Baltimore

Here I am in Baltimore again, for the Natural Products Expo East! I am trying to exhibit great restraint by not eating too many samples. I took this photo last night while walking on my way to dinner at ESPN Zone. The food was crummy and service slow, but I was the champion in
air hockey!

Milburn Street Fair

Last night I went with some shoe-changer friends to a street fair in Milburn. It had a 50s theme because Milburn's Paper Mill Playhouse will open their new season with Happy Days, the musical, and the street fair was basically a big ole promotion for it.

No 50s theme party would be complete without an Elvis impersonator. All the women that this one gave his scarves to appeared to want to run away.

During the band break, Joe, Gretchen and I walked around the corner, where we saw this classic car that had a little mini version of it driving back and forth on the sidewalk! The owner of the cars said the mini version is more fun to drive around than the big one. It has tiny hydraulic lifts on it, and it probably doesn't break as much.

Rainy Bike Ride

I thought this weekend was supposed to be nice and sunny!

We got up sort of early to have breakfast at the pancake place in Ridgewood, then go for a bike ride along the Saddle Brook path. We made it exactly to the end of the six mile path and were ready to turn back when the rain started. So we has to ride for six miles in the rain! Kenji liked riding in the rain but I was complaining because we didn't come prepared for rain. A ziplock bag for my phone would have been helpful, and maybe a towel or two in the car would have been nice.

I took this picture when we got back to the car. Because of all the damp, my phone had condensation all over it, and that's why the picture looks all fuzzy!

Musubi on the Phone

I got a new phone. Musubi asked me to take her picture with it. :)

Roommate's Wedding

While I spent a night at the beach, Kenji spent the night in Philly, at a bachelor outing for his old roommate from the Naval Academy, who got married on September 8.

The wedding was in Yardley, PA, and the reception at the Grounds for Sculpture, located in NJ just outside of Trenton. The wedding was very beautiful, even in spite of the fact that the florist screwed up and did not deliver the flowers as planned - turns out she thought the wedding was on the following weekend! Oh well, if no one had said anything about it, I would never have known the difference.

So anyway, that's Kenji and me standing in the picture frame sculpture at Grounds for Sculputre. I thought that was a pretty nifty place to have a wedding reception - you could walk the grounds and look at the interesting sculptures, and the reception itself was in Rat's Restaurant, which is the restaurant that is located inside the sculpture garden. The food was super-yummy. I had lamb chops and Kenji had steak. Some other folks ate salmon.

The groom's family lives in Texas, and this weekend we learned that it is a Texas tradition to have a really cool cake for the groom - aptly called the groom's cake. What makes the cake so cool is that it is decorated after stuff that the groom likes. In this case the theme was Star Wars. If Kenji had a grooms cake at our wedding, I bet it would have been a Seattle Mariners cake. :)

Jersey Shore

Last week I stayed at the Jersey shore for the first time. My friend Nellie invited me down to stay with her and her family since they were renting a cottage for the first week of September. That was the same week that Kenji and I went to three baseball games, a wedding rehearsal and a wedding (and I still worked a couple of days and delivered library books to shut-ins too)... so I only stayed one night. Those are my toes in the sand, looking at the Atlantic Ocean to prove it. :)

It was the perfect week to go to the shore. It was after Labor Day, and on a weekday, so the beaches were not crowded. Plus the weather was perfect - not too hot and not too cold.

When I arrived on Thursday afternoon, Nellie and her sister and I went to visit the Barnegat Lighthouse, which is on the very northern end of Long Beach Island. Nellie and I made the climb to the top of the lighthouse, and I took this picture of Nellie's sister, Natasha, talking on the phone way down there on the ground. :)

This is pretty much a picture of the "back yard" at the cottage where we stayed. The cottage is not on Long Beach Island itself, but just a mile or so away from the bridge that takes you onto Long Beach Island. There's a whole network of little canals between all the homes in the area, and the canals have street signs on them, just like on regular streets. :) Things were peaceful and quiet there, and that was nice.

Welcome Diddy Kong!

Kenji and I are uncle and auntie for the first time as of today. :)

Instead of using our new little nephew's real name, Kenji suggested we use a code name (using little nephew's first and middle initials, D.K.) -- Diddy Kong!

Um, for everyone else out there like me who has no idea who Diddy Kong is, Diddy Kong is the little monkey on Donkey Kong. :)

So, welcome and happy birthday Diddy Kong!!!!

Three finds!

After we got home from the baseball game, I called shoe-changer Joe to see if he'd like to join Kenji, Tiffknee and me for steak and/or chicken cooked on the grill. He couldn't come over, but he did tell me that he went letterboxing today and found the letterbox Kenji and I planted. He reported that he was the third person to find it, which means he did not get the little stegosaurus I put in there as a "first finders" prize.

Mariners win! (Finally...)

This picture was taken by Tiffknee and her phone. Kenji is saying "Woooo!" because Seattle won the first of three games against the Yankees today. It was also the first time they won after losing ten games in a row! Let's hope they can keep it up for the next two games, and more!

Heh, the silly sports reporter on Fox 5 just announced that Ichiro hit his 200th career hit today. Try again, lady. It was his 200th season hit. Ichiro holds the record for the most hits in one season, at 262. And we we were at that game when he set that record. :)

Galloping Hill Inn

On Friday night Kenji was working late, and I didn't a chance to go grocery shopping during the day, so I went with shoe-changer Joe to eat at a slice of New Jersey history - the Galloping Hill Inn. It apparently started out in the 1920's as some guy selling hot dogs on the side of the road at 5 corners in Union, NJ. Then over the years, they built a hot dog stand that expanded to what you see here. Plus what you don't see here, which is a fancy reception hall located across the parking lot.

I had a hot dog with mustard and relish, onion rings and a birch beer. I didn't take a picture of my food, though.

A letterbox and a milkshake

Tiff, Kenji and I went on another little letterboxing adventure last weekend. We found one planted in the Watchung area not too far away from Route 22. Then we drove out to Bedminster to the Far Hills Pharmacy, where this cute pink ice cream stamp is hidden under a desk in the back of the store. After finding the stamp, we went and root beer floats and ice cream sodas.

They had a cute little froggy journal with unlined pages, so I got one for Tiffknee so that she could start collecting letterbox stamps, making the ice cream cone her first one.