My Weekly Adventures: My First 5KM!

Welcome to February! We just passed through Valentine’s Day yesterday which I spent with my mom for dinner and then went to do some errands and wrapped up the night preparing for a podcast recording and writing and gaming. Suffice to say that I didn’t celebrate but then I’m hoping that you did enjoy the ongoing Valentine’s double feature celebrations going on here. Its been a packed first half of February whether its personal stuff to settle or working (yay to overtime) or trying to get everyone to join into Ultimate 2000s Blogathon and much more. Its been a packed 15 days!

Let’s see what went on!

MY FIRST 5KM – MONTREAL SOUTERRAIN

While I did get forced into doing the 5km and it was a painful experience especially afterwards because I hadn’t trained for it. However, I did a pretty awesome time, coming in 10 minutes faster than I initially expected. Time was: 35:21.9 . Not too shabby,right? Anyways, I’ll be getting back to working out soon since I need to fit into dresses for two upcoming weddings in 2019. And I’m sure that after my good time without training, my friend is going to try to get me to do more 5km runs. I’m not opposed to them because it was quite fun but then running inside through the underground and running outside are two different things completely.

CHINESE NEW YEAR 2019 – YEAR OF THE PIG

February 5th was Chinese New Year and we did some nice decorations different from last year and went crazy looking for flowers to decorate. 5 flower shops but at least now, we know where to buy some flowers near-ish to our neighborhood. Yay to discovering new things, right? Its the year of the pig so Piglet and Pua made its appearance onto the shelf outside of my office as piggy decorations. I also picked up some new fake flowers from Michael’s for the tall floor vase to give it some color.

VALENTINE’S MARATHON

For the first time in all the years that I’ve done the Valentine’s Marathon, this is the first time its extending past the 14th. Because of the theme this year with the Netflix alphabet, I am going to continue through this until the end of February to finish out the alphabet. There are some fun changes due to lack of choices. Anyways, point is, I have a nice little tentative schedule to pair up with the blogathon as they overlap and be able to finish off the Valentine’s Marathon with the entire full alphabet runthrough. I’m pretty excited. I’ve picked a nice variety of subgenres so it still feels very fun.

ULTIMATE 2000s BLOGATHON

Sign up has ended as of last Monday. If you are just seeing this and want to join, you can drop me and email and we can see if we can get it arranged. However, we will be emailing out notices to participants on their posting date. It starts on the coming Monday! Time flies, right? I believe we have over 3 weeks of posts so its going to be a fun time because there are some nice additions this year, some new blogs that haven’t joined in before and then returning ones and some other pieces aside from written reviews. I love seeing our participants getting creative! As usual, I will have a page ready to go on the menu so you can catch up on any posts you missed on either here or Drew’s Movie Reviews.

If you haven’t followed Drew yet, then you definitely should HERE. My blogathon co-host is absolutely fantastic!

MONTREAL SNOWSTORM

We are currently in the aftermath of the snowstorm which means sitting here waiting for the city and boroughs to clear out the snow. The day after the snowstorm in the morning to work was when this photo was snapped. As you can see, not much as been clear and well, walking on the streets is because the sidewalks were pretty much non-existent or just snow-covered ice which is almost more dangerous. The city whether Montreal or suburbs have been doing a pretty slow job in general this year. As I’m writing this post, its raining outside so bye-bye to snow but welcome rain on ice and giant slush puddles at all corners of the street. You know…the fun stuff, right? 😉

However, I can’t complain too much because we are incredibly lucky at our home. I went out to shovel at 11:30pm and the city was clearing their second round of snow and the very nice guy plowing saw me, the crazy lady that shovels in the middle of the night, and decided to move his plow up my driveway and cleared it all including the path. Its the first time its happened to me so I was pretty shocked in a really happy way. Although, when we woke up in the morning, it was so very tall that I had to climb the mountain at the foot of the driveway to head to the bus stop. But we are also super lucky because my neighbor has a snow-blower and he does our driveway when we get storms or lends it to my husband.

Cute Kitty Easter Gnome Pic

**Pictures taken at Winners Homesense at Quartier Dix30**

Thats it for this Weekly Adventures!
What have you been up to?

My Weekly Adventures: Holiday Celebrations

The last Weekly Adventures of this year everyone!

It is going to be a really happy one full of holiday celebrations and food and family. Its hard to imagine that its New Year’s Eve and I’m sure not a ton of you are sitting around looking at blogs but still, I’m keeping to my normal routine to share this. I have something to get done hopefully today as well if New Year’s Eve cleaning and dinner party prep doesn’t take up too much of my time.

