And now…What’s up for 2014 here?

Yesterday, I posted up my personal New Year’s Goals HERE!  I don’t usually document most of those goals on my blog so, before I update my About page, this is whats going to go on here regarding goals for the new year! I’ll probably figure some spontaneous stuff as the year rolls on but for now, I put a lot of thinking and made some decisions.  Of course, I’d also love to hear your opinion on it 🙂

Let’s start with the stuff that will stay from 2013!

1) MOVIES!

Shitfest 2013

Movie reviews, participating in blogathons and the whole thing has really increased in the past year.  I’d even go so far as to say that it probably was the most grown part in the past year.  Writing reviews really takes a lot of time for me and I’m still finding a good balance as of how to really review movies.  BUT, I’ll do what I did last year and review what I’ve seen.  I will try my best to make it to the theatres more but I will also buy less movies and watch more on Netflix! 🙂

Aside from that, we’re looking at the same marathons going on like below:

January: Catching up with as many 2013 movies as possible (with some other older ones as well)

February 1-14: Valentine’s marathon (I already have a general plan for this)

March & August: Recommendation month (check out THIS post if you’re wondering what that is)

July: Fantasia Festival 2014

September: TIFF 2014 (I’ll try my best to make it there)

October: Halloween marathon

December: Christmas/holiday/winter marathon

I have a few months just to do some random movie viewing and I’m aiming to take it easy in general.  Nothing like daily movie reviews because that can get tiring so I’ll try for 2-3 movie reviews a week.

Any other suggestions? Marathons? Recommendations (if not I’ll take suggestions given to me over the course of last year in the comments)? 

2) Baking & Cooking

Hamburger cupcakes!

For the most part, baking is my passion.  Seeing as my goal is to improve on the appearances and decorations of my baked goods, I’m going to do a little cupcake project.  Maybe I’ll put themes to them or whatnot.  I haven’t worked out the details but I did get Betty Crocker’s Big Book of Cupcakes so I’m aiming for a little bit fancier desserts. How does Cupcake project sound?

As for cooking, I’m sorry to say that Bite of China Project was something I really couldn’t get going.  However, I do have plans with my best friend to revive it once she feels like she’s ready to blog in her life.  So, maybe I’ll open a blog with her some time down the road the bring the project up to pace.  I’m disappointed in myself for not being able to do that BUT, this year, I had thought about taking down cooking entirely but the last while of using healthier foods and substitutes for a healthier eating lifestyle, has really made me excited about cooking again.  So I’m thinking of making that into an official thing.

What do you think? Should cooking stay and exploring healthy foods/vegetables, etc? Look into healthier substitutes and that sort of thing? 

I’m aiming to get at least one recipe up every week and gradually increase to 2 or 3 as my priorities drop a bit.

3) BOOKS

Sadly, this is the one that I’ve been thinking of cutting out.  However, in the light that I don’t want to really cut it out completely, in 2014, I’m going to do small reviews  on monthly basis.  The only ones that are going to take full reviews will be when its for books written by bloggers.  Some of the best books I read this year were written by these authors.  If you do want to see more of what I’m reading, just search me up on Goodreads or drop me and email and I’ll add you 🙂

My goal is to read 40 books this year as per the Goodreads Reading Challenge.  I might change it to 35…depending on how crazy life gets 🙂 Still, not writing full on reviews will make life a lot easier.

4) WEEKLY WORKOUT ROUNDUPS

I’m not sure how many of you actually find this motivating.  This is more of a personal thing.  It gives me the illusion that I have people watching my progress so I keep going and pushing hard.  So, my plan is to stop once I reach Week 52.  However, if this does motivate this, I’d gladly keep doing it but on monthly basis, which I actually think is a pretty good idea.  Its something I’m thinking about 🙂 I’m at Week 43 right now so there is only 10 more posts to go up.  However, if you do want to join me in my quest, you could always follow me on Tribesports 🙂 It’ll be fun! If not, my workouts go directly to my Twitter feed as well.

