6-23-2011

All ready already.

6-22-2011

These bugs are no ladies. I guess they just got bored and randy after eating all the aphids and drinking all the water.

6-21-2011

My pepper plants have have a (singular) flower! Both habanero plants also have tons of buds now, which is a big deal because they didn't really have any since the ground hog/deer/vampire ate them a while ago. Unfortunately, they also have aphids (above). More aphids than buds I think. We're doing something about it it, but I'll have to wait until tomorrow to show you.

I thought that I would have to wait until tomorrow, because you have to do it in the dark (to surprise the aphids in their sleep), but I bought a container of 1500 ladybugs to put on my pepper plants. Ladybugs are natural predators (they have heat vision and dreadlocks just like the movie), and aphids are their favorite food. Hopefully this works and the ladybugs don't get blown away, because there's a hurricane over my house as I'm typing this.

By the way, start expecting all together too many pictures of my pepper plants. I'm kind of obsessed with them, and I've realized it's really easy to take a picture of them on the nights when I just go running and don't do anything else interesting. Kthnxbye.

6-20-2011

It's Monday so this post is kind of a grab bag of me posting whatever I had on my memory card so I can go take a nap before running.

Even after being eaten, the buds on my pepper plants are starting to open up.

My coworkers that I go to lunch with are starting a new tradition. There's a new build your own frozen yogurt place by my job called Menchie's. In an attempt to do anything to make Mondays better, we've instated "Menchie's Mondays."

Sienna doesn't like Mondays either.

6-19-2011

So to celebrate Baby Lily's first full day of being one year old (while wearing the same kind of shirts that I always wear), we decided to have a Father's Day cookout. My father's favorite thing to do is to buy giant pieces of a cow so he can chop it up and cook it. I haven't eaten steak in probably close to three years, but hey...let's see what happens. We even had colorful steak colored plates and corn colored plates. Baby Lily is pretty neutral about steak.

Before we knew it, it was time to go back home so we could get back early enough to get a good night's sleep before work the next morning because clearly I'm a good and responsible employee...wait...what's that? We should take a long detour to go on an adventure?! Let's go!

Now for years, I've heard rumors and legends of a gigantic outdoors/hunting/fishing Mecca with a "mountain" inside the store. Said mountain is rumored to be covered with taxidermyed animals and be really awesome. I had never actually seen, much less been to one of said stores because they only exist in the middle of nowhere. Frankly, I doubted their existence and was thoroughly skeptical of their awesomeness. Well, I'm not ashamed to say when I'm wrong. These stores do exist, they are every bit as awesome as the legends say, and they are named Cabela's: The Greatest Store in the Whole World. My camera isn't capable of capturing the size and awesomeness of this store (no camera is), but here's my attempt at documenting taxidermy mountain. It was only fitting that we went here today since it was Father's Day and Nicole wanted to be with her bear family (they eat more meat than my family does). Here she is with her bear dad. All jokes aside...this place is amazing. They have real albino trout swimming around the floor, more guns than The Matrix, and for real sniper outfits. I've never seen so many guns in one place, and I've been to gun shows. Now I'm no gun expert, but I do know that this is the biggest sniper rifle you can get in Call of Duty, and you can buy one at this store. The taxidermy was like going to the Natural History Museum, but even more and better. I mean, they had an elephant, and a lion that is sad because it dropped its toy. There's also an art gallery-esque display of atypical antler configurations that was really incredible. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a hunter (I did however buy that gun lighter), and I'm totally into animal rights and respecting nature (I'm sure you've noticed this trend if you've read my blog before), but if you're thinking that this place is unfair to animals, you'll be glad to know that they have a taxidermyed human on display too. I can't even talk about all the awesomeness in this store. I feel like I could be there all day and still not see everything, but a few things I did document...a huge arcade shooting gallery like the one I used to go to at the mall when I was a kid, every kind of hobo pie maker ever invented (except they were out of stock of the kind we wanted), and the biggest fish Nicole ever caught. Really though, I'm pretty sure my absolute favorite things in the whole place were the fish in the zoo-scale aquariums. It was like the zoo or Sea World, but instead of weird tropical fish no one cares about, they were giant versions of the fish that I try to catch (but never do). Nicole liked the tanks so much that she decided to go for a little swim before we left.

