More of That Snow

Back with more pictures from our "Vacation Day" in the snow. I know there are a lot of people from areas where is doesn't snow this much, so I hope you can enjoy these types of photos. Now that I'm posting these, all the snow has already melted, so these are sort of cool to see again for me, too.

I like these pictures where the contrast of white and dark really effortlessly draws a picture of the trees and stuff. Without the snow, it would just look like random nonsense mess of branches.

Holiday Treats

 Merry Xmas! We bought this candy pretzel kit during the... Halloween season, but did not get a good day to try it until we took our "Snow Day" and had the afternoon off. Part of getting the kit was we knew it would be a fun thing to get pictures of and share, so enjoy this Holiday treat! Which Holiday?

We've seen these types of pretzels in the grocery store for a long time now, and they always looked so good. And when we saw this relatively inexpensive kit, it was perfect enough to try and see what kind of messy pictures we could get out of it while also trying out some candy pretzels.

Snow Day!

 SNOW! Alright! I get to take pictures of something besides random shopping oddities. The forecast was for 8-12 inches! Quick! Buy all the Milk and bread! MILK AND BREAD!!! MMIIILLLLKKK AND BBBRREEAAAADD!!!!!! Haha.

This was "the start" of it, when we got home from work early at 3 that day. It was supposed to snow all night until noon the next day!

Safe!

Not too much adventuring happening with the early darkness, so these pictures are just random nonsense again. But those are fun to share, too.

Taco Bell had a baseball World Series promotion where if any player "steals" a base, you get to "steal" a taco. So here's our stolen taco. My goodie-goodie friend was a little hesitant at participating in a fictitious crime, but then again, they don't arrest baseball players for stealing bases, so the false-terminology would also apply to this stolen taco.

Thoughtful Portion

 Another Thoughtful Portion of random pictures!

Digiorno has some tasty pizzas but Nestle has zero common sense package engineers. First of all, they trademarked the term "Thoughtful Portion". Huh? Then this says enjoy a portion with a fresh green salad. Like seriously has anybody EVER had pizza with a salad? Who are they trying to kid? And the most hilarious "portion" of this; is they say 1 portion=1/5th of the pizza. Who cuts a pizza into FIVE slices? They even put up a picture to show you, and it looks ridiculous.

The Least

Is all shopping these days considered "Xmas Shopping"? I mean, I'm just going to buy groceries. And get fun pictures to share while I'm out, too. Hope this brings you some seasonal cheer.

These are funny but also make me uncomfortable a bit. Like, would you be happy to get this as a present? I remember when somebody... hated me the least. Awww... you suck, too!

Don't Sit

 Oh boy! Another group of pictures from just wandering around. Hope these can cheer you up if you need some cheering up.

Okay so this first picture isn't very cheer-y, but surely, one day, we will all look back on this horrible year and all of the restrictions we went through in an attempt to be "safe." And I guess it's cool to document some of these things, like this crazy McDonald's interior nobody can, or should, sit in. Right now. In 2020. That was crazy, right?

Thanks for Pictures

Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy feasting on some fun pictures? Wow that sounds lame. Sorry. Um, anyway... During a record-breaking-ly warm week in November, we went for a very nice bike ride! So of course we gotta get some cool Fall season pictures to share.

Ooooooh the pretty colors! Brace yourself there's going to be a lot of pretty-colors pictures today. So you might want to pace yourself.

Buy the Un-buy-able

 Back with yet another round of random pictures. Hope these can bring you some smiles.

What's the word I'm looking for to describe this? Irony? Hypocritical? How can you say Xmas can't be bought, on something you are buying? Is this going to collapse the space-time continuum as soon as it's been sold?

Hot Pictures

 Playing catch-up with all of the random pictures I took while waiting for the new laptop to arrive. I'm typing all of these captions in advance so maybe there will be some stuff that's a little less-relevant when you read this.

For example: here's another picture of McDonald's Spicy Nuggets. I was going to comment about how good they are and the sauce is genuinely spicy, but I think they've already stopped selling these. Hope you got some while you could!

