Toronto 2018: Toronto Zoo

On the first day in town, we actually didn’t go to EGLX yet but rather went for a day at the zoo. Normally, whenever we go to zoos, its pretty much a quick max 4 hour experience but Drew had mentioned that he was set for a full day there and other than a short lunch break, Toronto Zoo did have a lot to see and we stayed for about 7 hours. The highlight for Toronto Zoo which ends this weekend is saying goodbye to the Giant Pandas, who happen to be the first pandas born in Canada.

Toronto Zoo is pretty huge. It covers a lot of different continents. Due it still being in the winter schedule, it had a lot of empty spots so some areas like Africa was just a walk through the place and then checking out the pavilion. I think that is what sets it apart is that there are a few pavilions to go through for the more exotic animals and it gives it a lot more space to check out some cool birds and more.

Since this was a huge day and I have like 800 pictures or something, I’m going to trim it down to pictures that turned out well or animals that I found were pretty unique to this location.

Giant Panda Cubs

Red Panda

Tree Kangaroos

MacLeay’s Spectres

Polar Bears

Otters

Gorilla

Pygmy Hippopotamus

Red River Hog

Jaguar

African Lions

Komodo Dragon

Greater One Horned Rhinoceros

And here you go! Not all of them are really that rare but its always a challenge to get pictures of animals because of how far away they are. A lot of really cool ones here in all the different areas plus a lot of them are various levels of endangered which really makes it worth it to see them protected. There was a ton more than what I have here from meerkats to sloths and all kinds of monkeys and a lot of fishes and frogs and snakes and other reptiles and insects. I could go on and on.

Toronto Zoo is really worth it to just see what they have. Not a lot of zoos have such a huge terrain with indoor pavilions and outside areas. It would be nice one year to visit when its the summer to see how its set up when a lot of the warm climate animals are back.

Plus, luck was really on our side for the zoo. A lot of times we would be right on time for feeding times or speaking by the carers of a certain animal. Sometimes, we’d double back and the animal would have woken up from their nap and started moving around. It was a really great time!

Blogiversary Bash 2015: Tranquil Dreams

Happy 2nd Blogiversary to Cara of Silver Screen Serenade! 🙂
Head over to check out my post for her party celebration. This year, I’m all about lists on my favorite Disney animal characters! There’s been some absolutely awesome posts for this Blogiversary Bash! And I’m positive a ton more are about to show up 🙂

Remember to head over and check it all out and of course, wish her a happy blogiversary! 🙂

Silver Screen Serenade

The cute? YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE CUTE.

The party continues! I’m here with yet another excellent guest post for my Blogiversary Bash, which has been an absolutely delightful time so far. Today will make it even more delightful with a very happy post from the awesome Miss Kim of Tranquil Dreams!

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Its one of those weeks! How about a little Pinterest Therapy?

When the whole office has one of those days collectively, you know its only a matter of time before stress just bugs us out. Scratch out days..because its been a shitty few days.  Work has been emotionally and mentally draining.  A whole new test of why I’m still there.

Because I desperately want to write hate mail to the provincial government but that probably won’t turn out too good for me.  Then I got some unreasonable client issues and man, its been just a whirlwind of crazy.  Plus, I realized that I didn’t just mess up the postal code on one order that’s already in shipping but a second one also.  Moving, my friends.  That hardest part is remembering the damn postal code!!

*takes a deep breath*I didn’t get a post up earlier today because of everything happening at once but now I’m in desperate need of some positive change.

My solution: Pinterest Therapy! 🙂

1st happy: Flowers!

Borage

What is seriously nicer than coming home to a vase of flowers or a pot (if you are a really awesome gardener)? I realized that I’m doomed from just the direction my house is facing for flowers so I’ve given up.  From all those plants I bought last spring, my geranium was doing so great until the last week so now I only have 2 plants surviving and another one doing better because I gifted it to my mom.

Either way, this flower is so pretty! Also, I’m excited that I get to start planning out Chinese New Year flower shopping. A good reason to have another lovely vase of flowers.  I have one right now because the boyfriend was mega sweet and gave me some lilies the other day to cheer me up.

2nd happy: soft furry kittens

I love animals in general and mini versions of any animal is absolutely adorable (except for crawly bugs). Just look at this furball.  It looks like a tiny snowball! Hmm…reminds me that I need to head off to give my kitty a kiss and a cuddle first! 🙂

3rd happy: Breakfast food

Breakfast food!

It doesn’t have to be in the AM to love breakfast food.  I love it all the time! I mean, look at that, doesn’t this look so awesome? Breakfast food makes me happy.  Its all happy colors too 🙂 Fruits, avocado, salmon, eggs all look so fantastic! And even if you don’t like this, think about bacon, everything is so much more awesome with crispy bacon.