On the way home, we continued our bear adventure when we found the soda equivalent of moonshine in a vending machine at a shady rest stop. It was birch soda with no company labeling, and facts about bears on the back of the bottle. Obviously it was delicious. I didn't really take any pictures other than that until we got home to install our new real* bear rug. Look how ferocious he looks! Goodnight!

* "Real" meaning it actually exists as opposed to fictional or imaginary.

6-18-2011

Good morning! The real reason why Nicole and I drove all the way to Philadelphia is because today is my baby niece, Baby Lily's first birthday party! Clearly, my sister is more organized than I will ever be in my whole entire life. In addition to Lily, it was nice seeing my grandparents and other relatives who came in from New York to party like one year olds. I hope to look exactly like this one day. I didn't really take that many pictures of Baby Lily getting passed from person to person for hours (the primary activity of a one year old's birthday party), besides, my Asian family has every step of that whole processed documented from every angle possible. I did however document Baby Lily's dirty crawling paw. The secondary activity of a one year old's birthday party is eating too much food. My sister went all out and made homemade ice cream in addition to the the homemade cupcakes above. I took her two homemade desserts, and homemade a delicious looking diabetic nightmare. This is allowed though. It falls under our "Ice Cream Every Weekend This Summer" policy. Speaking of desserts, here's a picture of Baby Lily eating her birthday cupcake for anyone who may have been sleeping upstairs when it happened. I'm just kidding, Nicole. Baby Lily still likes you way better than she likes me. She'll be walking by her self any day now.

After her party, we went to dinner in Chinatown. My grandparents only eat Chinese food I guess (I didn't know this before this trip). I don't mean sweet and sour chicken "Chinese food" either. I'm talking about the kind of Chinese food that comes with the head on the plate for some unknown reason. Baby Lily isn't too fond of this kind of Chinese food. It's delicious though. I like it as much as Baby Lily likes her Mickey Mouse water bottle cover or eating fortune cookies. I've already mentioned our "Ice Cream Every Weekend This Summer" policy, but here it is again in case you weren't paying attention.

After Dinner, we asked Baby Lily what she wanted to do for the rest of her birthday. The only thing she wanted to do was gamble and demanded to go to a casino immediately. They don't let you take pictures in casinos, so I can't show her playing high stakes poker, but I did steal this picture when no one was looking. After losing all her money (babes aren't very rich) and getting kicked out of the casino for trying to cheat (or good at being sneaky), Baby Lily enjoyed playing with dirt on the sidewalk out by the water.

To cheer her back up after the poker incident, we gave her the mountain of presents we brought with us. She carefully unwrapped and considered each gift, curious to see what she got. We think she liked her gifts. We got her stuff that I remembered playing with as a kid like this colorful xylophone and rolling popping thing. And so concluded the end of her first baby birthday polka dot party. Actually, Baby Lily decided she was hungry after presents and wanted to go to Tony Luke's for sandwiches. No one says no to a baby even if there's a long line in the middle of the night. Here's the Italian pork sandwich which is a lot like the one from DiNic's that I wrote about last time I was in Philadelphia, and of course a mushroom steak wiz without. Hooray for street food! Boo for what looks like freaky things happening in our hotel elevator.