Summer Stragglers

 Yikes these pictures are from a while ago. I seem to always have a group of pictures from bike rides that I wind up posting well after the weather has become much too chilly to actually ride anymore. I have to say, it's nice for me to look at these and remember the Summer warmth, do you get a similar feeling?

This is the new vacations idea for the horrible year of 2020 lockdowns. Get one of these silver bullet camper things and drive around. This one is parked in Middle of Nowhere, New Jersey. But I guess it doesn't really matter where you park it as long as you are on vacation and not home.

Anything?

I must be repeating lame introductions to batches of random pictures at some point. Maybe I could be using the same copy-pasted text, but that's lazy, right? Whatever.. Enjoy random pictures?

Caught a picture of this truck as it was driving away. It says they ship Anything, Anywhere, Anytime. Sooooo.... I hope the good guys know about this, because the bad guys will see this and think "Hey, that solves a lot of our problems!"

Columbus Flea Market part 3

 One last batch of pictures from the newly discovered Columbus Flea Market. We found a ton of treasures here! And by treasures, we mean photos. We got lots of photos.

Is this a trap? There's a TV just sitting here in the parking lot. Does it work? Does it belong to this car parked here? What is the deal with this? I'll admit we were a little stunned by the confusion, and wound up leaving it alone. But we were for sure going to get a picture of it, whatever the story was.

Columbus Flea Market part 2

I took a short pause to post up those Halloween pics so they would be more relevant, but here's the 2nd of 3 batches of pictures from our adventure day out to the Columbus Flea Market. Good 'ole fashion treasure hunting.

This building is in rather good condition considering it's a flea market. Usually these things are just glorified wooden shacks. Is that the difference between one good coat of paint and some bright lights? Let's see if we can um... see... some fun stuff!

More Halloween Spirit 2020

Happy Halloween! It's disappointing that Halloween is on a Saturday this year, and yet we cannot go anywhere. Not technically, with y'know... the whole Covid thing. So stay safe and buy yourself your own candy, get in a costume, and chill out with another batch of pictures from the Spirit Halloween Store. 

If you take a step back and think about Halloween... and why do we make a fun celebration out of this scary stuff? Eh, let's not try to analyze it and just admit it's fun and be okay with it. These are harmless props and not real things, so it's okay really... right?

Halloween Spirit 2020

 Let's take a pause on those flea market pictures to get in the upcoming holiday um... spirit? Looks like it's become a yearly tradition to wander through the Spirit Halloween stores that pops-up in September. I think Covid is going to crush a lot of Halloween this year, Trick-or-Treating and Parties and such. So why are they selling this stuff? I'll stay away from that conversation and instead just make fun comments like usual.

These pictures were taken in early September when the store first "popped-up" so the selection was still fresh. Of course I waited until closer to actual Halloween to share these pictures.

Columbus Flea Market

Back to regular postings with an actual Adventure! Okay calm down, we just discovered another giant flea market. We all know 2020 was a bad year for exploring but we grabbed a mask and prepared to stay six feet away from everybody, and went to go take some pictures. Who's up for some treasure hunting?

The coworker who told us about this place was thinking of this, years ago, when they recommended the Berlin Flea Market. This place is a lot closer, but still about a forty minute drive. No we did not get a helicopter, this is the view from the web site. Would have been cool to get a helicopter though.

Upgrade!

 Finally back to business! Um, I don't think I can call this a business. Back to.... hobby-ness? Hobbiness? Can I create words? Anyway... Our ancient Windows XP desktop PC was unable to load the Blogspot website interface anymore. So... What to do? I've grown fond of this silly hobby of taking pictures of fun things and sharing them, so I wanted to continue to do it. I guess we could have used the phone itself to both take pictures and post them, but I had no intention of typing this much text on the phone's "keyboard screen thingy". So I guess we needed a new computer.

  

Rather than just replace the desktop PC "tower" with a newer one, we decided to go with a laptop. My friend has never really had his own laptop before. So it might be fun to explore what that's like. We're supposed to cover this with stickers, right?

I'm Back!

