1-13-2012

Snowy roads means eating Pop-Tarts and watching movies about the respective lives of Steve Prefontaine and Biggie Smalls. At least we're diverse with our documentary interests.

1-12-2012

Twenty-Nine. If you look back at the previous pictures on this date, it kind of looks like I'm aging backwards.

I don't normally post this many pictures of myself because I think I'm funny looking, but Nicole took pictures of me opening presents. The wrapping paper has glittery octopus on it. My new running watch asked me a silly question. We run almost every day...even birthdays. The site I use to track my miles lets you make little avatar characters and give them outfits. Here's another picture of me. I'm wearing my shiny Christmas jacket, my new birthday watch, and badly need a haircut...just like real life.

After running, Nicole said I could eat anything I wanted. This is what I always want. I also wanted this lemon bar cake. I didn't really want another picture of me looking weird, but that's what happened.

1-11-2012

Yes, that's me wearing compression tights and a flannel shirt. My bad fashion sense isn't the point. The point is that Nicole went to get coffee today and came home with a foot massaging robot. It pairs nicely with the robot back massager we already own. We're kind of huge nerds about that type of stuff. Speaking of nerds...here's tonight's dessert.

1-10-2012

Dessert every night for a week isn't easy. Conveniently, I'm not picky when it comes to junk food. We initially went for Pop Tarts, but decided that we like Toaster Strudles better. Here's Nicole preparing for the rest of the week.

Really though, Toaster Strudles are a great dessert. They even come with little pouches of crack for kids. Nicole was telling me stories about how she always used to "make them" for her brother so she could just put half of the icing on his and put the extra on hers...or just eat the icing packs raw. Regardless, they make for a happy bday.

1-9-2012

This is in observation of a weeklong national holiday which is traditionally celebrated by eating dessert every night.

1-8-2012

After being spoiled in Toronto, Nicole and I decided to seek out the closest excuse for Chinese food as we could find locally. It ended up being pretty close. We went out for Dim Sum, which is like tapas style small plates that come around on a little cart. You can pick whatever you want, and they rate your gluttony on a little card. The more X's you get, the more they are secretly judging you. Needless to say, with carts full of tasty things like this, they judged me a lot. To our great surprise, we even found these. More X's.

After brunch we went wandering around to try and walk off the gluttony. Chinese people sell super weird stuff like it's no big deal (like tanks of live frogs in grocery stores). If you're ever looking for a robot Michael Jackson clock, or a random poster of JC, I can tell you were to find one. Speaking of weird Chinese things, My dad is still in his vacation home celebrating the new year.

1-7-2012

Unless you've memorized our lives from the past two years, look at 4-19-10, 4-21-10, and 3-22-11. Today Nicole saw these for the first time ever. It's pretty exciting seeing her desings as actual products (even though they gave the parrot four stick legs instead of bird feet).

Continuing the theme of creative process, we went to my friend's new gallery, to hang out and see my other friends' paintings get little red dots.

1-6-2012

I've come to the realization that by getting Nicole a mixer for Christmas, I may have accidentally made my running goals for the new year significantly more difficult. Nicole likes baking and making cakes. A lot. When she's not baking cakes to make me fat, she's making bitty little cakes as annual tradition gifts.

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!