4th happy: Pretty dresses

Pretty dresses

In a post quite a while, I’ve mentioned that when I’m feeling really bad, I like to get all pretty. You know, put on a cute dress and just channel in the pretty.  It kind of makes me feel better plus, I’ve turned into quite a crazy clothes shopper and I’m extremely poor after the holidays so the only shopping I have is fake version of it on Pinterest 😉

So many reasons to love Pinterest and thats one of the best ones.  Kills time and saves money…haha!

5th happy: Sweets and Baking!

 

C’mon! No words to describe that.  I’m working on that Baking Through Disney project. I can’t imagine all the fun stuff thats going to be so thats where my happy place is.  Baking is just all sorts of awesome.  I haven’t had time to bake this week (or last one) but looking up great ideas are equally great.

6th happy: Hot/Handsome Guys & The 100!

I’m going like crazy obsession phase of The 100 especially since its absolutely awesome with its weekly updated episodes 🙂 And honestly, The 100 isn’t even about the hot guys or whatnot.  Other than Ricky Whittle, not sure I see anyone exceptionally hot but the characters all have something that really gets me to just love them.  But searching up hot (shirtless) guys are a huge thing for me on Pinterest so look at this hot shot of Ricky Whittle.  He’s in The 100 and his character is awesome!

AND FINALLY!

7th happy: Quotes

 

I’m feeling oodles better.  Now if I can just fight off this cold that keeps wanting to get worse. Still, everything feels a little bit better! I’m ready to take on tomorrow.  Its finally Friday! 🙂 I’m still debating what to post tomorrow but I’ll be working on that in a little bit.

What makes you happy when you’re feeling down?

Music also helps and I’ll be putting together an obsessions post extremely soon 🙂

My Weekly Adventures!

Sitting around looking back at the past week, its been consumed with my house, boyfriend, horror movie marathon, catching up on TV and writing posts and of course, work.  Time is really a scarce resource, my friends.

Still, I’ve learned a few thing this week even if its not even having to step out of my neighborhood 😉

Lets see what I’ve been up to, right?

1) Marathoning at the max!

October Halloween Horror month is what set off the blog in 2012 and its what motivates.  I know that a lot of you are interested in this genre so every year I try to up my game.  This weekend I had some crazy motivation and got through 4 films in the rundown.  I know, I know, a deserve a pat on the back.  Wait until you see what else I got done 😉

The movies were interesting to say the least.  I already posted up the Friday 13th Part 2 review this morning.  I pretty much have one more movie to watch to complete this week.  Although, I’m actually thinking about whether to do a few weekend reviews or just do a few double review days.  I usually try to avoid weekends since the posts never are popular because we’re all generally busy with our own lives.

2) TV time!

Who’d have thought after watching so many movies, I’d still have time for TV, right? Well, yeah, sacrificing sleep or just pure insomnia week is where I’m at.  So I’m finishing up Arrow Season 2. I only have maybe 5-7 episodes to go which should be land me right in time for Wednesday for Season 3.

 

Other than that, I started Vampire Diaries Season 6.  Its interesting to say the least.  From how Season 5 ended, I figured everyone would be yet again grieving in their own separate ways (and this time, its pretty literal). I’m not a hard audience to please when it comes to Vampire Diaries so I was relatively happy with it.  I do hope that things intensify gradually because I can see things getting a lot worse before they get better as is always the case with Vampire Diaries 😉

I do intend on eventually checking out How to Get Away With Murder and Gotham. Before that, I’m going to work on Arrow 😉

3) House: New Lights

One of the biggest successes this week is finally having the basement done. Its just having my two DVD shelves over and arranging all the stuff into it but in general, its painted, the new wall lights (from Rona) were installed, trimmings done, furniture arranged and even bought a floor lamp (from IKEA) to help with lighting up the room a little.  Its feels pretty good to know that almost everything is in place for the basement.  I even managed to rearrange the storage in shelves and started putting a video games away.  Its rewarding to look at the basement and be pleased that its finally coming around.

Only one more room to do and thats the kitchen.  Along with my furniture to come in and a bunch of organization but its definitely coming along nicely 🙂

4) House: Cabinet decoration

Things are slowly coming out of the boxes and my room is looking more and more empty as things are boxed up at my  new place.  The first floor is technically done safe for what I mentioned before, organization.  Now that the garden is all transplanted with a few little decisions left and a whole lot of leaves raking, I was indoors taking care of pulling things out.  IKEA had a lovely sale on a glass cabinet and we bought that a few weeks ago so I couldn’t leave it so sad and empty in its corner.  Here’s how it turned out:

Yup, thats a Yuna from Final Fantasy on the top and yes, those are the original My Little Ponies at the bottom. Nothing is extremely valuable as in I’ll be able to sell it off and get back a lot of money but its valuable because of the memories it holds whether from person who I got it from, the travels or just parts of my life 🙂 Its not exactly done but I think its 90% there.

