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 🙂

A Fun and Delicious Weekend with Family and Friends!

This weekend, I’ve been a tad quiet, although I did post up my normal personal blog.  I will be posting up another bonus one some time this week, just an update based on all the self-reflection I’ve done this weekend.  BUT onto happier things!..What better way to pass a weekend than with family and friends? They totally helped me put my worries aside for a little bit.

Right now is the time to talk about what happened on my extremely busy but fun part of my past weekend! The parts where my brain could be shut off it was fantastic fun.  On Saturday, in collaboration with one of my friends, we had a “reunion” party at my house.  The goal was to get everyone together or as many as possible in our group of friends now that summer is just around the corner and we sit together and have good laughs, eat and chat.  We managed to round up a good 15-16 people in total (including me) and we had tons of food for the potluck.

I didn’t have time to take pictures of some foods, mostly ready made ones like the McCain Three Cheese Pizza and cooked frozen foods from M&M Meat Shops, like the lasagna, garlic bread and the hors d’oeuvres.  We had a Ceasar Salad from Costco.  Those things I didn’t particularly take pictures of either, except for one. Other than that, we had some salad, meat dishes, desserts.

Hors d’oeuvres

Quinoa Salad

Shepherd’s Pie

Turkey Meatloaf (from me)

I’ve featured this one before.  This time around I did it completely to the recipe, at least I added those chopped apples.  You can check it out HERE! I will keep using apples for this one because it gives it a nice moist texture, better than when I made it without.

Stir-Fried Veggies (from my best friend)

Viet-Style Chicken (from my best friend)

My best friend also made Oven-baked Asparagus.  I didn’t get a chance to take a picture of it.  They were delicious! My best friend is a really awesome cook. Which is totally cool because we complement each other.

Now, I know you all were looking forward to the desserts.  I apologize that I didn’t get a picture of the Chocolate Chip cookies before they were all eaten.  I did catch the Shortbread cookies

Shortbread cookies

And another one of my friends made some truffles.

Truffles

Doesn’t this look totally awesome and delicious? The best was being with a nice group of friends and having a good relaxed time.  Some others contributed alcohol, like wine and whatnot.  One of them brought me SoHo lycee liqueur.  He usually drops by my blog so I’m going to thank him here.  He’s one of my long time friend’s boyfriend and also a fellow Dragonboat teammate.  He’s been introducing me to cool liqueurs ever since we’ve been friends and having these parties.

We ended Saturday with a collective board game of Apples for Apples where the majority joined in. Some of us were busy talking about a new baking project so we skipped but then followed through and went downstairs for 2 games of Mahjong and trained 2 friends to play.  It was fun even though it wasn’t long.  I haven’t played in a while but its always enjoyable.

I know this post is getting long but Sunday was a quick day for me.  I ended up going over to my boyfriend’s place with some homemade hamburger patties and ate with his parents.  I made those awesome scones that I posted about yesterday.  If you missed that post, you can drop by HERE!

I had a fantastic chat next to these beautiful hanging flowers with my boyfriend’s mom.  She is the sweetest lady ever! We’re both bookworms so we talked a lot about that.

Excuse the bad angle.  It was the furthest I could go before having the danger of falling down the spiralling stairs…Still, I wished that sun had stayed around.  Its all gloomy and rainy again. I just wish this spring weather would disappear for a while and let summer drop in for a bit longer than a day…

Sunday dinner: Burgers with Homemade fries!

At least we’re breaking out the summer meals and enjoying whatever good weather we can 🙂

If not, the weekend would’ve been totally rubbish, if not for my awesome friends and family! They brought in the sunlight and pushed those dark days away for a little bit! Finding the positives..I’m still trying to keep that up! 🙂

Weekly Photo Challenge: My 2012 in Pictures

In the beginning of 2012, I had set myself a few goals which I called New Year’s Resolutions.  I’ve talked about this in a previous post but now, let me show you month by month, what’s worth remembering, also giving me a look at what makes up my 2012 and appreciate it all over again with all of you!

