end, The Goldenest Week of All (pt. 4/4)

So Wednesday was pretty low-key.  I might put up one pic in the next post from it but we pretty much just stayed at the house. Thursday, however, was an incredible day!  We went here: That’s right!  Seibu dome! I finally got into a stadium and watched a sport for the first time in (now) more than a year and a half.  It was so good.  So good. So good.  Can’t wait to go again.  Also, I like Seibu dome enough, it’s not too far of a trek from here either and with the boy at least we can keep him out of the rain.  Still would love to get to Jingu some time soon.

No good shots so you can get an idea of where our seats were but we were right behind the on-filed (helmet club) seats on the first base line. The seats kinda sucked in my opinion for a  bunch of different reasons that I’m not gonna devote the time to right now. I did bring the zoom lens and got a couple of decent shots but they could have been so much better if we’d sat farther back… 

The boy really enjoyed himself when he wasn’t napping (with his mom)

We had some pretty tasty ramen and the game was pretty good, 5-3 win for (our?) Lions and we saw some home runs.  Pretty happy the boy’s first game was a win. 

So there it was, 2011′s Golden Week.  It was a really good week.  Got to see some cool places, do some cool things.  It was great spending time with the wife and boy, more than the usual time at least.  Hope we can take another vacation soon, if not at least get out to the stadium again soon. A full week of work coming up here starting tomorrow…

twas the night before Golden Week…

We made it. I’m officially on vacation and I don’t know if I could be happier.  I’m beat though. I just woke up from a 20 minute nap on the couch while the wife was putting the boy to bed and I’d drooled all over the pillow. Gross but it was satisfying.  Think I could go for another.  I need to be up now to get a little packing done for tomorrow.  I guess we’re leaving fairly early and after two consecutive early days with little sleep I think I’ve gotta go to bed early tonight.  I’m waiting for the wife to finish doing some stuff before I talk to her about what’s going in my pack and such so I thought I might write something up here now since I’ve kinda blown it off the past few days.  Not much has really happened though. I guess it’s been about a week and a half. What did I do? Last Sunday I got my bike tire fixed and that was about it. I did make some sweet hamburgers again. On Thursday the day started with some baseball watching, here’s the boy checking out the M’s: Pretty sure we won this game so that was good. M’s have shown some promise here and there this year. Missing a few pieces to say the least though. After baseball we went back to the same place I got my tire fixed on Sunday to get some stuff for our planter boxes.  Kinda sucks not having a garden any more but what can we do.  Stuck with only this for awhile.  We planted a couple tomato seedlings, eggplant, chili peppers and bell peppers.  We also put in some morning-glory seeds.  I miss the garden. We had some sweet skies that night but I failed to capture them in a meaningful way so this is the best shot I’ve got for here, our little こいのぼり with the sun behind them: Boom, there we go.  Been playing a few games but maybe I’ll talk a bit more about that next time.  The hard-core vacationing kicks off tomorrow.  Hope I’ll have a ton of good pictures to go through when we get back. I have a feeling this GW is going to fly by! Hope the weather’s nice at lest for most of the time.  Happy Golden Week to all, and to all a good night…

pluggin’ along.

So it’s the end of another Thursday. Crawling into the last stretch before we get a much-needed and hopefully well-timed Golden Week. Well, some of the timing was already f’d because of my scrawny paycheck this month.  I was originally hoping to have 8 days off but can’t afford to go that long without working now so I’ll only end up with 5 days off.  Oh well, it will hopefully be a good 5 days. The well-timed part is that we are all seemingly finally coming to the end of our colds around here and I’m hoping we’ll be totally ship-shape by the time vacation actually kicks off next Sunday.  It’s been a rough couple of weeks for all of us, really the last couple months.  For a baby that’d never been sick and a wife that almost never gets sick they’ve both spent their time on the mend. Not to mention me.  But we’re all feeling fairly well and really are just struggling now to shake the coughs that rattle our chests.

Before I go on, I’d like to mention that I’m watching the first episode of “Game of Thrones” and so far so good, visually stunning.  Not usually something I’d be much interested in but all the buzz around it had me intrigued.  Also I’m sipping on my new bag, メロンクリームソーダ: I’m not usually much of a soda drinker but I happened to pick up a bottle of this at the store a little bit back and really dig it.  Sweet though.

So Golden Week, we’re gonna go up to 秩父 and visit g-pa and g-ma’s graves and hang out in the woods a bit.  Hope we’ll have some nice weather and hope I can get some good photos.  After we come back into town we’ll be heading to a baseball game! Yeah, you heard me, a baseball game!  We picked up tickets to the May 5th (boy’s day and cinco de Mayo!) game at Seibu dome (or whatever it’s called now) to see the Lions against the Marines.  It’s not Central League but it’ll do.  Hope it’ll be a good game. Man I just hope that nothing terrible happens (in general as well) before the game to postpone or cancel this one… I don’t think I could take the heartbreak again… It’s been too long.  Luckily it’s going to be in the only dome that I like so at least there’s no chance of a rainout.

For some reason my left knee has been hurting all day…

I finally tried to play GT5 the other night and I can say that I’m just totally done with that game.  I spent about an hour updating it and then trying to work my way through the menus (which seem to have been designed by a complete idiot) and I raced about twice and just was completely finished with it. After, I fired up Forza 3 but found out that my save file was missing which was disappointing but still, it’s just a better game. I did start up Killzone 3 again today and I think I will play a bit more after I finish this.