5) Yummy Lamb Chops

The weather gets cooler and my mom loves to make lamb.  Sunday night, she made lamb chops and they were absolutely delicious.  🙂

6) Cat Napping Time

Let me introduce you to a Saturday morning at 8:30am (because we all wake up at 7am to feed my cat), especially after a few late evenings away from home during the week.  The result is not only being waken up brutally early on Saturday morning but that when I crawl back into bed, she’ll finish eating and then comes back for her morning nap and usually is her obstructing me from getting up.  Apparently my blanket covered legs are extremely comfortable to sleep on.

7) Music!

There’s really nothing else that happened other than those little things so how about to end things off with some music that I love this week 🙂

Daniel de Bourg is an independent artist and this new single is awesome! 🙂 Plus, when in doubt, Jason Mraz is a sure fire 😉

How was your past week? TV? Horror marathon also? Any Halloween traditions? Also going through home renovations?

Happy Monday, my lovelies! 🙂

Late Night September Pinterest Therapy

What happened to August, right? It sped by so fast that I haven’t quite registered what happened, especially after Fantasia Festival ended.  All I know is I’m sitting here and realized how I just got so behind in blogging.  Its good though, because I did take a little break and my mind is now racing with new idea and projects and I’m outlining a bunch of stuff for next year.  I also accepted (again) that blogging actually  motivates me to do a lot of stuff so when I decided at the beginning of 2014 to become more focused and less versatile, that didn’t really work out and I’m slowly building it back to versatility but with some order 😉 Not sure how thats going to work but it will by the time my thoughts stop racing about frantically…

Either way, Pinterest therapy is due for this past week.  Work has been intensely crazy and it came pretty suddenly out of nowhere and I wanted to just wallow under my covers in bed and watch TV (and movies) all day.  Of course, reality is rather different.  The stress even caused some intense nightmares resulting in some sleepless nights. Seeing as Monday and this new week is just about to come around, I decided a late night Pinterest therapy is definitely the right way to go!

Lets go! 🙂

1) Priorities and Choices 

Just saying, I’m starting and ending with a quote that I found on Pinterest.  First one goes with my actual state of mind.  I’m reorganizing my priorities right now and its shifting stuff around so yes, I’m saying no to certain less important things in my life right now.

Totally feeling this quote 🙂

2) DIY Terrariums 

I’ve been completely in love with making a terrarium and I have no idea why.  Maybe because it just looks so cute and would be the most classy decoration EVER! Don’t you think?

Have you ever built a terrarium?

3) Importance of Staying Hydrated

I’m going to go right ahead and admit that drinking water and staying hydrated is so necessary (and I know that) but I fail miserably every single day.  I end up binging 4 glasses of water before bedtime and drinking next to nothing during the day. So yes, I’m starting to rely on eating a lot of fruits during the day to help with that.

Health is mega important so I’m working on being more proactive at keeping it up 😉

4) Avocado Fries

On that healthy note, I love healthy twists on food.  We’ll all heard of zucchini fries (and I’d like to eventually make that) but my undying love for avocado is definitely making this one go up on my to-do list.  It just looks so delicious.

5) Kitten pile!

Half of the reason I ever got onto Pinterest was for all the cuteness overload. I’m a cat or dog person but sleeping kittens and especially a kitten pile-up is just massively adorable! Excuse me while I got search up my cat and cuddle her in my arms a little…

…..okay, I’m back….let’s continue!

6) Cookie Monster Cocktail

On the whole line of cute, who doesn’t think cookie monster is cute? I can’t use healthy because I’m sure the health merit of this is close to zero… so lets just put that aside.  We all get to indulge once in a while, right’?

Well, unless I find some way to substitute some of these ingredients, this really only for your viewing pleasure 😉

7) Arrow & Stephen Amell & Emily Bett Rickards

I’ve been binge watching Arrow so excuse me when I’d like to say that I’m absolutely in love with Stephen Amell and you will know more about that in the post on Monday (its still Sunday in my mind even though its slightly after midnight as I finish typing this up) but Emily Bett Rickards’s Felicity Smoak is just the most hilarious character and she’s just so nerdy awesome! 🙂

8) Peanut Butter Stuffed French Toast

Isn’t that delicious? Seriously, that is food porn, okay?

I’ve been absolutely obsessed with learning how to make french toast and in a way that I can eat it.  Its one of my next baking challenges so I’ve been pinning French Toast of all kinds. This looks like I need to probably go do a 5 hours intense workout to burn and toss that whole proactive healthy living thing I was talking about earlier out the window, but this looks like it’s a party in my mouth and I mean like that bite where everything just melts into this absolutely out of this world awesomeness feeling.

9) Vibes

They do.  I get vibes from the people around me when I interact. Some people just give off a strong vibe of whatever it is.   Your vibe may not be all that accurate for anyone else but its a first impression and its a feeling that your body and mind (or maybe your heart) is telling you.  I’ve learned the hard way, that I probably should admit to those vibes more often 😉

Thats it for tonight! 🙂 I’m all relaxed, charged and ready for the coming week!