JANUARY

Chinese New Year’s celebration marking the beginning of the Year of the Dragon was the main focus.

We celebrate it with the normal traditions.  Its to wish everyone a prosperous and happy new year with banners of wishes.  We decorate with flowers to signify life.  These yellow ones have the name of “String of Gold” to wish for fortune and Lilies translates to togetherness.  My mom always makes a lot of food and she is the absolute best at it.  Here you see the Turnip Cake , however she also makes Taro Cake, which are both for meals and are not sweet as what you’d expect in a cake.  This year she tried out Sweet Potato cake and it turned out very delicious.

FEBRUARY

One Ottawa trip with friends led me to a small discovery in the most unexpected place: A perfume box for a line called Amazing Grace.  The philosophy quote they had was this: “how you climb up the mountain is just as important as how you get down the mountain, and, so it is with life, which for many of us becomes one big gigantic test followed by one gigantic lesson….  Its how you accept winning and losing, good luck and bad luck, the darkness and the light.”

MARCH

The 4th anniversary with my boyfriend, my 26th birthday celebrated with friends.

APRIL

I went on Toronto road trip during Easter with one of my best travel companions and best high school friend.  We go to explore every time and this year, it was to the Toronto Zoo, where we saw a cute baby polar bear and his mother next door.  We also had awesome Chinese food, to us the best at Asian Legend. At the end of the month, my boyfriend took me to see Beauty and the Beast Broadway and we both had lots of fun however, there were no pictures.

Asian Legend Steamed Dumplings

Asian Legend Fried Green Beans

MAY

My boyfriend and I have a growing love of hiking and exploring new places.  We finally made it on Victoria Day (Canada holiday in May) to go to visit Ausable Chasm in New York.  A quick one day trip that was really fun.  We found amazing scenery, beautiful walk and if you’re into video games, even found an area that was like the one in Uncharted and took funny photos.

JUNE

This marked my friends and I bringing in Summer with crazy amount of activities.  A lot of first time and some long time revisiting activities.  First time experienced doing the Tree Adventure, which I fell in love with.  Although I was screaming at the top of my lungs when I did my first zip-lining.  Note that I am VERY scared of heights.  Also, went to the beach with friends (hadn’t done that since 2007 in Taiwan) so it was super fun.

JULY

Fun times yet again with friends: went to Train Concert, went a water park and did lots of water slides, went to a friend’s wedding, won my first and second Dragonboat medals and the best of all was vacation to Saguenay with my boyfriend and hiking up to sit at the foot of a gigantic waterfalls. Wait one more thing, I had a stare down with a wolverine at the zoo also.

Staring down with a wolverine

AUGUST

The best part was one of my greatest friends who lives in NYC visiting me in Montreal with her friend.  Its always fun to make new friends.  We all merged into a Star Wars Identity at the Star Wars exhibit. We visited the Biodome and saw a baby lynx, a very rare sight as Canadian Lynx are endangered species. I also went with my best friend to celebrate her birthday seeing an awesome broadway show, Wicked! ONE MORE THING: as a Star Wars Identity, Dreams, I rejected the offer to join the Dark Side!

And if you missed my full description of the Star Wars Exhibit and my Star Wars Identity, you can visit it HERE!

 

SEPTEMBER

This year we managed to successfully complete the St-Bruno lakes trail and saw a chipmunk and had a wonderful walk.  Its more of a crowded trail so it was hard to get a moment but I took my boyfriend helped me take my first levitation photo.  Very fun stuff!

OCTOBER

Halloween and this blog got me back into watching horror movies, giving me many many sleepless nights. I also visited Lantern Festival and the Japanese Garden at Botanical Gardens.  Then took another night to drive up to Upper Canada Village to see Pumpkin Inferno.  By the end of the month, I transformed myself into Alice from Resident Evil based on her Apocalypse look for Halloween.

