Toy Rescue!

Today I was working from home, using our dining room table as my desk. Spammy always hangs around me wherever I go in the house, and today was no different. Near where I was sitting is the radiator, and the kitties' scratching post. I guess Spammy was bored because out of the blue he decided to stand on top of the scratching post.

Spammy used to hop up on his scratching post all the time when he was a little tiny kitty. He hasn't done that for almost two years now, so I was surprised when he did it today.

Of course I took the opportunity to make up a new game for him. It's called Rescue the Toys from the Radiator!

I put all of Spammy's favorite toys on top of the radiator (don't worry, the radiator was not on!). Starting at from the top of the picture below, there was Cowie, Mousie, Carrot, Peary and Moley. Spammy rescued his toys at least four or five times before he got bored again. Sometimes in between rescues, he climbed up on top of the scratching post just in case there were more toys up there. Cute!

Corn Maze (Reprise)

Tiffknee, Kenji and I went corn mazing last weekend. Much to our dismay, the corn maze we did last year was already closed for the season. But only a couple miles away from the one we did last year is another one at Alstede Farms. Last year's corn maze was much better than this one. For one, Alstede Farms is only open during the daytime. Secondly, you don't get to collect crayon rubbings. Oh well, we had fun anyway. We already set a date for going to the cool corn maze again next year.

One thing that's good about Alstede Farms is that they sell good relish there. The End. :)

Japanese Cultural Center?

Oh, oops, I mean Jewish Community Center!

Kenji and I joined the gym at the JCC in West Orange tonight. Weeeeeird. Well for me it's weird to join a gym. When we lived in Hawaii, I joined the Curves that was next door to work because my Hawaii Mommy (Gail) said she only would join if I did. But Curves doesn't count as a real gym because there's no treadmills or elliptical machines or pools or racket ball courts or locker rooms or any kind of stuff like that.

The JCC seems pretty nice. Most of the equipment have TVs built in so you don't have to get totally bored while you are walking, running and climbing in place. And now we can just go and take different kinds of classes like spinning, Tai Chi or whatevers. Anyway now we just gotta make sure we actually use our membership. :)

Snow fall before leaf fall...

So anyway I had some time this morning to take pictures while driving on my way into work. There must have been some kind of accident in Mendham because traffic was rerouted through town, and that meant sitting still for some time. It's not very often you get to see snow on trees that also still have their leaves. The fall colors showed up late this year, and apparently the leaves will hand on as long as they can!

Whiskey Cafe

Tonight (well I guess yesterday night now) Tiffknee and I went to Lyndhurst or Rutherford or wherever it is to dance at the Whiskey Cafe. Every month Jim Dean and his band play swing music and there is a buffet, all for the same price as we normally pay to get into one of the DJ'ed dances around here. If you look really hard, you can see Tiff dancing with a guy named Kenny - she's in the t-shirt. Kenny is a great dancer but somehow this is only the first time I've ever met him. Apparently he stopped going out to other swing dance venues in Jersey because there weren't enough decent follows to dance with.

Anyway it was a fun time. I should go to this venue more often. Our friend Mickey is going to DJ during the band breaks for this dance next month so maybe we'll make it out for that one too.

El Bandito!

Friday night Kenji and I went to a place nearby us called El Bandito. It's a colorful Mexican restaurant. It's down the street from another Mexican restaurant that is not colorful. We ate at the not-colorful Mexican restaurant about a year ago. It must not have been anything special since we haven't gone back to it.

Once of the things that makes El Bandito special is it is very colorful, on the outside as well as the inside. I like all the murals painted on the walls. The food was decent too. What we really liked was that they give you little complimentary quesadillas along with the chips and salsa to start you off. And then after you think you can't eat any more and you told the guy to pack up your leftovers to take home, they bring you free dessert - a little ice cream with a deep fried banana. Yummy. Oh and they have a little mariachi band walking around entertaining folks.

Better Music Video :)

Today the Gas House Gorillas sent a message to their mailing list, of which I am a subscriber. In the message, they had a link to a video that was recorded of them playing Run Run Rudolph at Stanhope House last December. If you look reeeeealllly hard, you can see Kenji and me dancing in the crowd between the Gorillas and the camera (though you can't really see us till like 20 seconds into the video). :)

Music Video!

This week at work we are having our semi-annual "summit", which means that all the folks who work outside the main office come to town for meetings and junk like that. It also means doing fun stuff together, and this time it was bowling.

One of my favorite out-of-town work buddies is Lynn. We like to drink girly martinis (like chocolate or fruity-kine mmm yummy!), and he has an infectious laugh. :) He also says funny things like "intermship" and "upsad" and I can't remember any of the others right now, but we have a whole list of them.