Last thing on the list is some sweet-ass sandwiches I made tonight.  I finally got the wife to make some sourdough bread and I whipped up the sandwiches; BLTACs, super grilled-cheese and a mishmash of the other two.  Here’s a shot of the BLTAC:  No real other news I think. Just hoping that everyone is well soon.

Spring has sprunoh wait, nope.

Yesterday couldn’t have been a more spring-like day around here. We went for a walk, did some grocery shopping and stopped by a park to take some pictures of the boy. With MJ’s b-day less than a month away now the wife’s been hard at work on a picture display in the living room (I gotta get to work on a video…) and we’d been missing a 11ヶ月 picture so we tried to get that done (pictures later). I even had the door open at one point in the early evening because the weather was so nice and warm. Today, however, is the complete opposite. Cold. Also, it’d been raining since late last night and continues even now but at some points throughout this morning that rain has turned to snow. Wow, what a way to say goodbye to February huh?
Just got to work and it was pretty much just rain on the way in but super cold. Oh well, back to yesterday we go!
So, here’s some of the good pictures from the park ( a bunch more on Flickr that didn’t necessarily fit in here):

After playing around for a bit I got-a-cooking! Looked like this:
I made some taco salad which turned out pretty good, original lime dressing was taste! The salad shells were the part I was most worried about, I thought about making the tortillas from scratch because the only ones we can get regularly are fairly small but I went with them anyway. I used some rectangular pans we usually use for lasagna to form the shells so I could only get three sides to stand up but it made for an interesting display chance. I just baked the tortillas in the oven for about 15 minutes and they turned out pretty decent. For dessert I tried my hand at some “Apple pie pockets” using gyoza skins. Turned out alright seeing as I’ve never deep-fried anything before. Good day!

In other news, M’s played, and won, their first spring training game today! March 31st is opening day (also the 31st has been decided as “Spring Cleaning Day” at our house), can’t wait! Think I’ll run over to Bic Camera today to get an iTunes card and buy the MLB at bat 2011 app for my phone so I can listen to games again this year. It’s gonna be really strange not hearing Dave’s voice this year. Sad… We’ll miss you Dave. I’m interested to see what the team does for their opening home game to honor him.

Grab Bag!

Here at no airplay we like to just give you everything at once.  So, that’s what I’m gonna do!  I’ve got a beer, and a nursing baby, so if those two things cooperate, I’ll be able to post a bunch of pictures, update some stuff, talk about some stuff, and maybe get a beer review (or maybe two?) by the time I’m done tonight!

First a pic of some of the wife’s home-cooking!  It’s great now that she’s feeling better and able to do more things around the house, nothing’s better than being able to enjoy her food (I’m still waiting on my bentos though…):

タコライス！

This is of course the famous Okinawan dish, Taco Rice.  Pretty good stuff!

Today was shitty, weather-wise, but we didn’t let it dampen our spirits.  This was the first time we could all go out as a family since the ride home from the hospital and we weren’t about to wait for good weather!  We’d hoped to do more but we ended up just going over to the next station for a little shopping.  Here’s a couple pics from our time outside today (there are a couple more on the Flickr account as well):

on the way to the station

even I got in a picture!

priority seat at its finest

baby train!

cabbage patch

There’s a bunch more pictures on Flickr that I’m not gonna put up here probably, also some from the couple of days before as well, here’s a representative shot but check them out for yourself if you like, just click the pic!

After our outing, we came home and eventually got the boy in the bath, oh he loved it!  After his bath, we wrapped him up in a present we got from dude? and Mrs. dude? and although he’s still swimming in it, it’s dawg-gone cute and at least we’ll be able to use it for many many months to come!So now on to some other stuff.  First, I’m loving the M’s resurgence since starting the season off so crappy!  Also loving that BS is showing most of the M’s games, reminds me of when I was a student here during the M’s magical 2001 season, before Matsuzaka and Matsui went across the Pacific and they would only show M’s games here.  Last year it was ridiculous, Orioles and Rays and Braves games were on all the time here, crap!  Now we seem to back to normal.

When we were at the next station over today I stopped in a １００円 store to pick up some more frisbees, this time bigger (drivers) ones for what I’m hoping will be some intense Golden Week Ghetto Phrisbee Golphin action with Melvis.  I also plotted out the 18 hole course that we will attempt, here’s a look on Google Maps:

Kugahara GPGCC

The blue line and dot at about 12:00 is the first hole and basically the course goes counter-clockwise from there.  The 9th hole goes along the Tama River down and to the left there.  I’m quite excited to give this a shot and if weather permits, I’ll be out some time during Golden Week and I’m sure I’ll have some pictures of the day’s events to put up here shortly after.

Alright, now it’s time for some beer, the first one is again from SanktGallen and it’s a pretty good Amber Ale. Nice dark flavors, easy drinker:

Amber Ale: Ne

Last beer (review) of the night.  This time it’s a Mexican beer that the wife picked up down the street called Bohemia Clasica.  Seems to be from the same company that makes most of the other Mexican beers you’ve ever heard of and for good reason, it tastes mostly like them too.  I will say that I have found lagers (and especially pilsners) to be better from the bottle, I accidentally poured this one out in the glass and it’s just pretty average.  I read that it’s probably better straight from the bottle and if I ever come across it again I’ll give that a shot but for now…

Bohemia Clasica: Kr

Can’t wait for Cinco de Mayo!!!

Opening day jitters

This young man was very excited (forced by his father) to get all gussied up for the M’s first game of the season today and my oh my did he look good!

After that, the wife told me that he was really cranky all evening before I got home and he’s been the same since.  It’s about 1am now and he’s still fussing around… and the M’s won!