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.

4-24-2011

I go to church a handful of times a year. Today is one of those big exciting days. Baby Lily was about as excited to go as I was. At least it was a pretty walk after we parked. I think we parked somewhere over there by Wolverine. I'm glad this didn't happen to our car. After church, we went here for our more common Sunday ritual of b-b-br-br-br-brunch. Baby Lily was also very happy about Easter brunch. She showed off her baby bunny teeth and told us all about the religious history of the holiday while dressed as the pope. My mom really wanted this picture. Then she wanted a nap while we made an ill-fated trip to furniture Costco. Baby Lily is too cool for Costco. I think this says something political, but I'm not quite sure what. I know that this says the cheesesteak place we wanted to try was closed for Easter. Then is was back in the car for a long long drive home where we only stopped at magical rest stops where children hover to appreciate the indigenous wildlife.

4-23-2011

After a few miles of huffing and puffing under pretty bridges, we went to this place for gourmet perogies (I'm not sure how gourmet you can actually make a perogie, but they took it as far as it would go). We didn't go to become Freemasons, but we did the next best thing. We took Baby Lily to go see the Crayola Factory for the first time. Beyond lots of crayons and paper to color on, they give you these tokens that you can put into various machines and get supplies out of for fun crafty projects. Baby Lily's hand print came out pretty well, but her foot print came out a little funny looking. She wanted to make a dental mold, but she doesn't have enough teeth yet. So we taught her how to vandalize (clear) walls and crawl though (colorful) sewers without faceplaning instead. She was only good a the first part. She's very good at waving, unlike my mom who isn't so good at taking pictures. There was a bunch of informational stuff like stories about racist crayons and the one hundred billionth crayon (pictured here), and the biggest crayon in the world, but I really just looked at all of the colors and didn't read that much. There were colors everywhere. Even places where they're too old to be. Speaking of out of place things, have you ever been to Ferrari church? Or had good Thai food (I ordered for the name alone) in the middle of nowhere? Nicole likes Thai food, but she likes eating mushrooms better. I like eating cheesecake my sister made. Bunny likes eating Baby Lily.

4-22-2011

I guess Baby Lily read my last post making fun of her hair, so she made sure it looked nice for today before flying out of the house. I'm aware that it's super touristy, but we went to the Reading Terminal Market so we could eat food and I could pretend to be a street photographer. Actually, this destination was primarily guided by Man Versus Food Network shows so I could try Tommy DiNic's. I don't know if this is Tommy or not, but I know the younger guy is the one that was on the TV show that always makes me hungry. Hungry for this. I've eaten a lot of "omg you haf to try dis food" food featured on various TV shows in a lot of places, but this was really really "omg you haf to try dis food" if you're ever in the area food. But that's just me, Nicole likes cupcakes better. I like this lady because she makes very good cookies. I also like this lady because she's cute. Speaking of cute, Baby Lily decided she likes coffee, so we gave her her own one so she would stop trying to take ours.* Next, Nicole visited her holy place to go shopping with bunny. We get real excited about bunny. Baby Lily liked it so much that she wanted to steal bunny because she doesn't know what morals are yet, so we just let her do it.* More shopping in fancy stores in fancy places. I like looking at fancy buildings. Nicole likes being invisible with her sidewalk-cammo trench coat. Baby Lily likes noses. I liked this little bike and the ideas of a toddler bike messenger rolling around doing deliveries on training wheels. Are you ready for more food pictures? Because we're going to a fancy Food Network guy restaurant called Village Whiskey. It is named that for a reason, and I quickly ordered the most expensive scotch I've ever had in my life. I don't even know how much it cost for the bottle, but I'm sure it was more than I cost. They have lots of bottles, and truffle flavored mushroom cheeseburgers. That's right, Philadelphia Cheeseburger Tour! Cheeseburgers with foie gras and bacon. Then I quickly ordered the second most expensive scotch I've ever had in my life and let Baby Lily have a sip.* She was happy about that all the way until we got home when she could eat some meat cleaver and try my shoes on.


* A lot of the things that I write about Baby Lily aren't true. But the ones designated with asterisk all are.

4-21-2011

Look! I'm driving in a car. That means it's Nicole's job to take pictures while I drive us to our doom. Actually, I just drove us to the diner above. It may look really cool and classic inside and out, but it's really just a fancy Denny's. A fancy Denny's with hot waitresses and healthy road trip food. Can you tell it's my turn to take pictures again? You're not allowed to P or turn around over there. Or else you'll make trucks explode and then the firetruck will have to come and save people. After hours and hours of driving, we got to see the sleeping baby that we came to see. She wasn't too happy to see us at first, but then she got a grip and turned on her messy hair happy face.

4-20-2011

Easter bunneh gang colurz.

4-19-2011

I could look at pictures of morel mushrooms all day. Some days I kind of do. Today we were outrageously successful and picked so many that we left the little ones to hangout and grow bigger. We found more than I ever thought we would find in one day. Nicole won the prize for finding the biggest one so far this year. I really hope to beat this record.

