My September Adventures: Halloween Horror Marathon & Festival du Nouveau Cinema Coming Up!!

September is now behind us. Its hard to imagine three-quarters of the year has gone by. However, it is the case. With July being hectic and then August being more of a laidback and recharging phase, September comes back with a little back to normal balance. Getting things back on track, events big and small and such were all in the plans.

Let’s check it out!

Dreamhack Montreal 2019

Dreamhack Montreal happened over the weekend of September 6 to 8 at the Olympic Stadium. It had some changes but this venue is still very suitable for this event overall. It was a bustling weekend with a lot of last minute changes that swapped my schedule around quite a bit. However, all the media coverage is over at Game Warp Blog. Everything is live now as we covered Day 1 and 2 as well as the Indie Game Zone. You can find all the posts below:

Day 1 Recap
Day 2 Recap
Indie Game Zone

IT: Chapter Two & Lambcast

We’ve really kept the theatre experience to a minimum this year except for special commitments that lead me to go. This time, it was for Lambcast recording of IT: Chapter Two that gave us the kick in our behinds to go check it out. We really did enjoy the first one so had it in our plans to see the second one anyways (just probably not on opening weekend initially). I’m not sure when we’ll be heading to the theatres again this year but it might happen again, who knows? I’m not quite on top of the theatre new releases as I should be.

You can check out the Lambcast show HERE.
You can find my written review HERE.

Moon Festival

Moon Festival happened on September 13th. Wonderful that it clashed with Friday the 13th because I have to say that it was a pretty okay day compared to the rest of the week prior to that. It was also full of sickness and a lot of cough-filled nights. Either way, I ignored my cold (which won’t go away and seems to keep morphing) and ate some moon cake as well as stood by the window and stared at the full moon for a little while, reminding myself that life is beautiful because I’m breathing and looking at those nice little moments of nature and nightscapes and such.

Friend’s Bachelorette Party – Dinner Out

One of my girl friend’s bachelorette party happened the Saturday on the second last weekend. She had it in two parts: the first was dinner and the second was an after party. Due to some other commitment (see below), I only went for the dinner party which was at Ichigo Ichie (which is the restaurant part of ramen place I like, Yokato Yokabai).

You can check out the restaurant recap HERE.

Festival du Nouveau Cinema Starting Soon

Much to my surprise, today’s announcements also include a press approval for Festival du Nouveau Cinema! Last year, I only got the 10 vouchers to go see 10 movies which had some pretty great films, with one or two that left a little to desire but didn’t fail on being artsy or creative. It will be exciting to see how many we can catch this year as well as what the movie lineup will be as that only goes live tomorrow (Oct.1). Keep an eye out for reviews during the festival from Oct.9 to 20th!

If you also are going, do tell me what movies have caught your eye so far?

Friend’s Wedding Day + Flowers Help Out

The last weekend of September was all kinds of crazy and lots of fun. Saturday was a day of hunting down flowers at various Costco. Between myself and another friend, we hit 5 Costcos in the morning. We met up in the early after to start making the “boutonnieres” for the groom and groomsmen and men of the families and then went along and made the bride and bridesmaids bouquet as well as a throwaway one. For myself, it was a learning experience since I had never done these before so it was all to help out.

 Sunday was her big day! We started out the morning to help with the door games (if you don’t know what that is, its part of Chinese weddings to pick up the bride, the groom and his groomsmen and other guys go to trials before he can pick her up). Then, we helped out with the set-up and mostly with the flowers to put together the vases. Yet again, I’m not too experienced with this so just helped out with my other friend. The picture on top is the centerpiece at our table with the flower arrangement. It was a ton of fun! I have a few more artsy pics going on Avenue of Daydreams at some point. It was a really fun night but we couldn’t stay as late as Sunday means work on Monday (aka today).