Lantern Festival

Japanese Pavillion Lights

Japanese Pavillion Lights

Headless Horseman

Devil Pumpkins

Glow in the Dark Cupcakes

Alice Resident Evil

NOVEMBER

This was possibly the BIGGEST month of the year.  I spent my two weeks vacation in Hong Kong and met up with lots of fantastic friends and family.  Spent a lot of time with my grandmothers and saw a lot of wonderful things.  I came back and gave a last minute week long effort writing like crazy and won the NaNoWriMo.

Respects to my Dad

Journey to Old Hong Kong

Old Hong Kong Street Cinema

Lamma Island

Jelly Fish

DECEMBER

Christmas with family and friend, the biggest winter storm in Montreal since forever, I have no pictures but helping with surprises always make me happy as well.

Winter storm

Winter Storm

Boyfriend’s brother in law with his mom

Winter Storm

Its been a fantastic year in 2012. I’ve had great moments with family and friends, experienced new things, conquered some fears and had so much fun on the blogosphere.  Some bloggers here I’m happy to call my friends and some have given me the most unexpected gifts on Christmas and New Year’s.  Not to mention all those comments and likes.  All your support has been incredibly important to me and means everything to me.

Lets welcome 2013 and I promise you that I’ll step up my game! I’ll have a few posts coming up within today and tomorrow updating everyone.

Have a awesome weekend everyone!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Silhouette

Silhouettes are the outlines of an object.  Many times we get that through having a brighter or more brightly lit background and it contrasts the closer images to be darker.  I really like these effects in pictures but then I don’t use them a lot because you can’t have silhouettes of everything and not see the details and the actual image, right?

Saying that, I do have a few that I’ve taken.  Some are from past festivals that I’ve been to and one was from this summer.  I had posted a similar picture in a previous post about my trip up north of Quebec to Saguenay Lac Saint Jean region.  Its probably one of my favorites shots I’ve ever taken.

Silhouette of the crowd on Formula 1 Weekend at night in 2010

 

Silhouette of my neighborhood park with the sunset during an evening stroll with my mom

 

Green River Ordinance opening performance for Boyce Avenue Concert at Metropolis

A snapshot of the silhouette of one of the band members!

 

An evening walk at Vieux Chicoutimi in Saguenay Lac Saint Jean region this summer.

Don’t you think sunsets are just the most beautiful? The silhouettes it creates are also the most enchanting and attractive, calm and peaceful.  All sorts of great feelings!

 

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Merge…into a Star Wars Identity!!

Fusion! The new fad for everything, especially food.  We want to MERGE concepts for eating, for living, for clothes, etc.  Companies merge to become more competitive or to absorb their competition.  We all love to merge to experience better and newer things, fresh ideas, attractive concepts and more.

This weekend, I visited an exhibition with friends, exactly merging a very popular movie saga with the idea of how we became who we are.  Maybe you’ve heard of it.  No? Well, I’m not sure if its touring, but it stops by wherever you are, I highly urge you to go check it out.  This exhibition at the Montreal Science Center is Star Wars Identities: The Exhibition.  It was a really fun experience.

At the beginning of the journey, we were given a bracelet and a headset.  On the wall we had to test our bracelet to make sure it was working.

“STRONG IS THE FORCE”

Our adventure starts by an intro video telling us about how the interactive experience works.  Its pretty much 10 stages that we need to go through to figure out how our Star Wars Identity will be made and shape its personality, career, etc.

The 10 stations! I won’t post up what happens at the stations since I’m not sure if anyone else will be visiting so to not ruin the experience.  I’m missing the 4th station though, to discover where we live and the lifestyle habits of the society.

So in the final panel, I decided to reject the offer by the emperor!

AND TO THE FINAL MERGE AND SENDING MY STAR WARS IDENTITY INTO SPACE BELOW!

What do you think? Nice merge, eh?

In a nutshell, you can see that I’m a female Twi’lek who lives in forest planet Kashyyyk.  I have 3 close friends and my mentor is Qui-Gon Jinn.  My career is a senator.  My past experiences include being a legend because I took down an enemy command station in one shot and after that opened a Rebel academy to train the younger generation.  I’m adventurous, curious, accomodating and I value self-direction, believe that freedom is the right to choose.