What have you been pinning?

Saguenay, QC: Centre d’observation de Falardeau

The last day of Saguenay was for the Centre d’observation de Falardeau.  Its a observation centre for animals.  They  hold only a few of certain animals but they take very good care of them.  Right when you go in to the reception hut, they have a bunch of baby animals there. You can pet some of them and some are in their cages depending on how interactive they are.  I really wanted to get a chance to pet the tiger cubs but they already outgrew that stage so it was the first weekend where they were back to just viewing.  But thats okay, I still got to pet baby kangaroos and baby raccoons. One day, I’ll get to those baby tigers and have a chance to pet them…one day, it’ll happen! 😉

There’s really nothing to say about this observation centre or we can even call it a zoo to a certain extent.  Its amazing to see actually pretty happy animals (or at least they look that way) and healthy.  They all look excited to see everyone thats there and they live in a fairly decent amount of space for them to roam around.  It should give them a natural habitat sort of feeling. It was a very memorable experience.

Without saying anymore, here is a portion of the pictures that I took there.  A lot were behind cages (like bears and tigers, etc) so I just gave up on showing those pictures because its not clear enough.

Baby Raccoon

Baby skunk

Python

Baby kangaroo

Baby kangaroo

more baby raccoon

more baby kangaroo

Great horned owl

Cougar

Bald Eagle

Coyote cubs (?)

more owls

Emu/Dromaius

Emu/Dromaius

Camel

Moose

Baby deer

Goose

Baby fox

Tiger cubs

Chukar Partridge

Baby moose

Saguenay has a lot of beautiful things to offer and this observation centre goes right along with everything else I’ve done here.  They actually have another zoo that I went to last time in St. Felicien which is more of a zoo and bigger.  Its also worth the visit and I invite you head over to check it out if you missed it back in 2012 right HERE! The most epic moment goes to my distant staredown with a wolverine.

I’m falling really behind with a bunch of this travel stuff.  I still have stuff to post up from Hong Kong.  Hopefully,  I’ll manage to do some catching up and sharing a bit more of my travels this year throughout September 🙂

Have you gone on your vacation yet? Where did you go? Are you a fan of zoos? Which was your most memorable zoo visit?

The Past Week/end & a little more!

**If you aren’t interested in reading my week’s adventures, please scroll to the bottom and I need a little help with something! Thanks!**

That title makes it sound loaded, right? Thats because my brain is slightly at that capacity.  I’ll try my best to keep it more pictures and less words 😉

Before I forgot everything, I just wanted to get it all out for the past week, weekend fun and some goals for the next week.

The last week, it was a scramble with the top priority of getting my new plants and seedlings into bigger pots to make sure they survived my leaving for the weekend for the Ottawa trip. At the same time, I did some weeding before, I think I talked about it and found some garden pests in the form of white grubs. We managed to get some Grub Control and hopefully it’ll go away but generally speaking, plans have taken a course of change and I will be fully engage in container gardening. With that said, I separated Starry Traveler from her newlywed husband for two consecutive evenings and went shopping then planted what we could.

1) PLANTING/GARDENING

Wednesday night resulted in this:

The first few were the most urgent and those included the ginger mint companioned with tomato plant (big red pot on far left), Ground Cherry plant (upper small red pot), Lemon Thyme (middle stainless steel pot), Crimson Star (lower blue pot) and the big brown one was prepared for the next day’s planting.

After the second day of planting

After the second day of planting, we now have the brown pot occupied with the assorted lettuce, we also potted the zucchini with some chamomile (small beige pot on the right), second tomato plant and lemon verbena in stainless steel pots, Starry Traveler’s raspberry plant in the fancy brown pot on the far left. The only plants left to be potted are the strawberry, Stevia, squash and broccoli along with a bunch of herb sprouts.  I will tend to those this week.

2) NAUGHTY CAT MISADVENTURES

On top of the crazy week, I came home on Tuesday to find that my cat had threw up on my bed cover and I observed a rubber band.  She threw up the whole piece from what I deciphered and had to go into monitor for her and gave her food in intervals at small portions to make sure she was digesting good.

As she slept in my lap at night, I kept leaning over to listen to make sure she was breathing okay with no funny breathing difficulty sounds. Stressful, I tell you!

3) RAINBOW AFTER THE RAIN

Nature’s reminder that even when everything doesn’t quite work out, there’s always the little joys in life that show up and just make the day a little bit better.  Thats what this rainbow was for me 🙂

4) OTTAWA WEEKEND

My friend and I left on Friday after work and we were entered into a looming dark cloud that caused this to happen.