Announcement: Halloween Horror Marathon

As usual, September adventures wraps up with the official announcement of the Halloween Horror Marathon tomorrow (October 1st)! We’ll be doing double features as per the usual set up nowadays. At the same time, I’ll be trying to put in some horror TV series TV binge posts as well as horror book reviews as well. That’s the plan! While some movies have already been watched at this point (and probably/hopefully written up), I would love to hear what movies you suggest or movies you always watch for Halloween marathon and maybe I’ll see if I can add those in or push it up as higher priority on my list (if its there). All update of Halloween marathon posts will be updated on the page HERE.

On a side note, due to the festival approval, marathon might be slower in the middle of the month! I am working to get more posts done in advance but I do have other priorities as well as podcast recordings so I will do the best that I can before October 9th comes around and hopefully you will enjoy it!

Cute Kitty Pic

That’s it for the September Adventures!
Looking back, its been kind of crazy! I thinned out some less important bits.
Mostly two announcements and some recaps!
October is looking less varied but probably much busier, as always when there’s coverage to do!

Battle of Ingredients: Moon Festival & Autumn BBQ

Welcome to the next round of Battle of Ingredients hosted together with Phoebe over at Starry Traveler’s Road. This month’s get together was a slightly belated Moon Festival celebration as well as the last BBQ of the season.

Its a packed one this time so let’s see what we came up with. A lot of the food was really thought up simply by our brains so if we have recipes references, we’ll share it, if not, we can list some ingredients or whatnot. this time seems mostly to be checking out spices and such. Nothing too complex as we were both fairly busy with our personal lives.

Wines

The two wines offered by our friends this time were these two rose wines

• Listel
• Cote des roses

I will talk about both of these wine in the upcoming wine recap. I had already tasted Cote des Roses before but realized that I hadn’t shared it in any wine recaps before (oops..).

Main Courses

We went fairly simple this time. Phoebe took care of most of the food. She had some vegetables from various types of cauliflowers to peppers and more. She also had corn. There was also steaks which she had two types of seasoning for. The first was a gourmet steak spice blend and the second was a innovative herb type which was a mix of oregano and thyme with salt.

My contribution for dinner were kabobs. It had sausages, zucchini, peppers, mini portobello mushrooms and onions. The sausages were the IGA supermarket brands. One kabob had the honey-garlic flavor and the other one was wine and chives. There was no additional seasoning added to anything. We just put it on the skewer and barbecued it.

Results

I’m sorry that I didn’t take more of the veggies pic. However, everything turned out really good. The steaks had two different flavors. The one with the spices had more of the flavor as the spices were on the steaks itself. While the herbs and salt was more subtle, which is normal since it was just on top. As for the kabobs, I thought they turned out fairly well. It was fairly packed but cooked quickly so was good. The sausage flavors were also quite delicious.

Dessert

 

Dessert was obviously the highlight here and that’s moon cakes. Just like last year, we went for a more local brand. This one is a Canadian brand, King’s Pastry. It was a variety pack (like last year as well). The flavors were the following:

• Date paste
• Red Bean paste with melon bits
• Traditional one egg yolk lotus paste
• Five nuts

To be honest, they were okay. The five nuts had the citrus peel which was a bit intense. My husband and Phoebe was not a fan of it to say the least. The traditional was a bit too sweet. The date paste turned out better than expected. The same applied for the red bean paste.

We also had a fruit bowl that I put together with apples, clementines and grapes but I forgot to take a picture so we’ll leave that out since no one really ate any of it with the amount of sweets we already had.

Overall, a simple but lovely meal together!
This is a wrap for this Battle of Ingredients!
Back to the indoor kitchen for us as we figure out our next battle!
Nothing settled just yet..we’ll be back in a few weeks!

My Weekly Adventures: Its Here Again… Announcements

Welcome to the next Adventures post. I shouldn’t use Weekly adventures but we’ll keep it like that for now since I can’t figure out a better name. These past 2 weeks didn’t feel particularly like it was busy but when I thought back, a decent amount of small things happened and it was really tiring.

Its October right around the corner so of course, that also means that we have an important announcement (and another one as well). If you saw my tweet then you might already know what I’m talking about.