 I'm back! Not entirely unexpected, since we got some warning in advance, but the blogspot interface updated itself beyond the reach of our ancient Windows XP computer. Several years ago, we would occasionally use the public library's computers to post, but... thanks to Covid shutting down the libraries, we couldn't even do that. Sooo.. okay let's buy us a laptop. Now we've officially spent money on this hobby. And I guess we now we have a laptop, to do other "laptop" stuff on. I'll get a picture of the new toy later, for now here's just another bunch of random pictures of stuff we saw and wanted to share. This still counts as a trial to see if this new laptop works. Pictures are a few weeks old but still fun.

D&D Properties Maintenance? Cool! Are they the ones that set up the trap doors and feed the giant spiders in the dungeon? I'm having trouble with my gelatinous cubes leaving streaks on the floors.

The Empty

Yet another collection of random pictures taken while out on shopping adventures. I should mention that this is the last post I'm pre-posting from August, and the blogspot site might have updated, and our old Windows XP computer might not be able to make new posts. So if there's a delay seeing more posts, it's likely because we are in the process of getting a new computer or figuring out the new formats or whatever. Hopefully they will keep what they call the "Legacy" format available, and everything will be just like usual.

A couple weeks later and the Walmart that was closing is nearly empty. We've been in going-out-of-business stores before, and it's always an odd mix of hopeful bargain hunting and sadness.

Riding Around

This bunch of pictures if from our bike rides, something we can get away with normally in the Age of Covid. There are some routes we have avoided, like the state park and Princeton, since we don't know what's-what with masks and all. But there are still plenty of other directions to go and fun things to see.

If this tree fell down and nobody was around to hear it, did it make a sound? Who wants some philosophy with their exercise?

Preparation

Another collection of random pictures from where ever. With entertaining comments to keep you um... entertained.

How odd is this shirt. It's funny at first, but after you think about it, it's like a depressing revelation about how society in general seems to push people apart. Unless you are one of those Alaska wilderness frontier people. I guess this shirt is for them.

Stomp!

More rando pics. Can I think of anything else clever to say here? Enjoy the fun pictures.

This Pikachu looks like he was trampled! But he... likes it? Look at how happy he looks. I almost felt a little bad picking him up off of the floor. We should have taken the picture while he was still on the floor, but my friend's instincts were to help him, and then take the picture afterwards.

Waiting Adventure

Adventure story! My friend's driver license "expired" back in May, but due to the Covid-19 pandemic whatevers, at the time, the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, or MVC, was not open. Bureaucrats decided to extend the expiration through July... and then later through September. We've been hearing horror stories about line-waits and thought it was a good idea to not wait until the last minute to go. So... let's get some pictures and share the experience.

We showed up at 7:05am, the website claimed you were not supposed to queue up on the property before 7. We were expecting a traffic jam of sorts, if they were going to open the parking lot at 7, but there was already a huge line there and no traffic jam. So feel free to show up earlier if you want. And you're going to want... We managed to find a parking spot but honestly there was only a couple left, I think we got lucky.

Treasure Hunting

Another collection of pictures from the wonderful Summer of Non-Adventures. Still, we get out and do a bit of shopping, so there's a small amount of adventure and picture-taking to be had.

Big Lots is reading our minds? We've often called shopping "Treasure Hunting" and I guess that terminology has somehow found it's way onto this sign. This cute puppy looks like it's ready to sniff out some treasures. We never thought about having hound dog trackers, so that's a new thought.

Return to the Mall

Phase-Whatever Re-Opening! I'm not paying attention to the numbers they give out, sorry. New Jersey guesses it's safe enough to invite people back into shopping malls. And since it's been several months since we've been, let's go check out what's there!

You might not have known with all of the cars in the parking lot, so there's a big sign to tell you it's OPEN! This was probably useful for the first few people to have shown up.

Best Logistics

Another batch of old random pictures we found! Are these the best kind of pictures? These are from around February. Also, I should mention that the blog entry interface is changing, so there might be a near-future when a huge lapse of time might occur as I have to buy a whole new expensive computer to continue to blog.

This truck says "Best Way Logistics" but, is taking up NINE parking spots the best logistical way to park? Is this an example of "irony"? At the very least, it's hypocritical.

Ikea Walk

Another group of pictures we recently found, this adventure was in early February...