Mega heavy rain and wind

The car was literally shaking from the rain and wind. It was pretty intense. Imagine the joy when we saw this:

Saturday morning, we were up and moving at 9am to get the race kit for my friend and the line up at 8:45 was ridiculous.

Lineup for the race kit

Luckily, the management of it all was very good so everything flowed wonderfully and it took us very little time to get everything and they even had a sports expo at the end.

Confederation Park

Breakfast at Eggspectations

Evening on Rideau Canal and Parliament Building

Waiting for marathon to start

Firefighter’s Memorial

Moving to the starting line

Daytime view of Rideau Canal

The last 5k for the runners both full and half marathon.

Nice weather, new experience and I met an awesome fellow blogger (you can read about it HERE).  The only part (not sure if its good or bad) is that my friend had an eureka moment and decided that for my (not so great) birthday gift he was going to sponsor me to join the 10K next year.  However, before we go to next year, my friend managed to run most of the 21.1 km and walked the last 5 but still came in 5 mins less than the max time he had aimed to be his max.  The energy at the marathon whether it was the runners or the spectators made for a very awesome environment.

5) MOVIE/MUSIC OBSESSIONS

Whats a mega post without telling you about my obsessions.  I’ve been totally watching repeatedly Dirty Dancing. You can see my review HERE.

And I’ve been listening to Montreal-based electro funk duo Chromeo’s song: Jealous (I Ain’t With It) on repeat.

6) Upcoming and Goals!

If you made it this far, congrats! You finally got to the somewhat more awesome part.

This weekend, I will have a special announcement.  Before that happens, I’m working on a few projects that will be announced then once I make up my mind with little details.

This week, I do have a few goals:

• Finish reading The Casual Vacancy (which has been occupying my life a tad too long and I’m a bit fed up…those 150 pages look like 1000 pages right now)
• Start preparing to edit my Nanowrimo novel
• Use my whipped cream and make something absolutely delicious
• Start being more organized with both blog posts
• Restarting my training schedule after stopping for about 3 weeks…

On top of that, my summer is looking quite full with a few events looking in the form like this:

• Tree Adventures
• Cirque du Soleil show
• Tarantino Music Concert
• Fantasia Film Fest

Unfortunately this year, I will most probably be skipping the TIFF.  The chances are pretty high that I will make that choice because of financial and timing problems/prior commitments.

7) A Little Help Please!

So just one more thing before I let you go!

I have a bunch of movies expiring on Netflix on June 1st. There is no way that I’m going to be able to see them all so maybe you can help me choose? 🙂

• A Single Man (2009)
• Beyond Borders (2003)
• Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)
• New York I Love You (2009)
• The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)

And thats the end of this seemingly long post!

Have you been to Ottawa? Have you ever ran a marathon? What are your summer plans? Which movies in that list would you suggest for me to watch? Any suggestions for what dessert to make with my heavy cream?

Spring Came! Just in Time for Easter Weekend! :)

It has been a rather crazy week especially weather wise.  Can you believe last weekend, I went for a jog and then during the week we had snow fall with a little accumulation (which melted the next day) but the temperature dropped again.  Thank goodness, by the time we hit this Easter weekend, things got back to normal spring weather.

I’m going to try and keep it short with my recaps.  I can only sum up being busy with work and my new house so much before I bore you all out 😉

On Wednesday, I had my chiropractor session and then went out for a spontaneous dinner with my friend at our neighborhood joint that I’ve talked about over and over again called Mrs. Amigos. That place is awesome!

Vegetable Soup at Mrs. Amigos

Mussels in White Wine

Spaghetti with Fried Chicken Thigh and Tomato Sauce

I had my normal fave, Spaghetti with Fried Chicken Thigh with some vegetable soup and we shared some very delicious Mussels basted in White Wine 🙂

Being a four day week, Good Friday came by really fast.  Normally, I’d have the day off but because its crunch time and my boss took on a new client, I had to go in to wrap up some work and ended up doing a bit over half a day.  After that, I met up with the same friend and we made a spontaneous trip to Plattsburgh, NY to do some shopping.  Luckily, we dodged the pile up at the border and got through as we normally would with just a bit of waiting.  Thats pretty good considering it is long weekend.

I tried to minimize my spendings there and it was pretty successful.  Only ended up damaging my wallet by $100, so not too bad 🙂 The most notable ones are probably these:

Berry Oreos & Fruit Punch Oreos

I love trying out these new flavors of Oreos.  I need to divide them with my friend so that I don’t eat them all.  Whats great is that Oreos are the only ones without any milk in them unless its the Birthday Cake ones.  I bought a pack of those for my boyfriend because its his fave.

Music, Book & Movies

As for this, The Fray is because I’m too cheap to go buy tickets to their concert.  The book is the final book to the Sookie Stackhouse series and I REALLY want to finish that up because its been dragging way too long and plus, isn’t it the final season of True Blood this summer? And movies, I didn’t buy Frozen in Plattsburgh as you probably figured with the French title but I bought that last weekend.  And Ender’s Game was Bluray combo for $13 and I think thats a good price since I’ve been looking forward to watching that and well, I’ve heard so much about Europa Report that I wanted to check it out 🙂 That pretty much sums that part up!