Let’s get started!

Hiking: Reserve Naturelle des Montagnes Vertes

Keep this one short and sweet. We finally got back out to hiking. Everyone’s health seems to be okay again. We have some little things that happened after the hike but still, it was a good one. I’ve already did a post on it so you can check that out HERE.

Hangout with High School Friends

Last weekend, we had a little get together with some high school crew to see one of our friend’s baby. I probably talked about the baby shower back in October last year or something. I can’t remember right now. Either way, we had a little food and some tarts and chatted the afternoon away. It was great! Plus, her little one is so adorable.

Montreal Oasis Marathon 2018

Last weekend was the Montreal Rock & Roll Series Oasis Marathon 2018. It had a move from the more eastern side of Montreal to downtown near Chinatown area. They shifted the event earlier as well. Suffice to say that, the pick up package and the picking up bags after the marathon left a lot to be desire in terms of organization but the race itself was great. It started off in Rene Levesque which is one of the main arteries in downtown. There was little firework moments for each coral’s start. Plus, the location made finding a place to sit down good especially since its kind of my turf. So it made the whole event for my being there to pick up my friend easy, especially when the temperature dropped that morning drastically so I had my scarf and hat for winter with me in the morning.

Setting Up New Social Media

A little side note and I guess a follow-up from the What’s Up segment (unless I edited it out and forgot then it would make no sense and be slightly embarrassing), I decided to continue on my research into the China social media world and actually signed up for a Weibo account. Its pretty much a Facebook/Twitter mesh but since Chinese characters are a word in itself, its satisfies the microblogging corner of the market. I’m not great at writing Chinese but I do recognize words so typing it is actually a good practice. Consider it a social experiment or whatnot, but I have an account now so I’ll be checking it out. If you have an account also, give me a shout. Its lonely to trek new territory alone.

Moon Festival

Moon Festival came around last Monday. I had dinner with my mom. After some debate, as her kitchen renovations continue, we decided to stay in to eat since the restaurant we wanted to go to was closed on Mondays. One of her friends dropped by to have dinner with us as well. Delicious as always and we had moon cakes and everything.

Halloween Marathon 2018

Official announcement tomorrow! Keep your eyes posted! Short and sweet announcement, right?

Festival du Nouveau Cinema

On that note, I got press just a few days ago for Festival du Nouveau Cinema, which is a festival that has been running for a long time but I’ve never been to. It usually hits the busy and event hiatus that I take for my own sanity. This year, a fellow Montreal blogger DM’ed me on Twitter and gave me a heads up to check it out and since I’ve been in the Weibo world and checking out movie reviewers and saw one of their movies being listed as this year’s top 5 Chinese movies, I wanted to go. So yay, that is happening. Not sure how its going to fit into the whole schedule but I’ll talk about that more very soon. I’ll have a post for my picks in a day or two.

Cute Kitty Pic

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

My Weekly Adventures #52

Its Sunday and we’re halfway through the month. We’ve had a really good Halloween marathon run full of events and movie reviews and even managed to finally get a TV Binge out. The second half of the month will hopefully see those dwindling book reviews (for books I’m working hard on finishing right now) as well as wrapping up the Saw franchise and hopefully seeing a ton more movies. I absolutely have another TV binge coming up and maybe two if my second binge works as planned. Things don’t go always as planned here. The first half of the month crossed over with Thanksgiving in Canada as well as the actual Moon Festival. Its been a fun time especially since the last week, my husband and I have been on vacation, or more accurately a staycation, so we’re just chilling out, doing some fall chores to prepare for the season and having fun. Oh right, and we also happened to celebrate our 2nd wedding anniversary. Anyways, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Moon Festival Dinner

The last Weekly Adventures ended with a look at the Battle of Ingredients which was Moon Festival themed and then even had dinner with my husband and my mom for the first part of Moon Festival. On the day of, I went over to hang out with my mom for Moon Festival. We made chicken and salmon and we had some lovely moon cakes. It was a ton of fun.

