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.