In an effort to prepare for the Toy Fair, we had the crazy idea of "walking around all day" for a day, to avoid last year's exhaustion. Walking is different than exercise bike, so despite how used to biking we were, it caught us off guard last year when we got so tired-out. The crazy thought of training for a day-of-walking isn't too crazy, right? The Ikea store is next to the big Jersey Gardens Mall, so that's a good amount of walking to be done. And we might as well grab some pictures to share.

Is is fun to put an quote from an internet "influencer" on this blog? I'm afraid I'm not familiar with Gabriela Perez, but it's okay she probably has no idea who Minty is either. And to be honest, I don't really think I count as an "influencer".... yet?

Squirrel Picnic!

Everybody heard of a "DIY" project? That stands for Do It Yourself. My friend got a Birthday gift that needed some extra crafting. But that's considered part of the gift, because we all know how cool it is to work on something yourself.

The gift arrived in two different boxes. We were told to wait until both boxes arrived before we opened them. There was an agonizing 6-day delay between the first box's arrival and the second. We waited to open the boxes, but Amazon does this cool thing where they wrap the thing inside the box in a gift bag anyway. Seems much more like a present. Yay Amazon!

Dark Magic

What's this? I found a bunch of pictures we never got around to posting! Looks like we took these pictures in mid-February, so that was before the Pandemic Lockdown Frenzy, and right before the Toy Fair. It's just a bunch of random pictures so it's cool if I took them a while ago, they should still provide some entertainment.

Every TV show, book, and movie tells me that Dark Magic is bad, Dark Magic comes with a price, Dark Magic darkens your heart,... you get the idea. Well, if you want that feeling, there's some coffee for you!

12:34:56

Every day is a new adventure? I don't really feel bored even though I just stay home every day. The bike riding is on hold right now, the rear tire went flat and wouldn't you know, Apocalypse Hoarding includes replacement bicycle tire tubes? They are not easy to find right now. There's still random shopping trips and other pictures to share.

So we just beat the newest Shantae game for the Nintendo Switch, subtitled The Seven Sirens. How awesome is this completion time? There's now way we planned on this and what are the odds? We didn't rush through or anything, if you were wondering. And the best win screen expects you to have taken... less than four hours.

Secure Destruction

Back with more random adventure pictures. Covid-19 era adventures include plain old shopping trips and bike rides.

We got a big thrill out of the text on the side of this truck. The Michael Bay Transformer movies are usually big messes, but they include clever uses of things like this text, and we were convinced this truck was going to change into a Decepticon robot and star destroying stuff.

Hanging Out With The Child

It's "The Child" from the Disney+ series The Mandalorian! Or, more commonly known as, Baby Yoda! We found him hanging out at the Target store and just had to bring him home to protect him. And, in a rare Minty blog post, I'm not in most of these pictures, it's like a mini celebrity guest post!

Just walking around Target with this precious little guy in the basket was awesome enough. He looks fully sized and fully detailed and fully accurate to the show and... fully adorable!

Summer 2020 Adventure?

It's hard to call things "adventures" when you are supposed to be staying home keeping everybody safe. How many movies do we see where the heroes just... stay home? Nobody's seen that! Anyway... here's some non-adventure random photos.

While out shopping, we still peek around for interesting things. Here's a Hot Wheels car that's also a money clip! Because nothing screams "awww yeah, bling bling!" like a 99 cent Hot Wheels.

Unexplored Paths

Going out for bike rides is about all the non-shopping adventure we can do right now. This group of pictures is from previously un-explored routes,  so what's new to share?

The office complex we chose to explore was indeed massive. Here's a connecting trail that looked a little worn. Nah, we won't get lost. I'm not being coy, we didn't actually get lost.

Nice Weekends

Back with another great weekend to go out riding the bike. Taking pictures to share helps us feel like we are not so alone on this activity we do all by ourselves.

This looked a little bigger outside the camera. But now that I see this picture, you might need to be told there's a banner over on that hill that says "Thank you to all essential workers!" That hill always reminds me of the big Gungan battle at the end of Star Wars Episode 1. Who mowed the hill in the movie?