Pumpkinferno at Upper Canada Village

Vacation started half day for myself on the Friday before last. I was supposed to have the full day off but I had to wrap up some loose ends. However, that is okay since I felt much better about going on vacation knowing the majority of the stuff was taken care of. There’s still some stuff to work on when I get back and its a huge deadline. However, vacation is always refreshing. The second day of vacation was the weekend and we had plans to meet up with family and friends to head to Upper Canada Village to see PumpkInferno. I had a post for it last week some time. If you missed it,  you can check it out HERE.

Visit from Friends

There’s no pictures but if you all remember, Butterflymumma used to be one of our fellow bloggers. She’s no longer in the blogosphere but she remains in contact with me. Whenever I head into her area, I’ll call her up and for Thanksgiving weekend, she came to Montreal to visit with her family. We had dinner and hung out a little. It was lots of fun. Its always a nice time to hang out with friends.

Theatre Visit: IT

Its always great to have a change in plans sometimes. We ended up losing track of time on Tuesday and ended up postponing hiking for that day and instead caught the matinee Cheap Tuesdays screening at the local theatres for IT. I’ve wanted to see that one for a while and had thought that I’d give it up due to finances but I’m happy to finally have that sorted it out and it work out and we got to see it. We did also see the preview for Jigsaw so we’re debating to see whether we want to see it by the end of the month and maybe add it to the horror marathon. It all depends. Anyways, you can expect the review for both the 80s IT and this new one soon.

2nd Wedding Anniversary

We’ve decided that hiking is our anniversary event. This year, we went out to Thousand Islands National Park to go for a hike. Its a pretty nice area and I’ll be posting about that very soon. It was a pretty flat path so there was no leaves changing colors to see. However, this year is cotton-themed. We gave pretty generic and useful stuff. My husband was great and he gave me a Teeturtle Cat Mom shirt. Here it is!

Belated Thanksgiving Dinner

We had my in-laws come over last week to celebrate a belated Thanksgiving. I’m not great at making turkey and it was a busy day of chores and catching up with the blog and editing so we ended up picking up the food to make from M&M Meat Shops which is a pretty cool place with some delicious food when in need for a quick meal to put together.

Noctambule at Granby Zoo

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#Dinozoo at #Noctambule at #GranbyZoo. #dinosaurs #quebec #granby #zoo #animals #canada

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Granby Zoo is a place we haven’t gone back in a long time. This year, they added a Dinozoo area which is full of animated dinosaurs. Its pretty cool. I actually think its probably more effective at night than in the day.

Cute Kitty Pic

Upcoming:

–> MORE HORROR MARATHON/TV BINGES/FALL ACTIVITIES

That’s it for this Weekly Adventures!
I know it was a little overloaded. Its just because of vacation having more time to do stuff. 
We continue the horror marathon tomorrow!

Whats up with you?

My Weekly Adventures #51

Hello everyone!! Welcome to the next Weekly  Adventures! This will be a slightly shorter one with less fluff or serious stuff mostly because tomorrow is going to be the October marathon announcement or kick-off or whatever! It was why I slightly hesitated to do a Weekly Adventures however, why not, right? Overall, it was a pretty chill half a month. The first week of it didn’t really have anything in particular however the last weekend to this one has been a little more eventful.

Rock ‘N’ Roll Oasis Montreal 2017

In celebration of the Canada 150 and the Montreal 375, this year’s Montreal marathon took place over two days instead of just the Sunday. Obviously, I only was a part of it because of my friend who usually needs me to help with drop off and moving the car downtown where the race ended. This year was pretty cool as because of the event closing a wider area, I ended up having to change where I parked which came with its problems such as discovering where the boundaries were and figuring out where to get some tea in the new area. I work in Montreal however I don’t venture quite as much in the area near the LaFontaine Park surroundings so wasn’t quite so familiar however, I did end up finding some breakfast near the Berri-UQAM metro at the bus station and for the first year, ended up watching the race in the middle of the course. It was pretty nice with a live band and water stations and everything. Anyways, it also happened to be the hottest weekend of the summer, hitting the 40s Celsius in humidity and the full marathon was cancelled. However, the weather really took a turn around and I think because of the heat, everyone wanted to just mentally find that extra gear to get to the finish a lot of faster. Still, the event was cool as usual.