Anyway at bowling Lynn and I starred in our very own little music video. Well you can't hear the music we were grooving to, and it's not much of a video.


Here are some other pictures from our bowling expeditions:


This one is from Tuesday night - we went to Dover Lanes, which is in Dover (I know, surprising....).

And tonight bowling was at a tiny little bowling alley in Mendham called Pastime Bowling Lanes. They only have four lanes, and even get to keep score with a pencil. :)

Conveyor Belt Sushi

On our way home from Connecticut we were both getting sleepy from driving so we decided to stop at the Palisades Center Mall in Nyack, New York to find someplace to eat. It turns out there's a conveyor belt sushi place there. I can't remember the name of it... Eastern Japanese Restaurant or something like that... somehow that restaurant doesn't seem to be listed on the mall's web site though.

It was really good - I think better than any other conveyor belt sushi place I've been to anyway. The fish was really fresh and they had a pretty good selection, except the little spam musubis were missing. :)

Letterboxing Bust!

This morning Kenji and I took a road trip up to visit my friend Chris (a.k.a. Topher) who lives in Middletown, Connecticut. After having a nice lunch, we drove down to Haddam in search of some letterboxes that are hidden along some hiking trails (I don't know what park they are part of as we did not use a main entrance).

Anyway, on top of the facts that trails are not very well marked and the clues not very clear, there was a nice layer of leaves freshly fallen off the trees which made it difficult to identify which way the poorly marked trail went. Oh and because it's almost wintertime, we didn't have a whole lot of daylight to play with anyway, so we thought perhaps it would be better to try this lot of boxes (there should have been six altogether) in some other season.

But while the letterboxing was a bust, the hike itself was not. Along the trail was this cool abandoned stone house. We went inside and explored. There wasn't much there, and we had to be careful walking around inside as the floorboards were all rotting away. Anyway it was fun.

Moksha and Mithaas

Last night shoe changer Gretchen called us up asking if we were interested in going out for Ethiopian or Indian food. We chose Indian. Gretchen happens to dine quite regularly at a place in what is essentially the Little India section of Edison, New Jersey called Moksha. I let Gretchen and Kenji make all the selections since I trusted everything would be good, and it was. I especially liked the chicken appetizer we had, but of course I can't tell you which one it was because I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to what was being ordered. Kenji's favorite was the Nellore Chapala Koora, which was a spicy fish curry (that one was easier to find on the menu hehe). We also got another chicken and lamb dish, and yummy drinks, and well, we ate way too much. :)

After dinner, Gretchen took us to a nearby Indian sweets shop called Mithaas. It happened that this week was also Diwali, so Mithaas was all very colorfully decorated as you can see in the photo above. We bought some sweets to eat, but not last night because we were too full already.

Dancing

Last night I wen to the twice monthly dance in Whippany. See that's me in the red shirt... that's right, I'm all the way to the left there. :)

Oh wait, there I am where you can actually see me. Hehe.

Burger Night Letterbox

Here's a stamp I carved for a letterbox that I planted a couple weeks ago. It's planted behind the bar at Joe's Place in Union, where on many Mondays Shoe Changer Joe and friends meet for burgers and just to hang out. Every now and then Kenji and I join them.

This image is from the piece of paper I used to design the stamp. On a letterboxing venture with Shoe Changer Joe, we stopped for a late lunch at the Tropicana Diner in Elizabeth. They had a pretty good picture of a burger on their menu, so I took a picture of it. Later on I printed the burger picture, darkened certain parts of it using a pencil, and then transfered the image onto an eraser which I then carved.

Anyway the piece of paper has been lying around the house adding to coffee table clutter, and it's time to get rid of it. So that's why I took a picture and posted it here. The End. :)

Peddler's Village

Yesterday we had some real nice autumn weather so Kenji and I drove out to Pennsylvania to visit Peddler's Village, just across the Delaware from NJ on Route 202. It was a very busy day to go because they were having an apple festival. In addition to all the shops, they had a whole bunch of tents set up with vendors selling their wares, as well as about a bazillion people. I really wanted to get some apple dumplings but the line for that was astonishingly long.

We spent a few hours there, did some Christmas shopping, and enjoyed some homemade veggie soup. We also saw a tall guy walking around on stilts and got to watch a blacksmith pounding out decorative iron stars on an anvil. But we forgot to take pictures of those. D'oh! But we did get a photo of this big pot of apple goo cooking over a wood fire.

On our way home, somewhere around Bridgewater, we spotted a hot air balloon coming down from the day's activities.