look at the picture, the blue sky looks clear and nice right? It should be perfect to go up the tower! But let's go get some poutine first. Yelp told us that the best poutine is from a blue chip truck that parks outside of City Hall. As we were looking for parking, look what we saw drive by. I was really worried that blue truck was leaving, since I was really hungry and ready to eat after my morning run. Luckily, they were just parking like we were, but they weren't open yet. We wandered around waiting, and found this crazy camera store owned by an even crazier camera guy. I really wish I took a picture of him, but his crazy was too crazy and intimidating for even my "must take a picture of everything" crazy. Finally, the fabled "blue chip truck that parks in front of City Hall" is open! This is way way better tasting than it looks, and made me love Canada just a little bit more than I already did.

Then we dawdled around a bit looking at where the New Years Eve party was going to be that night. Did you notice that the sky changed colors? We didn't. We probably should have before going up the CN Tower to admire the incredible view. The observation decks have views for miles. But only when the entire sky isn't one big, giant cloud of fog. I blame poutine for making this fog while we were waiting for the truck. It's ok. It was worth it. Besides, at least the glass floor was cool to look down and jump on to make Nicole nervous. We decided to have coffee and dessert while waiting for the smoke to clear. It didn't. Oh well, at least we can say we went up the CN Tower.

Something I may or may not be proud to say I did was go to an all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ place for my last meal of 2011. Korean BBQ is fun because you get to cook on fire. All-you-can-eat is embarrassing because I can't stop eating food like this until I'm physically incapable of motion.

After waddling out of the restaurant, we went here. How exciting, we're at the biggest celebration Toronto has! There's even going to be a Backstreet Boy (singular) performing tonight! Look how excited Nicole looks! That picture was taken exactly 30 seconds before we realized that this concert thing was really lame and kind of boring. It was really cold, crowded and we didn't have any booze. In contrast, our hotel room was warm, spacious, and stocked with wine and the Crown Royal pictured yesterday. It was a pretty easy decision to run away before even more people trapped us there. Besides, even in the wonderful land of Canada, they enforce open container laws (I know because I Googled it), so no one was really getting trashed on the street. This makes for far less exciting street people picturing, so I had to settle for just weird/embarrassing ones. Like this guy actually using a pay phone, this picture of big girls in tights, matching funny looking bicycles, and Nicole's seduction face.

We got back to the hotel in time to see where we just were on TV, but like good Americans, we watched the ball drop in Times Square instead. Happy New Year!

And so concludes year #2 of my 365 picture project (I guess it's now a 730 project). I'm looking forward to see what year #3 will bring as long as I don't get sick of posting stuff. Besides, 2012 will be my most difficult 365 so far (since it's leap year and I'll have to cover an extra day), and I might get to take pictures of the end of the Mayan world. Bye!

12-30-2011

We do our best to travel a lot. My motivation it to see as much of the world and have as many varied life experiences as possible before I die. I'm pretty sure Nicole's motivation is to visit ever Anthropologie in the world. She's doing pretty well so far. We've been to stores in three different countries and at least five different U.S. locations...just this year. Actually I should take that back. My real motivation for traveling is honestly just to eat food. There are lots of foods that you can't eat where we live like Chinese breakfast and very high on my list, xaio long bao also known as "Chinese soup buns". I'm pretty sure you can find these were we live, but they're really tasty as well as photogenic.

This was really photogenic, but I have absolutely no desire to find out how it would taste. Speaking of photogenic, we went to Dundas Square. It's a place every tourist goes to take pictures and they all pretty much look exactly like this. Tourists also go to Eaton Center to go shopping. Clearly, if shopping and picture taking defines tourism, Nicole and I are tourists. Here's a picture I tried to take of fast guy ice skating, but he was too fast to really get a good picture of. And he didn't fall down once. Here's a picture from Queen Street West. You can pretty much figure out what that street is like from that picture. Can you tell what this street is like from the picture? Here, this picture should help. Yeah, we're in Chinatown to eat more food. Yelp guided us to a place called Mother's Dumplings, which probably means that this is some one's mother. Additionally, these are dumplings. These really are one of my favorite things to eat, so having them twice in one day was ok with Nicole.

Canadian money has hockey on it. Another sighting of something specifically Canadian is milk in a bag. It's only funny to Nicole and I...well really just me, but this is a picture of the old elevator in our hotel that may or may not be too confusing for one of the people in the picture to use. And here's another Canadian thing that I like.

12-29-2011

Phantomgram on repeat means that we're on the road and driving past Buffalo (the city and the animal)...to flee the country and see a big waterfall! We might have picked the exact worse time of year to do this, because everything was cold and frozen, but at least it looked really cool. Nicole looked cool/cold/very wet. I looked like a nerd/Vanna White. We looked at America.

You know the saying about "the grass is always greener..." or whatever? Well the grass is more frozen on the other side of the border. Nicole is always frozen is on the other side of the border. Toronto is on the other side of the border.

Hey look, we have a hotel room. They bumped us up to the second best room because we got there late and they gave away all the cheap rooms already. Since we got there late, Nicole was sleepy, but I dragged her out of the hotel to go eat noodles. Now please understand, the scheduling of this trip around the new year was purely coincidental. I really just wanted to go to Toronto to eat. Eat everything and that's it. As such, the next few post are going to be food picture overload. There will be some pictures of Canadian stuff, but really mostly just food. For example, for years I've heard of a legendary, exclusive cultural establishment that shocked every Canadian I met when they found out that the U.S. didn't have it. Of course I'm talking about Ketchup potato chips which are as Canadian as hockey, mooses, and geese that poop all over the sidewalk. See, I'm talking about Canadian stuff, but it's really just an excuse to post more food pictures.

12-28-2011

Of course I'm not foolish enough to attempt to transport a handgun across borders, but I figured it would make for a much more exciting photo of me packing to flee the country again.

12-27-2011

My cats still just hang out and sleep this close next to each other all day while I go out and try to be productive.

12-26-2011

My dad is still in the hospital after his nasty surgery, so we went to visit and bring him presents to cheer him up. And what would possibly cheer anyone up more than officially licenced Baby Lily™ merchandise.

12-25-2011

It's Christmas, and my mom is here to inspect the authenticity of gifts. Sienna is working down to the last minute to make sure she's on the naughty list, but she and Mushroom get gifts anyway. Also receiving gifts even though she's probably on the naughty list too is Baby Lily. We got to watch her open them on Facetime.

So almost a month ago, I brought a giant present home from work and told Nicole that I was hiding it for my boss so his kids didn't find it. I then proceeded to have to pretend to shop for her and not know what to get for the past few weeks while she walked by this giant box multiple times every day. She was kind of confused when I told her to open my boss' kid's present, but she was willing to do it and pretty happy about it even though her gift was on the 7 Gifts to Avoid this Holiday list on Yahoo. She was much less excited about watching A Christmas Story. Then I stopped taking pictures for the rest of Christmas, but I'm sure all the haul of awesome presents will eventually show up on this blog as long as I keep doing it next year. Merry Christmas!

12-24-2011

After picturing in churches when I wasn't supposed to all around Europe, I figured it would be ok to take one sitting behind Mrs. Claus tonight at my mom's church for Christmas Eve.

12-23-2011

This reminds me of the Moonshiners show on Discovery. Obsessed.