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.

Happy Halloween!

Yep, we ran out of candy again. This time we must have had like 150 kids come to the door... at least that's about how many pieces of candy we thought we had.

This year we had big purple wizard guy answering the door. Most of the kids thought he was funny, but some thought he was scary. A Grim Reaper chick also answered the door, but she was too scary so we didn't let her open the door too often.

After running out of candy, big purple wizard guy was spotted playing karaoke!

We also found a little Musubi kitty hanging out with a green glowy pumpkin. :)

Um, and I just thought these were silly Crate & Barrel decorations...

So what the heck are these green things? We found them on the ground next to the trailhead located at the Iron Hill Museum in Delaware. We were out hunting a letterbox of course.

Anyway, I've seen the artificial likeness of these strange fruits... we sold them at Crate & Barrel as decorative things to put inside a centerpiece bowl. I always thought they were tremendously ugly. I also always thought they were made-up fruits. But I guess they are real. Either that or the folks at the Iron Hill Museum in Delaware like to shop at Crate & Barrel.

Breakfast!

This was breakfast this morning. It's a large quarter slice of a huge baked apple pancake. Yum!

China Shipping Line

After wandering around the shops in Chesapeake City, and watching the little fire department parade, Kenji and I went letterboxing. I mentioned before that there are six bridges that cross the Delaware & Chesapeake Canal. Well, there are also six letterboxes planted alongside the canal, each carved in the image of one of the bridges. Two are hidden on the north side of the canal, and four on the south.


We took this picture of the China Shipping Line ship from the north side of the canal. We also saw several other large cargo ships pass by today. We found all six bridge boxes, as well as another box hidden at Lum's Pond, which is also on the north side of the canal.

Volunteer Fire Department Parade

So our stay in Chesapeake City happened to coincide with the little volunteer fire department parade they were having for the area towns. Here are some of the vehicles that were in the parade.

Chesapeake City, Take II

Kenji's been away for several weeks at a training in Virginia. He's been driving home every weekend, except for this one. Instead, I made arrangements for us to stay in Chesapeake City again, about the halfway point between his training and home in NJ. This is our second time staying in Chesapeake City. We did try to stay someplace different, maybe in Fredericksburg or Alexandria, but all the places I called were already booked. So we stayed in the same B&B as the last time, even the same room. :)

It's Friday, and I arrived in Chesapeake City several hours before Kenji, so I took a nice walk. That's the Chesapeake City Bridge, one of six that crosses the Delaware & Chesapeake Canal.

Worky

This is where our new offices are. The building looks much prettier than it used when we first began considering the place.

Hitchhiker!

Shoechanger Joe is going on vacation for a couple weeks - to France and Scotland!

Now that I've gotten him into Letterboxing, I've made my first "hitchhiker" letterbox. Joe will plant it alongside a regular letterbox that he will find in either France or Scotland. Then the next person to find the letterbox that my hitchhiker is hidden with, that person will take my box and re-hide it alongside the next letterbox he or she finds. Once my letterbox's logbook is all filled up with stamp impressions, I will make arrangements to have it sent back to me.

At least that's the plan. Of course it could always get lost somewhere along the way. That's why I thought I should take a picture of it now. I got the pink button on top from my grandma's button collection. The kitty cat bead is something I bought a few years ago when I was making little containers out of beads. I became bored with making those containers before
I ever got around to using the kitty cat bead.

An Irish Blessing

After finishing the hike with Jason and his friends, I drove a little further into town to find a place to eat. My plan was to go find the letterbox hidden at Ringwood Manor, and I thought perhaps I should grab a bite to eat before hand. So first I went to the little New York town of Tuxedo, where I ate at a busy diner where they had good French toast. Looking out the window of the diner, I learned that gasoline in New York is at least $0.50 more than it is in New Jersey.

Anyway, after lunch I found my way to Ringwood Manor, which is just a few miles back over the border on the Jersey side. I should have read the clues for An Irish Blessing more carefully before I got started. For some reason I was under the impression that this would be a quick find. I didn't even change back into my hiking boots, which would have been nice since was tromping around in the woods wearing my sandals.

The hike was really nice though. The manor grounds are pretty with interesting things to look at, like a reflecting pool and sculptures of creepy looking beasty chicks.

There's a little lake, next to which is a graveyard I guess for the people who used to live in the manor way back in way-back times. For some reason I like graveyards, especially when you can see water from them.

Since it's been so warm so far this fall, there has been very little change in leaf color. So here's one of the few examples of fall foliage I found - the picture doesn't convey the color as well as it looked in person, and I can't quite get it right in Photoshop, but it's pretty close. Oh well.

So the hike and the hunt ended up taking about an hour and a half altogether. I could have done it more quickly but I was having fun poking around the graveyard, and then when I was just about ready to find the letterbox, I had to sit real quiet for several minutes while waiting for other hikers to pass by. Sera and Doobie carved a real pretty stamp, so yeah, other people should go find it. :)

Harriman Hike (Again)

Two springs ago Kenji and I went on a hike just over the line in New York's Harriman State Park with our friend Jason and the group of hikers he organizes on a monthly basis. We hiked the 7 Hills trail. Today I went on another hike with Jason and a couple of his friends, again at Harriman, but this time a different trail.

This time instead of the 7 hills, we hiked near the 7 lakes. Well, I don't know how close to any lakes we were, but we at least had to drive down Seven Lakes Drive to get to the trailhead. I liked this hike a lot because there were lots of cool rock formations along the trail, and those are interesting to look at. And this rock formation was extra cool because it was like a comfy chair. See how comfy I look?

We also found a bunch of cool acorn caps like this one. I don't know what breed of oak trees produces this kind of acorn cap, but I had never seen one of this shape before. Like the regular acorn caps I'm used to seeing, this one made a very good whistle. :)

Hello Stuffed Lobster

Last night I went to dinner with Tiffknee and her mommy and daddy and
some of their friends. I thought the sign out front was funny.

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.