Baking Date

Last Friday night, I hung out with my baking and travelling friend. Its always nice to hang out with friends after a long time and we had decided to the weekend before due to her acquisition of many apples because this is the apple picking season. The original plan was to make apple pie however due to time running late and whatnot, we ended up making these little apple galette and I learned what pate brisee was and that was super cool. I’ve always wanted to make them and never did but they turned out to be pretty simple. Plus, its always fun to hang out with this friend. Hopefully, I’ll get my finances in order and we’ll be able to head on another foodie adventure to Toronto soon.

Battle of Ingredients Gathering

This month’s Battle of Ingredients will go live at some point next week. However, we had our gathering for it. We decided to do an early fall BBQ event. The weather’s definitely dropped since the last month and that weekend before with the  40+ Celsius temperature. We’ve been in the single digits the last few days so its been a sudden hit of cooler weather. Either way, this is coming up and we had a little Moon Festival twist since that’s also next week. Look out for that if you’ve been following it! 🙂

Moon Festival Early Celebration

Moon Festival is officially next week however, we got together earlier for an early celebration as my husband has work during dinner time on the day of. However, I will still have one more dinner with my mom on the day of. Its always nice to get together for dinner.

Cute Kitty Pic

Upcoming:

• HALLOWEEN MARATHON!!!

Sorry for the late post today!
I’ve been plagued with migraines all weekend, so not as productive.
Thats it for this adventures!

Halloween marathon starts next week with little bits of random non-Halloween posts
The announcement post tomorrow will cover everything from whats the franchise I’ll be working on and such!
What have you been up to?

My Weekly Adventures: Vacation, Festivals (and some pondering…)

Welcome back! Its been a month since a proper My Weekly Adventures. This tiime, we’re catching up a little and getting in some updates. You know, actual updates. Last night was Midautumn Festival so yeah, I was planning to do a vlog and get all fancy inserting pictures and videos but nope, not happening for this one yet. But, a vlog is coming up… I hit over 2000 followers in the past week and color me happy. It also somewhat confirmed something about the blog that I have been thinking about for a while now. It kind of puts me in a rut. Give me some time to have those thoughts calmed down and I’ll post up a chat with you all to ask about your opinion on it. That is for probably near the end of the month seeing as right before writing this, I recorded and then deleted it again because I ramble just too much and it was missing the point completely. Things to look out for soon…

Now, back to My Weekly Adventures!

Vacation Time!!

Its funny that this time, we went on vacation, we flew somewhere and then rented a car and ended up doing quite a bit of road trip out and about. Vacation was in Vancouver and Kelowna. Two posts have gone up already. If you are up to date, don’t think that the rest are by days because they aren’t. Some of them might be just by location if there’s too many pictures that I liked. However, pictures are incredibly a lot (they still are) but I just had my phone so I couldn’t go crazy.

Regardless, we had some good food, beautiful scenery, lovely road trips. The weather didn’t agree with us all the time but we didn’t mind it and just kept enjoying our vacation. We even had a talk about what vacation felt like a vacation. One, bustling cities are a big no-no because we already live in a big city. It is probably the main reason why we really stayed in further out places when we stayed in Vancouver except the one day we went to Stanley Park and Vancouver Aquarium.

Lots of vacation stuff coming up in the next few weeks. I didn’t want to swamp my blog with just that so we’ll take our time with it. 🙂

Festivals!