Saturday came around with some wonderful weather.  So wonderful that I woke up at 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep till relatively later and ended up forgetting to set my alarm to wake up to help with the painting at my new place especially since I had a ton of chores to finish at my own place.  Thats okay, I still accomplished all that I had to and the walls were all painted. If you are wondering, my bedroom is painted in THIS COLOR. The trimmings will be an off white.

Now, Saturday wasn’t completely useless because I started shifted some of my items to the new place and slowly, I’ll be getting there.  I did manage to also get a jog in after everything was taken care of, sometime in the afternoon.

Doing my run!

My boyfriend went for a walk so he took a picture of me doing my run. My point is not me but look at the beautiful weather 🙂  I had to keep it short since I had to pick up my mom from the airport and because my boyfriend came with me, I was able to take pictures of the beautiful Montreal driving on the Champlain Bridge.

Sunset in Montreal!

The zoom on my phone makes it not so pretty but the sunset was very nice when you look at it like this.

Sunset on the highway

Aside from that, it was a pretty peaceful yet efficient weekend, I took a few random pictures here and there of flowers and cat paws.

Purple flowers (I don’t know the name)

My cats hind paws as she slept on my lap

Now, before I leave you and run off to finish off some more stuff before I go to bed, I’d like for you to go welcome one of my childhood friends, Phoebe (who I was the maid of honor recently in March for HERE, HERE, and HERE) to the blogosphere.  She’s super awesome and has some pretty remarkable talents, one of them including gardening which she has been sharing with me quite a bit.  She just posted her first “real” post after her initiation one for the Weekly Photo Challenge with some lovely pictures. Please check it out HERE and show her some love.

Before I wrap this up, lets bring you to a song I’ve been pretty obsessed with and then one thats an oldie but a goodie in my book.

I used to not into Max Schneider but his original music has really impressed me.  It all has some sweet beats and very fun to listen to.

Funny one about this one is that Bodyrox came back into my life because of a movie I watched (review coming up) and this song used to play every time I got in my boyfriend’s car when we weren’t an item yet and just on dates and in the beginning of our relationship because of his car’s CD or MP3 system or whatnot and starting at the first song of the playlist.

Last song is a Chinese song with a pretty classic singer and his song is “Friends”.

Its an awesome song just about long time friends. The lyrics roughly translates to this:

Through all these years, smooth or rough times, I always think of my friend,
When we are sad in our journey, we realize who can share our problems with.
Through all these years, time flies by, the people in our lives come and go,
Past events flash through our minds like an old song, and we reminisce a little.

Friend, oh, Friend, we both yell together as we cross through the hilltop.
What we believe in our hearts, we keep for always, we don’t need to say out loud.
Friend, oh, Friend, we lift our heads and have a drink together.
In the future path, we walk together. No matter how long, we’ll be by each other’s side.

Maybe its not a great translation since I did this pretty quickly but you get the idea, right? I love songs like this.  Its just so meaningful and the man has an awesome voice! 🙂

Hope you all had a great Easter weekend and maybe some of you still have tomorrow off!

Which movie should I start with from the new ones? Which Oreos are your faves? Do you know the name of the flower up there?

AND the Crazy Begins…

WOW! I finally found time to sit down and start writing a post…

Probably one of the worst timings is buying and getting the keys for my new place in one of the busiest months of the year at the office.  What is great is that we can do this whole moving and spicing up our new place in our own leisurely pace. At least that part is something I’m very happy about.  As I write this, we’ve been doing anything other than painting but thats ok, because we managed to get a few little knick knacks out of the way.

Did I tell you that I had my birthday on Monday? Yup, I’m 28 now. As a gift to myself, I launched a new blog on April 1st.  No joke there! I’ve been contemplating a new blog and splitting some content over there since the New Year but I figured whats a better time than on my birthday, right? Its a time to try to new things and to just do it! And getting older probably means I’ll ramble even more so I’ll stop and just say, check it out right HERE if you’d like! Its going to be focused on creative writing and I’m going to be moving book reviews there but I’m still working on some details such as finding some project goals to aim for.  I haven’t quite pinpoint that part out yet.  Spontaneity doesn’t always do so great but I’m hoping creativity kicks in soon and I’ll get my second post up! I can feel it coming already, the inspiration is just being a tad shy 😉

There’s still a lot of work to go in that blog and some stuff to figure out.