Winter Solstice Festival

Winter Solstice Festival was celebrated a day later so it was just the day before our Christmas Eve gathering meaning that we had a few days of lots of eating. This festival is more of a Chinese celebration between family. My mom made some turkey and as usual made more food than the amount of people since she also invited one of her friends as well. It was delicious and fun. My husband was occupied with watching NFL football match while I chatted with my mom and her friend. It was really nice.

Christmas Eve Family Gathering

Our annual Christmas Eve gathering was at my in-laws this year. The whole taking turns to celebrate is a pretty nice. Everyone showed up as well as some close family friends and their loved ones. Its always a fun time to see everyone and just have a good laugh, eat lots of food and do some gift exchange. The adults are usually just simple little things so we actually brought a bunch of stuff that I had bought from the haul in the previous weekly adventures and did a little pick your prize style so everyone got to just close their eyes and put their hands in the big christmas bag and see what they got. It saves me the trouble from figuring who wants what and they have a little surprise element. I just hope that everyone liked their little sweets.

Friends Holiday Gathering

I forgot to take a picture of the food at this gathering. However, this is part of what I brought. I also brought dessert, pumpkin cookies. (recipe HERE). My meal though was finally putting the many goodfood boxes to use and added my own little twist from something I had learned from those recipes in their one pan recipe. This had squash, brussel sprouts, nantes carrots and chicken thighs and some garlic. Lots of fun with my girl friends and their other halves. This year did make our gatherings less frequent than previous years so we have agreed to try and make things happen more frequently in 2019.

Game Warp Podcast – Year in Review 2018 (plus new audio format)

Gatherings and family is a big deal but in between all that, I did manage to get our big year end episode for Game Warp edited. These episodes are usually mammoth tasks so I did procrastinate a little and pulled two evenings of working hard and got this one done. Hopefully you have time to check it out and enjoy. On better news, Year in Review 2018 is also available audio on Himalaya FM now. I can’t figure out how to embed the player but you can find it HERE. I’m still exploring this Himalaya thing so hopefully things will get better.

Cute Kitty Pic

This wraps up the last 2018 Weekly Adventures!
Hopefully I’ll be back with an overview of 2018, if not, I’ll talk about 2019 plans tomorrow.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVE CELEBRATIONS!
(and Happy New Year if you already have past midnight)

My Weekly Adventures #57 (actually its been a month…)

Welcome back to the first 2018 Weekly Adventures post!

As usual, we skipped one to do the What’s Up 2018. If you missed whats coming up in 2018, you can check it out HERE. Nothing too late since I’m still struggling to catch up with some of the 2017 backlog and get it all out. Especially with this week being quite spotty and missing out on 3 days which is something I hasn’t happened in a long time. Work and balancing adding in a workout routine and trying to just be healthier and house stuff like taking down Christmas and such is starting to prove to be quite crazy at the beginning of 2018.

Regardless, I will catch up in the coming week and get it all out next week hopefully! Let’s see what happened this past month!

Christmas Eve Party

Christmas Eve Party is a tradition that we have with in-laws. My mom comes along with me and we have a great time together just hanging out while chatting and eating. It was supposed to our turn to host this year but things took a turn for personal reasons and we ended up going to my sister-in-law’s instead.We had a great turnout in food and everyone had fun. Gift opening was always entertaining. We got a lovely gift card from my in-laws and sister-in-law and her husband for a restaurant in downtown called Les Enfants Terrible which we’re definitely looking to find a time possibly in the summer to go because its on a top floor and probably would have a nice view in the summer and maybe a terrace or something.

Boxing Day

Boxing Day happened of course. As per tradition, I went out with one of my friends to go spend some money efficiently and get in on some great deals. I won’t expand too much on it but you can find my Boxing Day Haul in this post HERE.

Holidays Gathering

Next gathering we had was with my girl friends. I skipped the last gathering because I just couldn’t make it with a clash in schedule. Its been forever since I’ve seen my girl friends so it was great to actually head out to meet up at a housewarming and holiday gathering potluck at one of the girl’s new place. Delicious food and awesome company go hand in hand and we definitely had both as we sat around catching up and having some laughs.

Family Dinner

This holidays has been back to back to back dinners. You’ll see as right after our holiday gatherings above, the evening after, we went over again to my sister-in-law’s place to have a slightly smaller gathering for a pre-New Year’s celebration. She made turkey that took hours to do but it turned out fantastic. She made some french onion soup. Mine was cheeseless which was a thoughtful move and then used lactose free milk for her mash potatoes. It tasted delectable. Another fun evening.