6-17-2011

...Go! I think I'm happiest when I'm going places and doing different stuff from the same things I do every other day. So it's always a pleasure to end up on an open highway traveling somewhere across America. Ok, so maybe we were only driving across Pennsylvania, but it's still fun to see bridges and farm clouds that are different from the ones I normally see. I did a lot of the driving this trip, so Nicole actually took all of the above pictures (yeah, she takes better photos than I do). I did use my camera hours later when we finally got to South Street in Philadelphia to go to Jim's for steaks though. Most people say "cheese steaks," but I'm finding that locals just say "steaks." I try blend in and not be too much of a tourist, but that's pretty much impossible considering I'm Asian and bring a camera bigger than I am everywhere I go. I think my blending did work in some weird way though, because as Nicole and I were walking down the street, we were randomly addressed as "whiitteee peeeoopplleeee!" by some weird guy who apparently has pretty poor eyesight. Now I've been mistaken for a girl or a child more times than I can count, but I've never been called this in my entire life. After driving all night and our South Street adventure, we were happy to see the hotel bed.

6-16-2011

We played Nascar. Ready, Set...

6-15-2011

So my cat, Sienna, has stuffed animals. This seems normal right? Most people give their pets little toys to chew on so they don't destroy everything else in the house that belongs to the people. But these aren't her toys. She has those too but those are different. These are her stuffed animals that she only plays gently with (she practices different murder techniques on all of her other toys), carries around the house in her mouth, and brings up onto our bed to sleep with. She even makes weird meows specifically to talk to them, and she doesn't make these meows in any other situation. I made the squid for her out of one of Nicole's old shirts when she was a kitten and she stole the chicky off of a shelf around the same time. Sometimes, on special days like today, the animals even end up on top of each other in a little pile.

6-14-2011

Birthday, baby, blog, niece, soon, party, toys, getting ready, and tired. All of those words relate together somehow but not necessarily in that order.

6-13-2011

Share-a-tail.

6-12-2011

Today is dedicated to finally doing a long list of long avoided house work stuff. Things like fixing toilets, unclogging drains, and digging up ant hills suck for pictures (trust me, I tried). So Nicole playing backwards Alice in Wonderland is as good as it gets. As creepy as it gets is this guy starring at us for way too long to be normal after we had breakfast with friends.

6-11-2011

Believe it or not, I left my camera at home for most of the morning. So just imagine lots of running and then some more walking for miles and miles. We did manage to buy this $12 antique chair for Sienna to reupholster since it was cheap.

At night we ended up at a cool kids designer/artist/taste maker festival thing to watch bands play. This may sound like I was doing something good and proactive for my career, but really I just wanted to eat fancy vegetarian hot dogs at the bar and people watch.

6-10-2011

So yesterday I posted a bunch of pictures of my cats. To be fair, here are a bunch of pictures of the cutest pup in the world. I didn't get many shots that weren't blurry because he doesn't stay still for very long. Actually, he doesn't really even stay on the ground for very long.

This is pretty non-sequitur, but I haven't posted about Melt in a while. This isn't because I haven't been going there recently because really, I'm mostly embarrassed about how often I eat there, but today is special. For today and tomorrow only, they're having my favorite (fake) turkey Thanksgiving stuffing with cranberry sauce sandwich that they normally only have in November.

Back to cute furry things, the cat grass Nicole planted for the cats to chew on has been growing like crazy.

Even more cute and furry, this little beast was sleeping in front of my neighbor's house today. I was pretty mad at deer-kind in general after my pepper plants got eaten, but it's hard to hate this face. This little deer isn't that much bigger than the puppy that was bouncing around my office today.

Now in case I'm posting too many furry cute things, here's something to make up for it. I've been wanting to take pictures of a snapping turtle for a while now (since we saw the giant one when we were mushroom hunting, and there's been one hanging around Nicole's job that I never get to see). This is mostly because I think that they look like dinosaurs, and "I like turtles." So while we were walking in the woods and being eaten by mosquitoes tonight, I was really happy to see this smiling face walking across the path. Since the mosquitoes enjoyed eating us, we decided to get something we enjoy eating as a prize. Yeah, ice cream every weekend all summer.