I did an entire post on YUL EAT festival so you can check it out HERE if you missed it. What more is there to say: Old Montreal, great companies with my girl friends, lots and lots of food, free samples and learning and seeing a waiter race. I’d say it was a pretty fantastic day. I am currently peeling on my shoulders from the huge sunburn I got and thinking about how its been quite some time since I had a sunburn to that extent. Hmm…Need to remember sunscreen all the time. Although autumn is around the corner so sun is going to decrease significantly soon by the time we hit winter at least.

Festival des Vendanges also had a post right HERE. This one is in the Eastern Townships of Quebec located right next to the Memphremagog Lake which is absolutely beautiful to walk along. We had a train pass right behind us (almost because we crossed the street). Odd urban planning structures but that kind of applies to a lot of places. This is a festival I’ve been looking forward to checking out and we finally did so I’m super happy about that.

The Long-Awaited Somewhat Garden Update

At this point, after coming back from vacation, my garden is pretty much non-existent except for a few things. The leeks are still going. I think its almost time to harvest before we lose them all. Lettuce is seeding, which means I can use it for next year. Same goes for broccoli. I didn’t harvest any of the florets in time. We had a few cucumbers but we froze them before we left so that it’d still be good. They are all eaten now so there’s nothing to show you. However, the raspberries are at full ripe state and we’re just harvesting every other day. This was from last weekend.

For the record, that’s a pretty deep tupperware.

Next up is a little surprise discovery in my geraniums, a ground cherry popped up on the side!!

Aside from that, I have completely revamped the side front yard flower patch. It finally doesn’t look like a cluster of a mess. The cure was to pull out almost all the irises. They just spread way too much. Although next year, I am almost positive it’ll be overflowing with these lily of the valley that just ended up popping up in the garden. This is what it looks like after I finally bought some chrysanthemums. Chrysanthemums are perfect for autumn but they are biannual so I have to get them every other year pretty much.

Before winter comes, I just need to separate the roses from the echinacea a little. There’s a bit of shifting on the front yard part lining the front of the house where I need to move some plants around. The raspberry patch needs some serious work to control mint overgrowth, raspberry intensive spreading and strawberries.

I don’t have a vegetable garden here but that will be for the next update. It just has too much overgrown grass that I need to figure out how to control better. And we need to figure out how to fence the garden in but leave room for the pool hose to run along the back without it destroying my shallots.

And one more thing is the clematis finally has lots and lots of buds and as this post goes up, its already starting to bloom.

Apparently we have the late summer-early fall variety so that’s why it is going crazy now. When it all blooms, it is going to be so pretty! You might want to head over to Avenue of Daydreams and I’ll have lots of artsy close-up shots of it!

That is really it. We have lots of raspberries, apples and pineapple sage (which has its own accident). The herbs need to be planted into the ground before it gets super cold. That is the next mission also. Updates next time for that.

Cité Memoire

If you happen to be dropping into Montreal, this is an event I really think is worth your while. All you need is to download the app, have some temporary storage space on your phone and some good shoes to do the walking. Cité Memoire is a concept where it is a history walk around different locations in Old Montreal. There are 30 mins, 60 mins and 90 mins circuits. Both 30 mins and 60 mins have two different circuits each. 90 mins only have one. There is also a Daytime and Nighttime. I have yet to try Nighttime and actually might soon. There are some places that tells you at the stop in a recording with a text (that you can choose to read or not) about the history of the location and the significance and what it has become now with some old photos of what it looked like. There are some spots where you can use your phone and do augmented reality segments where its like a little video. I think the concept is really cool and although I didn’t retain all the information, I did learn a lot about the architecture and the background of some more obscure buildings (not like the Church or Board of Trade or Banks).