5) TRAVEL/WRITING/DAILY PROMPT/PHOTO CHALLENGES

Other than Photo Challenges, everything else is something of a part time thing here.  I like to do it but I don’t travel all the time; I don’t do creative writing because I think I write bad and daily prompts are really when I’m inspired by the topic.  First off, I’ll try my best to keep up with Weekly Photo Challenge and A Word A Week Challenge.  I know that I’ve slacked off a bit at the end of the year but I’m ready to do well. I have a side goal to improve my photography skills and get to know my DSLR camera better. 🙂

Do you want to see more creative writing or daily prompts here? 

6) PERSONAL/VLOG/PIANO COVERS & MONTREAL EVENTS

Boyce Avenue Concert

The last section is also some new stuff I’ve implemented in 2013. Montreal Events and possibly just events around me that I go to, I’ll see cover all those things.  Its fun and I do it already.

BUT, my big question is whether you all would like to see more vlogs, piano covers and my personal posts (mostly about staying positive and stuff related to that)? How about my expanding the TV series and music obsessions? Do you like those segments? Which would you like to see more out of these?

OVERALL!

This has been a really long post, or it felt that way because it took me a span of hours to get it all down. I’d love to hear your opinion on where I want this to go. Is there something you drop by to check out? Is there something I did rarely but you want to see more of? Help me out by answering some of my questions?

Please leave me a comment, tweet, email (if you’re shy).  I’d really love to hear from you 🙂

Thanks for everything! I’ll be updating my menu and my side bar widgets this week to keep this organized a bit more.

Let’s play! My cat’s way of welcoming the New Year!

Now that this business is pretty much out of the way, I have reviews and photo challenges lined up for the rest of the week! Final note, I felt last year was a bit crazy, hence the chopping off or slowing down of certain segments and also, I was going at 2 posts a day but I’m going to gradually drop down to a post a day and maybe just round up to about 7-8 posts a week.  I’m trying to find a decent balance to match with my personal goals and not overload on stress 🙂

2013 in review!

I was going to do a post on 2013 recap but since WordPress did one for me, here’s the simple version while I put together my more detailed one. Check this out! 🙂 Visit some of the posts that are popular if you’d like.  I’ll be back with something very soon! Some 2014 forecasts as well and some last minute decisions to make as to the direction of where all this is going 🙂 I know some of you will cross the New Year’s point and if you have: Happy 2014!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 47,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 17 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

A Word A Week Challenge: Journey

Being on vacation means I’m always on a journey somewhere.  In Hong Kong, its all on public transport and sometimes it was over an hour of travelling.  It made Sue from A Word in Your Ear’s word for this week JOURNEY seem so on the spot.  (You can join into her challenge here for more details)  I had to think about which part of my trip felt like a journey.  Leading up from Ocean Park feature for the weekly photo challenge of green, I’m a bit late with this week’s word but I still wanted to participate to demonstrate my journey into the old days of Hong Kong. Hong Kong is different from China in the way that it was influenced by Chinese culture but also because it was a British colony before 1997, it has been influenced by colonial architecture around Hong Kong.  This makes Hong Kong into a different phase in its early days before modernization.  This part of Hong Kong is the part I want to show you.  Ocean Park now features a Old Hong Kong street area.  Here is a gallery to show you my journey through that.

Journey to Old Hong Kong

Old Hong Kong Street Cinema

Here is the walk down old Hong Kong street where we get an idea of how the stores looked.  There were side carts and people that sold fruits and vegetables and other goodies on the side of the street as well.  There were posters on all the walls advertising perfumes and lotions, ointments and messages from the government such as to preserve water.  One of the issues is that people needed to get water at a certain place and they only had a certain amount they could get so they would use old oil cans to fill it up and bring it back home to store and use accordingly. There is the old double decker buses and the first generation trams.  You even have the booth for where the traffic control officer would stand before traffic lights existed.  Also, there are rickshaws and we even get the actual frontal display of the theatres and how they looked.

I’m all about history and heritage when I talk about Hong Kong and I feel that as someone whose family is primarily born in Hong Kong, I find it important to understand how my grandparents and parents lived when they were younger and understand the past society.  It has been a tremendous change from back then till now.