4-18-2011

Are you getting sick of me posting pictures of all the little creatures I come across in their natural habitats? I hope you don't mind me posting more pictures of mushrooms, because today I'm explaining how Nicole cooks them. First, she cuts them lengthwise to make sure they're hollow and the right kind of mushroom, and to make sure nothing gross is living inside of them. Then she soaks them to rehydrate any dry parts and to clean off anything gross still stuck on them. Then she puts a ton of butter in a frying pan. We love butter. The mushrooms pan fry in butter, while she boils things and makes mushroom sauce until they're done. This is pasta with mushroom sauce dinner. We even used our downstairs dinner table that we normally just look at. We love mushrooms. We didn't know what our cat named Mushroom would think of them. We quickly found out that she's a cannibal.

4-17-2011

See this little green toad? This toad loves Nicole. He expressed his love by hugging her fingers very tightly and not letting go (pictured), and also by peeing all over my hand when he did let go. I'm now convinced that toad pee (and my trashy looking bandanna which I don't have pictures of) is good luck, because after finding plenty of puffballs, I finally found my first one of the year! And my second one of the year right behind it. The third one was behind that, but by then I stopped taking pictures (and crying tears of joy), so you get the point. Yeah, that weird looking wrinkly thing poking out of the ground is what we hike miles and miles in the wilderness looking for (and is also worth $200 a pound). I've had super vivid dreams about cutting the first stem of the year with my new knife. See, it's hollow inside. I'm aware that this all just seems super weird to normal people, but actually finding hidden little bits of wrinkly mushroom is horribly exciting and addictive (beside the fact that they're really good to eat). I would say we got found a pretty good spot when there are big ones growing this close together. Some are very small. I think I took more pictures of them than actually picked them, but Nicole also carries a knife for this reason. Bag of mushrroooommz. The bag is mesh so as you walk around, the spores can fall out and plant more for next year. This little guy was getting cooked in the sun. Totally unrelated, but I thought that this looked cool. This looks creepy, but this is also cool. This looks like a unicorn or a narwhal. I guess these cup mushrooms are related to morels. This newt is not related to morels. He is however engaged to Nicole. This is like a treasure chest to me. Then we went home to show our cat named Mushroom why she is a cat named mushroom.

Do you know what this bottle means? It means food feast at Momocho with out of town/state friends. I only take pictures of Joel when he's drinking while I point guns at Lorenzo.

4-16-2011

We're not so good at finding morel mushrooms, but we're great at hiking...so I'm going to say that we just went out to hike today. I supposed I could say we went out hunting for snails because we had good luck finding these guys, but false morels are the closest we got. All the conditions were right and we even found indicator species like this may apple and these fiddle heads. We should have found mushrooms growing out of mushrooms, but all we found were flowers and some alien thing that I have no idea what it is. This ravine salamander helped us look, but was confused as to which type of mushrooms we were looking for. We weren't looking for puffballs either, but these are kind of cool. They're hollow inside and full of spores. If you step on one they blast spores everywhere (including into your lungs if you're stupid enough to get super super close to take a picture while Nicole steps on one). Personally I think the mushrooms were climbing trees to hide from us. So yeah, we just went on a (long) hike today, but it was fun exploring places I've never been and driving around "roads" like this. We found this goat jaywalking on said road.

We aren't doing Cheeseburger Tour this weekend because Food Network related obsession sent us to Belgrade Gardens instead (and it looks like this). There's a sub genre of fried chicken called Barberton Chicken which is a bit of a local legend and has gotten a lot of press. People brave decor that looks a bit like a retirement home and go crazy over their coleslaw, "hot sauce" (it was really rice with some stewed tomatoes), and of course chicken. Now keep in mind, I've recently been the worst vegetarian ever, but for an entire year I made a mental list of forbidden foods that I really wanted to eat. Bacon took the number one spot by a long shot, but fried chicken was also very very high on the list. So the idea of a locally unique version of chicken deep fried in lard was something I lost a bit of sleep over last year. So I don't know if it was all the mental hype leading up to it, or the fact that I think I've lost my taste for chicken, but meh. I mean it wasn't bad, but for all the Food Feuds and food blog internet nerds building a religion around it...I liked the coleslaw pretty well. Sorry, Barberton.

4-15-2011

These are our funny looking futuristic running shoes from space. I took a picture of them with mud on them as proof of my first "running though swampy paths in the the woods" trail run. I'm proud of myself. So proud in fact that we decided to celebrate a three and a half mile run by eating a three and a half million calories at Melt. Actually, we had prior plans to go tonight because Nicole wanted to try their weekend special Squid Sandwich. Say it out loud a few times...it sounds fun. I decided to tease the heart attack gods and ordered this monstrosity. His name is the "Corny Beast" and he is what would happen if a grilled cheese sandwich and a corndog ate each other at the same time. I'm actually proud to say that I tapped out before finishing even half of it. I'm going to go die on the couch now. This may very well be the last post I ever write.