Not a Cookie

Over the last several weeks we've been posting pictures from the game Animal Crossing and our bike ride. But we've also been taking random pictures while out on errands. So let's see what we have to share?

I saw this package in the freezer and laughed out loud. The little munch out of the pancake, and Cookie Monster's resigned expression. He was tricked into thinking these pancakes were cookies. That's NOT a cookie. He does not look thrilled.

More From The Bike Ride

Still pictures from our first bike ride of the year! The last Saturday in May, if you can believe it. We went right from a mild warm Winter into a chilly Spring, into global lockdown mayhem, and more chilly rainy weather. But finally glad to be out and taking pictures to share.

See that family waaaaay over there? Yeah it might be a little silly to be so cautious, but we know that the bike can catch up to them quickly, and we made sure they were far enough away before we continued.

1st Bike Ride of The Year!

Finally! We got a "good" Saturday to go for a bike ride! Not chilly, not rainy, not quarantined, not terrified-of-social-distancing (as much). Just a nice sunny warm day. Our area is refreshingly packed with people walking around, usually. And even now it's very common to see a bunch of people strolling around... in masks. But the paths we go on bike rides are relatively clear of that kind of traffic. We brought along a mask, just in case, but never had to put it on.

Woah, does my friend even remember how to ride a bike? It's been so long! Oh, yeah. I guess it's just like... riding... a... bike? Haha. Got ya. Of course we were excited to be going on an adventure to take pictures for sharing.

Animal Crossing Fun

One last bunch of pictures from Animal Crossing: New Horizons. For now. This might be the best ones. There's a lot of funny things that happen either on purpose or by accident. Sometimes an item name gets put into a generic sentence,... or sometimes the characters just say fun things. I'm going to keep the comments to a minimum this time, as the pictures really just speak for themselves.

Is this everybody's weekend these days? I removed the name to maintain the thin veil of Internet anonymity.

More Animal Crossing!

You didn't think we had just one batch of pictures for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, did you? Since we can't go on adventures like we normally do, this game has become the adventure. This bunch of pictures is to showcase some more details about what you can do in the game.

Ah, the humble beginnings of Fort Pillow. Remember those tents we used to live in? Your island is randomly generated and you get to choose from a few selections. If you are curious, the things you cannot eventually change include the main plaza and airport locations, as well as the beach and river ends where they meet the ocean. Having never played an Animal Crossing game before, we had no idea what would be good or not, and just picked one that looked interesting.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Since it's been taking up a lot of our time lately, I thought it might be fun to post pictures from the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The Nintendo Switch has a very easy screen-capture button right on the controller, so it's a habit to take pictures of "cool stuff" whenever. We had a lot of pictures saved so we thought, why not share?

My friend had never played an Animal Crossing game before, but it's like Star Wars: It's popular for a reason, right? Like, it can't be anything but a great game to be so popular. This game was actually given to my friend as a planned-late-Xmas-gift, so... I guess we're in!

Minty Cam

I'm not going on adventures at my regular pace, so that's the reason for the slowdown in pictures to post. I'm still taking pictures of stuff, so let's see what we got. Hope it's fun a little bit.

I thought it would be cute to post a picture like most TV media looks these days, like as if I was talking to you from a web cam in my comfy home. I suppose I should say stuff like "we'll get through this together?" Sorry I didn't put anything interesting on a shelf behind me. Who else checks out the backgrounds to see stuff the celebrities "coincidentally" had there?

Count on Minty!

Well, not much going on around here. Staying home all the time is not boring, but it does limit the picture taking opportunities. I do have a few pictures I can share.

Forgetting about the logistics of collecting the census data these days, we saw this commercial for the US Census featuring The Count from Sesame Street. And we had a laugh imagining what that must be like for him. Counting every---single---person---in---America?! That's got to be his total dream job! He goes door-to-door and AH AH AH! with every person he counted!

What can I say?

Minty is still hanging in there. We've been chilling in the self-quarantine for a very lazy few weeks, after a very minor fever and almost no other symptoms whatsoever. That's technically over next Wednesday so life will return to "normal" shortly. Normal, like going to work and drive thru lunches. The rest of it is still all weird. We were properly stocked-up so we barely opened the front door. There were some pictures in the camera of random stuff, so we can post stuff from when life was less weird. These pictures were taken when you could still go out shopping regularly.

