Sunday-Monday and other days.

Well looky there.  Still no voice. Well, more voice than yesterday. Much more than Friday or Saturday but even what little I have today I imagine wouldn’t last long if I’d gone to work so I’m home sick again today.  Hope I’ll be near full strength tomorrow so I can go in to work Tuesday and Wednesday. The wife and I might head to an Ear Nose and Throat doctor this afternoon to get me checked out and maybe speed up my recovery.  Being an English conversation teacher and not being able to talk is quite a conundrum.

Hey, it snowed like crazy again this morning! Sweet!So Sunday, well, I felt fine, the weather was amazing and incredibly Spring-like (weird how these snow flurries seem to come the day after Spring-like weather…) so we went for a walk and had lunch outside the house.  We went to Jolly Pasta and my favorite picture from the restaurant was this awesome backhand I received from the boy when I got too close, gotta keep your pimp hand strong: After lunch it was off to Baskin Robbins for some ice cream: And after that, we spent some time at the park. MJ played with some other kids (a girl with exceptional eyebrows especially took a keen interest in him) and we rode the slide a bunch:

And that was about it for Sunday.  I got Killzone 3 two weeks ago and played a little bit of it but have to get a bit more into it.  Also got Fight Night Champion last week and played a bit.  Both of them are pretty good but I’ll hold off absolute judgement a little while longer.  This week I’m hoping MLB 2K11 will be on its way to the place and then next week I think I’m in for Homefront (probably place my order later today) so a lot of gaming to do this month.  Need to get back and healthy, been going to bed too early lately to get in many games. Also have Back To The Future The Game Pt. 2 to get into… Can’t wait for this Sunday most of all though, SOCCER!!! It will be the first game since we got the new camera so I’m really excited to bust out the zoom lens and hopefully get some cool pictures of the stadium, the game, and the action!

Finally, the boy sleeping, I took this under really bad lighting conditions so I tried to bump things up in Photoshop, not sure how I feel it turned out but here it is anyway, later:

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.

she gives me love, love, love, love, crazy love

Holla at me Van Morrison!

Good day at the nest today.  Not too much went down today except that I finally got my hair cut!  Oh man, it’s nice to not have very much hair again. The exciting part of this week came at the beginning. Sunday night I made some pretty sweet Teriyaki Chicken (American style because I was telling the wife about how it’s popular there), here it is:

There are some pictures of the marinade on Flickr if you care but it’s basically just: soy sauce, grated ginger, garlic, some pepper, cooking sake, mirin and maybe that’s it.

I also took this picture that got a lot of love on Facebook with the caption: “baby bear, mama bear, daddy bear”

Monday of course was Valentine’s day, of course it started out with my receipt of beer and a t-shirt from my favorite brewery in Japan, Baird Brewing Co.:That picture is from today when I cracked open my first one from this selection, the Angry Boy Brown Ale: I liked this one, it’s really bitter but I like that bite and I give this one a: Ne

Back to Monday.  While I was at work it started snowing again!  This time it started around 7 in the evening and so as it started to get colder it started to stick (FINALLY!) so when I got home from work this is what it looked like outside: So cool to have snow finally sticking around here. More on that later.  When I got home I also brought home the wife’s Valentine’s present.  I was gonna get her a cake like usual but instead decided to switch it up and get her some chocolates this time (maybe a cake for White Day?): There was also a plate of freshly baked brownies waiting for me!:

So that was about it for Valentine’s day but luckily the snow stuck around so the next morning, while I was sleeping, the wife took the boy downstairs to play around in the snow for a bit.  Even luckily-er, she took some pretty decent pictures of the event:

So that’s about it.  Again, a backlog of specific posts is hanging out there on the periphery that I might get to soon.  It becomes less and less likely as time passes but we’ll see (as always).  This Saturday is K-chan’s b-day but I can’t go so hopefully the wife’ll get some decent pictures for me.  Gonna play some games with dude? tonight and maybe crack open another beer but I think I have a slight fever so I think I’ll try and call it early tonight. Maybe.

Land of the midnight snow…!

I know Casey will be totally unimpressed with this, but I’m ecstatic!  It freakin’ snowed!

I’d say that at the time of this picture, we’re up to about 7cm or so, how awesome is that?!  Too bad my guess is that it’ll stop snowing in about an hour and a half and then it’ll pretty much all be gone by the time I wake up tomorrow… sad.

by the way, how cool is it that this picture was taken at 11:30 pm?  looks like mid-day!  tough to get the focus right looking through the view finder in the middle of the night.  I got lucky to get it this focused!  Still, damn that is a bright looking picture!