I now realize that I’m crazy because I picked THE worst time to launch a new blog.  Still, this week has been quite eventful so we’ll jump to some fun stuff 🙂

On Monday, I felt a bit neglected.  You know Samantha in Sixteen Candles? Yeah, my mom forgot that Monday was my birthday so in the evening she finally told me that the next day was special and I was like, huh? We’re celebrating April’s Fools and she’s like, “No! Its your birthday!” And I go, “Uh, no…today is the 31st.” That was actually somewhat funny.  But does give me the shameless plug of inviting you to go check out my Sixteen Candles review  right HERE! Just because I really love that movie.

My best friend however is just the best in the world and she asked to spend some time with me for my birthday and we went out to have a nice night out together. Dinner at our favorite place: Les 3 Brasseurs 🙂

Mussels a la Provencale

I love these mussels at Les 3 Brasseurs.  They were alright that night.  The sauce was quite good but normally, the one where I eat it has it a tad less salty, which I prefer 🙂 But still, it was quite good.  It probably  had to do with the fact that I keep a econosize pouch of natural almonds in my drawer and stuff my face with them when I need to fuel my brain for work. Either way, it was fun to just chat with my best friend since the winter has been so brutal that we didn’t really hang out much. After dinner, we went for a nice little shopping time.  I had a coupon for Dynamite (which I believe now has stores in the US or at least it ships there, along with the rest of Canada).  I love that store.  Almost all my clothes are from there now.  I needed a new coat and they gave me a 25% off coupon for one item.  We went in and I tried a few pairs of pants and shirt and that didn’t work out so well until I found the coat I had least expected to like, which I ended up liking a lot actually 🙂 Since I promised no more selfies for a while, here you go.  Just the coat!

I now own a raincoat, perfect for spring. YAY! Now that I’ve taken care of my seasonal clothing needs, I can go back to focusing on spendings for the new house. That will take some pacing.  I’ll talk more about that in a little bit 🙂 Lets continue with the weekend, shall we?

On Saturday, I did some cleaning with help from my boyfriend’s family who managed to arrange the whole kitchen now while they wrapped up the plaster on the wall to prepare for painting.  Since I am coming up with the case of the sniffles, I quarantined myself to my own corner to not infect others to spend quality time with the blinds.  It took 2 hours to wipe the blinds to look dustless and white 🙂 The only thing I got out of it was a pretty long cut in my finger. Apparently the tips of those wooden blinds are pretty sharp. We learn something new everyday, right?

In the evening, I had my monthly night out with my girl friends. We had dinner at Barbie’s Resto-Bar Grill, which is a pretty economical and family-oriented chain of restaurants around here.  It has a decent atmosphere and there was a pretty crazy line-up when we arrived at 5:30pm.  Fortunately, the wait time was acceptable. We sat down and the waiter was super nice and we ordered drinks then our meal, had a nice chat about whats been going on for the past 2 months, since we didn’t have time to hang out in March.

Sangria @ Barbie’s

The sangria was pretty delicious.  Why? Its the first place, other than my own concoction and my boyfriend’s that you can actually taste hints of the red wine.  I find that pretty impressive.

Grille Salmon @ Barbie’s

Then I  had my Grilled salmon meal 🙂

After that, the girls went with me to see my new place and then at night, one of the girls and I went to go see Captain America: Winter Soldier together.  The review of that will be coming tomorrow 🙂 I always want to ask the question of why people DON’T stay till the end of the credits for a Marvel flick. I mean, c’mon! I got fooled ONCE when I saw The Avengers and missed the scene at the credits and I never did that again.  I always sit till the very end. I mean, what is the rush, right? It is already past midnight, might as well make the most of it, right?

Saturday was a long day but really fun.  Sunday came around and we ended up just going to Ikea after my delicious lunch at home with my mom and her friends with some homemade dumplings.

Homemade dumplings

Honestly, I’m going to say this right now, when you go to Ikea, its at least 2 hours of your life gone.  We walked around and we were inspired by so many things.  We actually have our dining table and our TV stand and media storage chosen BUT money being scarce and all, we will be back to pick those up.  We decided to take advantage of the dining chair sales instead.  When we got back, that was the first thing we did: assemble the chairs, the floor lamp and my little rack.

Ikea’s SOCKER Plant rack

I haven’t talked much about how to set up the house but one thing that I’ve decided to do is to have an indoor herb garden and when I saw that rack there, I knew I had to get it.  After some thought, I decided that spring was just around the corner and I’d better start planting those herbs so that we’d have some fresh herbs by summer or something 🙂 Plus, this rack would mean that I could move it outdoors in the summer and indoors when its cold.  I only had money for 4 planters but thats okay.  We’ll fill up the rest soon enough 😉

Happy times, right? I know nothing about gardening but I’m pretty excited.  Can you imagine the possibilities afterwards for baking and cooking?

The past week has been REALLY busy.  Work has been all over the place but I did learn one thing that helps and I call it Pinterest therapy 🙂 Its like window shopping but online on one site.