Saw this in the art store and thought it could be one of those internet things where people steal it and insert funny text. Maybe something like "My Little Pony was relevant 8 years ago"? Minty is just glad to still be taking pictures at this point.

Cabin Fever?

Okay, what happened? I know I was posting pictures from the Toy Fair for a while, and during that time, massive changes happened around the world. The Covid-19 Pandemic has urged everyone to stay away from each other and how strange is the result. Having a "warehouse" job, little had changed for my friend. He went to work as usual, stayed away from people, fast-food drive thru for lunch, go home. It was not very different than his normal routine, for the most part. Until about a week ago...

One night he got "the chills" and checked his temperature. Fever. Boom. Instant out-of-work for two weeks, minimum. Toasty waterbed plus 12 blankets got rid of the chills and acetaminophen got the fever down. A "small amount of" panic and uncertainty about how this would progress turned out to be "very minor symptoms." So minor in fact, that we're not even sure if my friend actually DID have the "Covid 19" at all. There was definitely some vague head-cold feeling, like he should have been stuffed up, but wasn't. No trouble breathing at all. As I write this on Sunday when the fever happened last Tuesday night. So we're still vaguely worried but optimistic that we were either spared from the worst case or lucky we did not actually get it. Yet still expecting to be sucker punched when we least expect it.

Having said all that, I suppose it's okay to have some fun with the pictures we've taken over the preceding weeks. I guess this stuff happened, and we got some pictures, so might as well record it in the blog. One day we can look back at this and think a different bunch of thoughts. If you are reading this, I hope you are doing well.

NYC Part B

One last bunch of pics from our walk around New York City after the 2020 New York Toy Fair. If you need reminding, these pictures were taken late February before "things happened". Let's all just forget about those things for a while and enjoy some fun pictures.

At the FAO Schwarz checking out gigantic Funko Mystery Minis. Funny  that I still have to refer to them as "minis", they usually come in those small random boxes. Could you imagine the size of the boxes for these? How much would they have to cost, and how bad would you feel if you did not get the one you wanted? You think you could find somebody to trade with?

New York City Walk?

What a difference a few weeks make. "The World" has changed a little over these past weeks, and seeing pictures like this must seem odd or inappropriate somehow. This walk around New York City was on February 22nd. So try to enjoy a peek into the recent past and remember that there will be a future where this is all "back to normal" and a big old rant like this might seem silly when looked upon in the future.

Of course, every trip to the New York Toy Fair includes a trip to the big city itself. I suppose we could just go home, but we are already here, so let's walk around and get some pictures.

Random picture from the train ride into the city...Can you think of a clever graphic icon for "keep feet off seats"? They couldn't. If you can't read English, does it still apply to you? Or do they expect all non-English speaking people to just be polite normally, and not need a sign.

Last of the Toy Fair 2020 pictures

This is the last bunch of pictures we got at the 2020 New York Toy Fair. I know I've been spreading these posts over several weeks, so it might be a little strange to see pictures from a big-attended event like this right now. It's only been a few weeks? Anyway, enjoy this small distraction. And if you want more, remember I've got years-worth's of posts to check back on!

I wonder if there are any 75-year-olds still playing with toys. Minty is not nearly that old yet. The Mattel booth is located on it's own separate floor, and there's a club-like bouncer turning you away right at the escalator. It's giving off the wrong vibes, are they aware of that?

Toy Fair 2020 More Cute

Sorry for the delay, I got caught up playing Animal Crossing and slacked off on the pictures for a few days! Almost through the pictures from the 2020 New York Toy Fair. I don't think we took as many this year... when you go a few times, you start to wonder what's new and what you've already taken pictures of last year. We try to only get new pictures, but sometimes we forget. Have another round of cute pictures.

What exactly is this poodle soliciting here? Welcome to the New York Toy Fair! I guess it's innocent enough. The thing to notice about this enormous poster is that this is a trade-only show, so technically you'd be taking this poodle to your toy store to sell, not to your home.