New Year’s Eve Celebrations
(aka: Mini Battle of Ingredients)

The holidays craze has definitely put a slight hiatus for our Battle of Ingredients. Even with New Year’s Eve slated in, we didn’t quite get a lot of it done in time. Consider this a mini Battle of Ingredients. Phoebe made the prosciutto wrapped asparagus which turned out great. I was thinking that I was going to roast veggies but I ended up making the veggies in a pan instead. I can’t say that mine turned out that well. It felt slightly raw so I had to pop it in the microwave to hopefully remedy it but Phoebe’s dish was really delicious. My mom made a turkey which was also quite tasty.

Fret not, despite still in somewhat of a craze on our end, we’ll figure out this Battle of Ingredients scheduling and get back on track. 🙂

New Workout Regime in 2018 (& how we are being healthier)!

As I feel the ab and leg pains from the currently in progress 2nd week of a 6 week program that I set on Nike Training Club app, I’m actually feeling quite good. The holidays was a weird mush of feelings. As much as I was excited for the holidays and decorated rather early and got everything together, the holidays hit me quite hard. Maybe it was just that I had a lot of time to think and reflect and 2017 was a very tough year and we went into the holidays in somewhat of a bad mood (at least for myself). Reflecting on the past year and looking forward to the new year always brings some odd emotions. With that said, I’m getting back to my positive self and I want working out and being healthy from it to give me the confidence boost and the feeling good vibes mostly from it. My husband and I are both hopping back into being healthier this year. Together, we’re aiming to be more active (hiking, running, strength & endurance training), eating healthier by cutting out as much processed food as possible, and being nicer to the environment as in using biodegradable cleaning products and such. Working out has been on track despite the crazy schedule and I’m pretty  happy about it. I’ll try to get an update on how things are progressing on that front.

Winter Storms

Montreal has been a crazy roller coaster of weather. December storms started early. Christmas week was a deep freeze zone as we entered the -40 Celsius zone. Bring on the double layered pants and socks and triple layer clothing. It was in a fairly freezing mode all the way till the last two days which rained and melted almost all the snow from before away and then on Friday to Saturday within 14 hours, we got a lovely 36cm of snow. This was on Saturday morning as the storm was tapering off. We were pretty much snowed in. I shoveled a bit before having to head out to a chiropractor appointment but my husband did a fantastic job and shoveled the rest for 2 more hours as I went off to do groceries as well . Every day life stuff, right? 😉

Miscellaneous Other Stuff

My Weekly Adventures is a day earlier than usual this month. Its because I missed one but also because tomorrow, I have an announcement coming up! Remember to drop back to check that out!

Aside from that, what other miscellaneous stuff am I thinking about. Unboxing will possible fade out this year. I made the move to cancel the FabFitFun box. Its a pretty costly expense that while I like, can’t seem to be justified anymore. We do have another Meowbox coming up but after doing massive cleaning this year, I realize that I still have a lot of unopened cat toys sitting around so I might forego that one as well. I’ve talked about vlogs and other video segments for the blog so I’m definitely working on something to get that together or maybe doing a What’s Up Wednesday video segment instead. If you have any suggestions on video content you’d like to see here, leave a comment and I’ll try my best to work it out!

I honestly had other miscellaneous stuff and now as I’m typing this out, I’ve forgotten all about it.

Cute Kitty Pic

It might not seem cute but when I’m in the shower, this is what she does. You know, my little guard cat…who runs away when she hears anyone approach. Effectiveness is zero but the thought is admirable 😉

Upcoming stuff:

• 2017 leftovers: Gilmore Girls Season 5 binge, Bring it On: Worldwide #Cheersmack, Stranger Things Season 2
• Announcement tomorrow
• A new segment coming up
• Blogiversary!!!

Thats it for this Weekly Adventures!
Remember to drop by tomorrow to check out the announcement!
Also, if you have any video ideas, do share them with me: What’s Up Wednesday vlogs or Weekly Adventure vlogs or some movie related vlog.
That’s all the ideas I have for now so maybe all the above will show up. Which would you watch?

My Weekly Adventures #43

Yesterday I already did the Mother’s Day recap, you can all head over to check that out HERE if you missed it!

