Holy Crap!

Today, well yesterday now, the highest scoring major league baseball since 1897 happened. The Texas Rangers beat the Baltimore Orioles in a come-from-behind victory, with a final score of 30 - 3! My-oh-my!

Closeup Kitties :)

The kitties say "Happy Birthday!" to a certain someone who happens to have a birthday today, and who was up half the night last night singing karaoke in his living room. =)

Titusville, Take II

In a previous post, I mentioned that Kenji and I had gone for a bike ride through the little New Jersey town of Titusville. It's a very cute little town, but at the time, I had neglected to take pictures of it.

So this time when Kenji and I took another bike ride along the Delaware & Raritan Canal between Lambertville and Washington's Crossing, I remembered to snap some pictures.

This is on River Road, which, as you can imagine, runs alongside the river. I think the town is much cuter when you see it in person than what you can see from the photo above.

All the houses along River Road seem to have a nice little patch of land directly across the street overlooking the river. What I especially like is how they all have set up a nice spaces, like this one, for themselves to sit and relax and enjoy the river and the sunset. That might even be better than a front porch. Although most of the houses on River Road do have front porches as well!

After Titusville

On our way back from Washington's Crossing I took advantage of Joe's Bench for a few minutes rest. Mostly I did this because I wanted to have a picture taken of me sitting on a bench that says Joe's Bench on it. The bench does not belong to our friend Joe, but if he ever reads my blog and sees this post, maybe he will be amused for a half a second or something.

After sitting on Joe's Bench, we stopped for a bit and took a walk out onto Firemen's Eddy. Well, I guess we didn't walk out onto the eddy itself, but rather onto the jetty that creates the eddy. Some folks were out there just lying or reading in the sun. It was a beautiful day for it - nice and sunny but not too hot.

We returned to Lambertville, but before we put our bikes back into the car, we rode north for a bit in search of a particular letterbox that is supposedly hidden near a railroad trestle. The clue is not written very well, or needs to be updated, or most likely, both.

We didn't have any luck finding the letterbox while riding through on bike, so we returned the bikes to the car, drove and parked nearer to the letterbox location, and tried again on foot. We were unable to locate the path that was supposed to be 32 paces after the mammoth tree. But reading the clue further, it sounds like you eventually end up walking over the railroad trestle. However, there didn't seem to be a path to the left immediately after crossing the trestle, and even though we checked around in the general area anyway, we still had no luck. But it was fun to walk over the trestle. And as a result of hunting for this letterbox, we also got to see through the underside of this waterfall, which isn't something you normally can do with waterfalls. I guess the canal is raised through this part, and water overflows from that into the stream below. So anyway, while we were unable to find the letterbox, I don't consider the effort to be a complete bust. :)

Fondue!

Last night Kenji and I went out to dinner - fondue style - with friends Kevin, Lex, Dave, Diana, Bryan and Julia. Well we didn't actually meet Julia till last night, but she was there too.

We went to The Melting Pot in Whippany. It was a fun experience, but probably about an hour longer than it needed to be. We arrived at 8 o'clock and it was shortly before midnight when we left. Now fondue for eight people is not a quick and easy meal - part of the whole experience is taking the time to cook all the little morsels of food in your fondue pot, and as you can see from the picture, we had a lot of fondue skewers fighting for space in each pot.

Our waiter was very efficient up until the time we were finished with our entrees and ready to order our dessert. Then for some reason we pretty much saw no service at all for a period of 45 minutes, when after watching the waitstaff do shots at the bar, the owner of the restaurant realized that we had been left unattended for quite some time. Anyway, for our inconvenience, at the end of the night the owner gave each of the ladies in the party a $10 coupon toward a future dining experience at The Melting Pot.

The food was really yummy though! We had pork and beef teriyaki and chicken and fillet mignon and mushrooms and zucchini and carrots and cauliflower and broccoli and ravioli which we cooked in the mojo base. But the best of course was dessert, which was all kinds of stuff dipped in dark chocolate and peanut butter sauce. I heard there was also some other kind of milk chocolate sauce in the pot on the other end of the table, but who needs that when you have dark chocolate and peanut butter!