Feeling down? Here’s how I’d approach it:

1) Finding some inspiring quotes

2) Be tempted by some beautiful and delicious baked goods and utensils

3) Cute animals

Sleepy kittens

puppies

4) Travel off on vacation to a calm and relaxing location

Waterfalls

How was that? I know my Pinterest therapy was really good for me! Maybe what relaxes you is different from me 🙂 Sometimes, the world of technology has its perks when its not playing tricks on me!

I’m sure we all need a bit of happy energy boosts on Mondays! I know I’m working hard on de-zombifying myself.  Its slowly getting there 🙂

Happy Monday, my lovelies! How was your weekend? Any suggestions for book or writing projects?

I’m sure you all have better experience than I do 🙂 Remember to drop by to check out the Winter Soldier review tomorrow!

The Best Feeling In the World…

This past week was busy and crazy at work but it also went by really fast.

Maybe it had to do with having Monday off to do the official transfer to our new place and then simply looking forward to seeing friends on Friday and then the actual key exchange on Saturday morning.  Even standing in the empty house after all the movers had gone seemed a bit surreal.  Is this really happening? I have to happen its a pretty wow moment.

Before I ramble on with that, Friday with two of my really good friends was really fun.  It feels like I haven’t had many friends of late as I polish through keeping the people matter in my life.  At the same time, its been just a whirlwind of crazy at work that I work 9-1o hours every day and then some days, I’ll even go in to work on the weekend. Either way, work is work.  I managed to luckily get through my urgent deadline on Friday and met up with them.

We started our evening with dinner at Casey’s in Quartier Dix30.

It started with a pitcher of a Mont-Tremblant Sangria which was fully loaded with all sorts of hard liquor and was served in an original way 🙂

Mont-Tremblant Sangria!

Then our main courses!

A rack of ribs with Jack Daniels sauce

Burger

Flank Steak

And for dessert, we shared a Cinnamon Sugar Nachos.

Sweet Nachos

Ice cream and Whipped cream

The ice cream and whipped cream should be on top of the sweet nachos but we had it on the side due my lactose intolerance.  This sweet nachos was super good.

Raspberry Mojito

I even added a little raspberry mojito.

After that we headed over to Indigo to just hang out for a little bit. We had wanted to catch a movie but decided to just go over to my place to watch Zombieland.  If you missed my review, its HERE! I love that movie to bits.  The cast, the dialogue, the story, Bill Murray cameo: just so fun and awesome!

Saturday came along the next day and after popping in to work for an hour to wrap up some urgent stuff that my boss needed for a client over the weekend, I got back right in time for my boyfriend to pick me up and head over to get the keys.  After a little while of the previous owners (since we’re the new ones), they took us for a detailed trip around the house for the things they left behind and what is outside and what they could only pick up after the ice/snow melted (hopefully) next week.

Changing locks

We proceeded to buy some stuff and then my boyfriend and his dad changed the locks and after we took a little break where I had a late lunch and he took his parents back home, we went back later on to do clean up, which lasted pretty much the weekend.

I used this time to look through my room and moved one of my best friend’s long time gifts and shifted some of the contents to use the garbage can she gave me with a bunch of stuff inside.  Yes, I  know its weird but she wanted to be creative and give me something useful.  This is what I sent her to show her how I found a use for it 5 years later.

The message after went something like her garbage can was not only useful but the first item that is being moved from my room to my new place. I’d say thats pretty awesome.  Now I just need to figure out how to use all those cranes 🙂

Today was pretty much more cleaning and I’d say its about 70% done. I’ll just have to drop by one more evening and wrap up probably so that we can start painting next weekend.  Aside from that, we also went to the most badly organized advanced polling station ever and had to stay in line so much longer to vote. I’ll fill you in more next week on how the house is going. I’m actually thinking of maybe adding a segment because there’s just so much work to do.  I’ll be getting all crafty and learning a whole bunch of home renovation knowledge on the way.

In a nutshell, this quote is how I feel!

 

Enough about the week, lets move on to some fun stuff!

Other than recommendations, I had a few Netflix movies expiring in April so I figured that I’d watch as much as I can, now I have a huge amount of reviews to write up for next week.  Nothing was bad at the very least and no, I’m not going to do the lazy 3 quick reviews format. I need to get back on track with doing full on posts.  My schedule has been way off. Some to expect would be Contagion and Sleepless in Seattle among others.

Also, I started watching another series, Psych! There’s seems to be a good 6 seasons so I’m taking that slow.

This is dragging out a bit long of what seems like nothing so I’m just going to go do some baking, because I haven’t done it in a while.  Before I head off, here’s some music that I’ve particularly enjoyed!

And an additional little sound effects video that I found was pretty cool with basketball dribbling and Buick.

Just in case, the music doesn’t work for you, how about a cute picture of my cat this morning?

Hope you enjoyed the videos and the post! 🙂

How was your weekend? All rested up for the next week?