Thats my Star Wars identity and its in Star Wars history now!

Project 365/52 for 2012!!

I will be lying if I could do 365 posts in 2012 so I’m not going to be this ambitious.  For the sake of having a goal for 2012 for blogging, I’ve decided after some thought that I will post about things in my life that make me happy and relaxed.  There are various things that make me forget about all the problems in my life and for that, I love doing them.

One of them is blogging.  So what better idea than to keep myself in good spirit by working on the other fun activities that I engage in and share it with everyone.  I’m going to try to at least post 1-2 times a week.

So this year will be about my favorite things:

1) Photography! For many of those who have followed my blog, most of my Post a Week challenges were fulfilled with the Weekly Photo Challenge.  Also, this year, one of my new year’s resolutions is to improve my photography and know my new camera better.  So I’ll try to take pictures of different sceneries, portraits, etc, basically work on a wide variety of photography-related skills.

2) Crafts!  I’ve gained this wonderful love for crafts.  For example, this year, I almost made all my gifts.  I love hands-on crafty things.  I love to try new crafts.  So when I do accomplish something, I’ll share with everyone the little accomplishments.

3) Movies!  I watch TV series and movies a lot! Its part of who I am (aside from music). Its something I do to relax and for that, I also have my own little collections at home.  Be it new or old movies, I will review movies once in a while.  Especially certain movies that intrigue me more such as book adaptations or whatnot.

4) Baking! Do I need to say more? I love to bake desserts.  I’d love to be able to make fantastic desserts and try new recipes.  I’m lactose-intolerant so normally, I’m restricted in choice when it comes to buying it elsewhere.  Therefore, I hope that with this extra push, I’ll encourage myself to bake more in 2012.  I’ll share my results and if it does prove to be a good recipe, I’ll even post up whichever recipe I used.

I think four different areas of interests will be suffice for 2012.  So this is my initiation blog for my blogging goals for this coming year.

I hope that everyone will enjoy it and please leave comments or suggestions if ever you have any!

Have a great 2012 and happy blogging!

Can a camera truly capture a moment in time (when it is unable to capture itself or its user in that moment)?

After coming back from my vacation in Niagara Falls and reviewing all the pictures that I took, I am completely inspired to write this blog.  I think that a camera can truly capture a moment in time even if its unable to capture itself or its user in the moment.  I think this because whether it was pre-planned (ex. staring at camera when picture is taken) or whether it was a candid moment, it still held the purpose of capturing a time in space which was intended to be remembered and reminisced.

Even in pre-arranged pictures, we are celebrating moments of gathering, whether amongst family or friends or even both.  Even in these moments, we see the connections each person has with the others and the message that was sent out in these events.  This is what is wanted to be remembered.  There are days I still look back at pictures like these and we think back to the happy moments during certain gatherings I’ve had with family especially with loved ones who have moved away or passed away simply leaving us one way or another.  We think back and become thankful for the times we’ve spent together and being more grateful for the ones who are still in our lives.

In my opinion, the best moments in time captured by the camera are the ones that are completely unexpected.  During the trip, I took many pictures of my boyfriend.  The ones I loved the most was the various moments when he was so captured by the moment whether in thoughts or in joy that when I simply looked at the picture, I felt it because it was so natural.  A moment captured by the camera when he had the most radiant smile while in Bird Kingdom observing the little birds of the lost kingdom, a satisfied grin while trying something new for the first time, or even the serious concentrated look when he was focused in taking the best shot with his camera.  With these pictures, we relive the moments in our memories and feel the deep feelings that went through a loved one.

Another example of moments in time captured that are very enjoyable are those that we can’t control being the ones where nature is the main focus which can only be caught in a few seconds or the moment will be gone until some unknown time.  Something like this picture below (taken at the Butterfly Conservatory):

 

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Lines

Last week I didn’t get a chance to post this before the new Weekly photo challenge came out.

Mostly because I was in Kingston and looking at this alleyway with such defined lines made by the bricks. Very beautiful and meaningful alleyway. Perhaps a time machine of sorts.