After planting and seeding around our new front steps and walkway this morning, Kenji and I went and had breakfast with our friends Tiff, Kevin and Brent at the Country Pancake House in Ridgewood. Pancakes definitely have turkey in them, because after we got home, we all had to take naps to recover. :)


Anyway, four of the five of us all got different color juices. Mine was cantaloupe carrot. :)

Planting Stuff

Now that our front steps have been replace and are looking nice, we have to spruce up the plant life surrounding them. Over the last few weeks we've removed all the little bushes that were in the front, several of which were half dead and generally funny looking, and we've also cleaned up the weeds. Actually Kenji did most of that stuff.

Yesterday we bought ten perennial plants and twelve packets of wildflower seeds at Metropolitan Plant Exchange, and this morning we planted all ten plants and spread seeds from six of the packets. The other six packets of seeds we'll plant in the fall as per the package instructions.

So it looks pretty nice at least for now. Hopefully the new plants grow and prosper, and don't get all trampled by neighborhood kids.

Van Gogh's Ear

Kenji and I had a really yummy dinner this evening at a place called Van Gogh's Ear Cafe. It's in Union, NJ. We sat next to the window, which has this picture of Van Gogh painted on it. Van Gogh's Ear Cafe is an artsy-fartsy, relaxing place to eat.

Kenji had a roast beef sandwich. I had one of the specials, Mango Shrimp Salad. The mango flavor really didn't through, but that didn't bother me any since it was still the best tasting shrimp I ever had! The shrimp has a nice peppery flavor, I guess from the jalapenos. It also seemed to taste like Old Bay. The salad dressing, ginger cilantro vinaigrette, was also especially tasty.

More Letterboxing

Yesterday Kenji and I took Tiff on her first letterboxing adventure. She didn't have a stamp, so we let her borrow a smiley face stamp. We found two letterboxes - one next to a river in Linden, and the other hidden at a bookstore in Clark.

The bookstore letterbox was our first urban letterbox. It had a tiny stamp and instead of a log book, it had a two or three-foot length of register tape rolled up inside a small magnetic key box.

The most challenging part of retrieving and replacing this letterbox was being able to do it without anyone looking. When Tiffany and I went to replace the box, a woman was standing RIGHT NEXT to the shelf where we were supposed to hide it. She was reading a book, and didn't look like she was going anywhere anytime soon. So I did my best to invade her space, pretending to be intensely interested in the books on the shelf right beside her. It took five or ten minutes, but she finally gave up and decided to go somewhere else!

Aiea Letterbox Doing Well

I was chatting with my friend Dave from Hawaii. He said he checked up on the letterbox I hid along the Aiea Loop trail a couple years ago. He said it's still there and in good condition. He also added a little Spongebob Squarepants toy to it as a surprise for the next person who finds it. :)

Thanks Dave!

A-Rod Hits 500th Home Run

And we saw it in person.Tiffany's co-worker had four Yankees tickets that her family was not going to use, so last night she offered them to Tiff. Turns out the game was of some historic significance and Alex Rodriguez hit his 500th career home run, and he is the youngest MLB ballplayer to do so.
There's A-Rod swinging the bat - but this was after his home run. As you can see, our seats were practically on the field. Kenji and I sat in the second row, and Tiff and her mom in the front row.

Us Guys

Here we are - Tiff's mom, Tiff, Kenji and me. :)

With a final score of 16 - 8, the game was rather long. And it was rather hot. So lots of people left early, including the folks sitting next to Tiff and her mom. That's how come we are all sitting in one row in this picture.

Kenji wants me to tell you all that that is a piece of pop corn in his mouth. He bought a big souveiner bucket of popcorn. The bucket has a Yankees logo on it. Kenji's going to use it as a waste basket.

Side Arm

This is Mike Meyers. He's not as funny as the other Mike Meyers. But he pitches with a funny side-arm delivery.






I forget who he was pitching to when I took this series of pictures. Whoever it was, apparently the guy hit the ball.

YMCA!

My other favorite part of the game is when the grounds crew comes out and dances to the YMCA while they are fixing up the infield.

Letterbox Planted!

Kenji and I planted the letterbox I made a couple weeks ago. Now the clue is listed on Letterboxing.org and AtlasQuest.com. We hid it at Turtle Back Park, which is part of South Mountain Reservation. The clue itself is posted here.