4-14-2011

I'm obsessive compulsively waiting for morels to sprout, but not finding anything. Nicole is sad because she found a (huge) dead snake.

4-13-2011

I drank coffee and akwardly babbled in front of a camera Gangland style.

4-12-2011

I'm sure that these will quickly turn into the equivalent of cat pictures that no one but me cares about, but Lance Armstrong just told me I beat my personal best for the mile and right now I need any encouragement I can get.

4-11-2011

I'm not sure how something free like "running outside" can turn into something so expensive so quickly, but I did run the furthest I ever have tonight with this thing so maybe it will be worth it?

4-10-2011

The weather is nice again and I'm hanging my head out the window like a dog on the way to go look for more mushrooms in the woods. In the woods there are skunk cabbage which smell wonderful when you step on them. Little boys like looking at Nicole and I like looking at trains. Nicole likes looking at leaves. She also likes to find burried treasure and closly inspect it (note the clothing because we're going to have a few costume changes today). Someone didn't do a good job taking care of their baby. They had better hope the vultures don't scavenge it from the swamp or we might need to make it a memorial in the woods by it's house. Can you see the fly on the flowers? This is why we wear boots. Here's a picture of another false morel and a woolly bear (that does not look woolly at all). We've been seeing a lot of snakes in the woods this year. I love the woods.

One of the highlights of warm weather is pretending it's full on summer time a few months too early. Nothing is more indicative of this delusion than going to our favorite seasonal ice cream shack and getting the first cherry dipped cone of the year. This is serious (note costume change). I don't think Nicole likes me shoving cameras in her face while she's eating but I think she's used to it by now. I try to take pictures of other things too.

Costume change number three involved head wear and replacing the rubber boots with something a little more fancy. Nicole wanted to go to the Beachclub Pizza Bistro for wine and pizza (note this was mushroom pizza with truffle flavor...I think it's safe to say we're obsessed). And desserts and coffee. Did you notice "desserts" was pluralized. Remember those yellow flowers Nicole found in the woods? I guess she was wishing she picked some, but we were in a nature preserve, so she respectfully preserved the nature. Landscapers beware, your flower beds are not a nature preserve to me.

4-9-2011

This is going to be a lot of pictures, so get ready. Nicole and I both decided to collect outdoor necessities and go take pictures of the first nice day since...ever. We've been really into going to the same breakfast place on the Saturdays, because really, who wants to wake up and cook in a kitchen when you can go do outside stuff and shoot cross processed film instead. Cross processed film does however make breakfast look a bit like Dr. Seuss, and even something as wonderful as bacon looks kind of gross. Nicole uses normal colored film so I can't blame cross processing for looking kind of gross. Actually, today there will be a lot of pictures of gross stuff even if it's normal colors. Sorry.

Last year I posted about how we look for fancy morel mushrooms in the woods. The season is starting up again, so today in addition to walking and taking pictures, we're trespassing in the woods to hunt for mushrooms with friends. At least we aren't fishing too right? Trespassing isn't even that bad really. At least we aren't doing drugs. We're just looking for fungus but not that kind or this kind, or this, or that. Definitely not this one. This isn't even a mushroom. Actually, between Nicole and I, I think we found every kind of fungus except for the kind we wanted. Here are some of the ones that she found. She also found purple flowers, yellow flowers, and a cat (but not Mushroom). Other finds include a snake that Nicole caught, a snail, a tree that eat signs, a tree that hunts, a pair of sun glasses, a dinosaur, and another snake that wanted to bite me. These are all different reflections. Here are some birds, and this little speck next to the nest above the beaver dam is actually a bald eagle. Here's a hawk out of order since the eagle was so far away. These are all yellow ribbons.

After a break to take our boots off, we went to see Nicole's parents to play basketball and look for more more mushrooms. After a day of searching, I almost peed when I thought we found one, but no. This is a false morel and they are poisonous even though they kind of look like what we want. We hiked so much all day that I kind of wanted to sit down somewhere. This is Nicole taking a picture of me the happiest I've been in a long winter. I think she was pretty happy about the nice weather too. I originally forgot to add this sign to nowhere so I'm adding it now.

When we finally gave up on morels, Nicole reminded me that it was the weekend, which means Cheeseburger Tour. We went to The Erie Station Grill because even bears like it here. This is the second time today that the wrong film made good food looks gross but the cheeseburger was good and it even had mushrooms on it. Nicole's parents have so many morels that they even have mushroom statues. They were nice enough to give us a jar of dried morels from last year since we didn't find any today.

Then we went to my friend Rachel's birthday party which just so happened to be on dubstep night. I learned that punx not dead it just listens to dubstep now and hangs out with weird girls that accessorize with glowsticks. Aweee...birthday friend pictures. Then I slept like I was dead because I was. I can't believe how many places and how much stuff we did in one day.