The last two weeks went by in a flash, pretty much like 2017 has been. It hasn’t all been sunshine and rainbows (figuratively and literally), seeing as Montreal had a state of emergency issued over the weekend for the amount of rain we had been getting and flooding in various districts. It was a mess to say the very least. However, this coming week is looking up. We’re supposed to get a ton of sunny days and great weather finally! 🙂

Game Warp & Youtube

Perhaps one of the biggest things to go on in the last two weeks is the move from That Moment In’s Youtube to Game Warp’s own Youtube. It has taken us a year to make this decision but for us, despite having to restart on the subscriber count, its a fresh start. There were many reasons into doing this. We’re still under That Moment In and write our articles under that but as my post HERE explained, it opens up the option for us to make other types of videos. Of course, if you were subscribed over at That Moment In for gaming and didn’t see my notice, head on over to our Youtube HERE and subscribe to not miss out on what’s coming up. We are aiming to have content every day but we are only two people and rely heavily on what we have access too so it might not always be playthroughs on new games however we try the best we can to stay current or at least dive into the indie scene and give devs their space or highlight games that we’ve tried out no matter what they are.

For more info on this, I urge you to click on the link above to read more. I don’t want to be too repetitive for those who have read that post. Game Warp is a ton of fun but if you aren’t into gaming, that’s alright, I’m still here chatting up on everything else that you enjoy! 🙂

Cirque du Soleil –  Volta

Two Fridays ago, my girl friends and I had a night out to go to see Cirque du Soleil Volta. I love Cirque du Soleil. Two years ago, I went to go see Kurios. Its probably somewhere on the blog, probably a My Weekly Adventures a while back. We didn’t get really great seats and the story was a little abstract but there were some great stunts. The highlight of the show were the BMX bike stunts and man, it was exhilarating. There was one where it was a gymnast hung in the air by her hair and that was fantastic as well. It was funny and the music was really good, which usually is the highlight of the show. It was rainy but still very fun.

Birthday Bash (not mine)

My friend and their little one along with Mother’s Day was celebrated all together with a bunch of friends at a great restaurant. Here’s all the food on the menu which I or other people had. It was super delicious and it was very fun. Obviously, to respect their privacy, I’m not sharing any pictures with other people whoever, it was a fun Friday night. I was pretty tired however it was nice to go out and chat with other people.

73% Dark Chocolate by Chocolat Favoris

I’m not sponsored or anything by Chocolats Favoris (wouldn’t that be the dream, right?). However, we went there with a big family gathering over the weekend for chocolate and I found this 73% Dark Chocolate. Oh my goodness, this is just heavenly. I thought 70% chocolate was pretty delish but 73% apparently is the absolute perfection.

Cute Kitty Pic

Upcoming:

• Battle of Ingredients
• Double Features

That’s it for this Weekly Adventures!
What have you been up to?

Happy Year of the Fire Monkey! :)

Happy Chinese New Year~! 🙂

We’re stepping into the Year of the Monkey today in Chinese tradition.  Spring has arrived in the lunar calendar and we welcome it with a lot of traditions.  We spent most of the weekend tidying the house and making sure that we’re all set for a fresh start in the New Year! This is the first year I’m spending Chinese New Year living at my new house away from my mom.  We had to put together a bit of decorations to hopefully bring some good luck.

Here’s a bit of the decorations around our house and some of the Chinese New Year celebrations and we’ll end with a 2016 New Year video.  Its in Cantonese and its a ton of good luck wishes but yeah, its fun to watch even if you don’t know what its saying. And well, Hoi-Pang Lo is one that you’ll recognize if you watch Hong Kong movies. 😉

I know its more flowers than anything but its really lively and I love having them there.  We have a few of those hanging decorations.  I just didn’t want to bore you with how they are everywhere as well as those lucky slogans.  We have 3 of those around the house. As for the orchids, they opened just in time for the New Year.  The timing couldn’t be any better! 🙂

Dinner

Year Cake

Dessert

Heading over to my mom’s for dinner is always awesome! I think my mom makes the best food ever so what more can I say? Plus, we had the Superbowl playing in the background which I talked more than I watched but the halftime show was fun.  I thought it did the 50 years justice.  Bruno Mars was a great special guest and its great that they had him because well, he got judged so harshly back when he did it a few years ago that having him back gives him justice that he is definitely a great performer. Plus, Coldplay is always great! 🙂

Happy Chinese New Year from my family! 🙂

And now for the song! 🙂

Have a great day, my lovelies! 🙂
It may be Chinese New Year but expect another post this afternoon!