6-30-2011

So I've been writing this blog every single day for the past year and six months. That's a really long time. I'm pretty sure that no one has actually read all of the posts (including me), but you may remember, last year Nicole and I went to an invite only, pre-opening party at Melt. All that really means is that I eat way too much grilled cheese, and have little to no filter as to what I will or won't tattoo on my body. You may have also read about how Nicole likes Anthropologie as much as I like Melt, and that we vist each store in pretty much every city we go to. Well tonight, we went to an Anthropologie invite only, pre-opening party (with the smallest, least intimidating bouncer I've ever seen). They also had fancy food and free booze (above). This makes for a much better shopping experience for the boys. As for the girls, I've never seen so many blonde girls named Lauren that shop on Etsy and only listen to indie pop in one place at the same time. Nicole had Christmas in July one day early.

Random, unexpected carnival picture.

Since I talked about Melt so much, we also went there for dinner with out of town friends and their walking baby.

6-29-2011

Bald-faced hornets are a notoriously nasty type of nasty stinging bug. This is their house. To quote Wikipedia, "Bald-face hornets will sting repeatedly if the nest is disturbed. Like other stinging wasps, they can sting repeatedly because the stinger does not become stuck in the skin." In other words, I'm pretty much an idiot for taking this picture.

6-28-2011

I think my career's officially "made it" when I get to photoshop my signature as the Secretary of the Treasury onto a dollar bill, and I have more movie prop money in my desk than real money in my wallet.

6-27-2011

Yeah, it's Monday, so I'm posting more pictures of my pepper plants. This is my first habanero flower though, and I thought it would be interesting to compare it to the flowers on my orange thai pepper plant.

6-26-2011

Today, I'm running my second 5k race ever. We signed up last minute because it's in a fancy nature tree place and we thought it would be pretty to look at while gasping for breath until our legs exploded and stopped working. From what I can remember seeing though the tears and hyperventilation, it was beautiful. As discussed previously, running with a giant camera is both impossible and stupid, so the picture of Nicole crossing the finish line above is all that you get. I took this picture of the awards in case a picture was all I get, but Nicole went two for two and won an award again. If you can believe it, I bribed this gnome to make me run fast, and I won an award too! Really, spend some time looking at that very special picture, because I'm pretty sure I won't be holding many other running prizes very often (if ever) again.

Since the race was at a nature place, I'm sure you're already expecting random nature pictures of things like snakes and mushrooms and frogs. You're right. What I'm sure none of us expected was what I saw when I got home and put the pictures on my computer. This is really gross, so fair warning. I zoomed into that frog picture 100% because I thought I saw something weird. Yeah, that's three mosquitoes sucking themselves full of (visible) frog blood while peeing(?) at the same time. Sometimes I think my camera equipment is a little too good. Here's some cool looking tree bark to make up for the gross picture.

After running and nature time, we went to bbbb-brrrr-unch where I quickly ate back all the calories I burned that morning plus a few extra. Don't judge me.

Back home, our fireplace mantle has fancy new additions!

6-25-2011

My cat is confused about how we got stuck in the TV.

I've written on this blog about my obsession with tacos probably more times than you're interested in. On top of that, I've written about this specific taco place multiple times. I don't care. This place is my favorite and I love it. I wish that this lady was my mother. Every time I've eaten here, she's been making tortillas by hand. Those tortillas are one of my top favorite things to eat of all time. Including things that my mom makes. My Mexican mom uses this wooden thing thing to make them that looks like it's older than I am. Oh yeah, and they have a keg of horchata. This is the best taco picnic with the best people I know. That's the only picture though because I was too busy eating the rest of the time.

I haven't posted any pictures of mushrooms in a while, but we saw those on the way to a street festival to walk around and look at our friend's art. Dear little girl, some day this photo will explain the reoccurring nightmares you will undoubtedly have as an adult. Please email me for an explanation when you're old enough. It will save you a lot of therapy money.

6-24-2011

Are you ready for lots of pictures? Because today, I met up with a bunch of friends on Cleveland's public square to watch my friends Bob and Amy get married on bicycles. Yeah, my friends are way hip and are down to have cool weddings that most people would be too scared to actually do. I'm proud of them. I guess a lot of people were proud of them actually, because they made national news and lots of people wanted to interview them. This was a great opportunity to jump into the background of shots with the best man. I probably took way too many photos of the ceremony, and I'm going to post a bunch now because I like them.

Stay classy.
They like looking at each other (which is a good thing if you're about to get married).
Girl ring.
Boy ring.
Aweee.
Bob is way serious about Amy being happy.
Kissin' scene.
Look, they're married now!
I'm pretty sure the guy pulling the rickshaw should have been Asian.
Rick Shaw.
Girl ring detail.
Boy ring close up.
Here's some random unrelated destruction if all the wedding pictures were making you feel too fuzzy.

Their wedding coincided with the monthly Critical Mass bike ride. If you don't know what that is, the few hundred people left in Cleveland that still own bicycles (and epic beards) get together to stop traffic and take over the streets. I didn't do a good job of showing how cool this part was, because I was focused on riding after learning from last summer not to do that while trying to take pictures...or very bad things happen.

After splitting off, we stopped at this gallery so I could take pictures of my friend's pictures before going to the after party to eat cupcakes. Nicole was a little bit interested in the cupcakes. She also had to take on the hard job of drinking with my friends since I was driving and there was a "No shots for Alex" policy in effect (she performed admirably). This concludes Bob and Amy's wedding (we think?). My cat Sienna says "Congratulations!"

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.

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.