Funny story is that I was doing this circuit after work and this Amphitours bus goes by and they are saying the exact same thing passing by the building that I had just listened to the recording for. So you see, all you need are your legs and this history lesson is for free. Plus, Montreal even has set up a wifi that stretches along the entire path so that no extra data fees. I’m not sponsored or anything but this is one of the better ideas Montreal has had. A more detailed post will go up soon 🙂

Midautumn Festival

 Last night was Midautumn Festival and the full moon was ever so bright! I went for a lovely walk with my mom after having dinner with her to celebrate. Here’s dinner and moon cakes 🙂

The one on top is the moon cake I usually eat. The one on the bottom is supposedly Taiwanese Moon cake. I believe I’ve tasted it before and its is actually more fluffy and delicate than the top one but then, I like my traditional lotus paste moon cake. 🙂

That’s it for this My Weekly Adventures!  As usual, here is a Cute Kitty Pic! This is my in-laws cat by the way. She’s one month younger than my kitty. Oh, and she hates me..absolutely loathes me for some odd reason…

Upcoming posts:

•  Cité Memoire
• Netflix A-Z
• Vacation

That’s it for My Weekly Adventures!
Next one will be probably with the Halloween month announcement!!

My Weekly Adventures!

First, a massive THANK YOU to Laurie at Pride in Photos for suggesting to give my weekly personal updates this title 🙂 Now, I don’t need to get all fancy and can just use this lovely simple My Weekly Adventures.  I just learned the whole  acronym of KISS –> Keep It Stupid Simple.  This however is not stupid in any way and its recaps exactly what the weekly posts are about.  Thank you for being so awesomely genius, Laurie! I owe you one! And if you haven’t visited Laurie’s blog Pride in Photos, I advise you to because she is an amazing photographer and I love her posts to bits.

From now on, this segment will now be MY WEEKLY ADVENTURES.  I will add that on the menu some time this week (hopefully tonight).

Lets see what adventures I went on this week 😉

1) Moon Festival!

Dinner for Midautumn/Moon Festival!

Moon Cake

Last Monday was Midautumn Festival or more commonly known as Moon Festival. Its a time for family and symbolizing the arrival of a new season.  The moon is like a completion of something mostly in the complete family being there and the blessing behind it.  My mom made a delicious dinner and then we had moon cakes later on at night. We even stepped outside for a walk together and to look at the lovely full moon 🙂

2) Another room finished!

Thanks to my boyfriend being super awesome at picking up the pace for painting. Another room in the basement is done 🙂 This color is absolutely adorable and actually turned out way better than I expected! Only 3 more rooms to go and one of them is already in progress.

What do you think of the color?

You think it’ll make you feel energetic? This should eventually be a workout room..haha! So thats kind of important 😉

3) My first Montreal Comiccon!

On Saturday, I went to my first ever Montreal Comiccon! After finally having to go alone, I ended up spontaneously meeting up with fellow blogger and one of my very awesome girl friend, Day’s on the way to the line-up.  She was there alone as well so we paired up and went together 🙂 Very nice turn of events.  I ended up going to 4 Q&A panels and then checked out some exhibits and took tons of pictures of some awesome costumes.  I’m still shifting through my pictures but the detailed post on that one will go up tomorrow!

I’m totally going again next year.  If there is someone awesome, I would love to go do a photo op.  This year, the photo op was full by the time I decided I would like to dish out the money to do it.  Plus, I’m planning on going to Toronto Comiccon next year if I can arrange my finances and find some friends who would like to road trip with me.

4) Little Finds at Comiccon!

Although I did spend most of my day at Comiccon running back and forth between Q&A panels, we did find time to eventually hit the exhibition hall and check out some merchandise.

Our first find was this Moonglow Jewelry.  The concept behind it is that you can use whatever date you choose.  I chose my birthday and looked up the code for the moon that was on that birth date and it a photograph of the moon on it.  Then you can attach it to either a bracelet or a necklace (in various models).  I eventually chose a bracelet and added on my boyfriend’s moon on his birth date as well.  When you buy this, it give you a little card with a description of the personality of the person born on that moon.  I was born at the 3rd quarter of full moon while my boyfriend is the new moon.  These little charms absorb UV light and at night, they glow in the dark.

Pretty neat, right?

Moonglow Jewelry

After debating on getting some artwork to decorate my new place, I eventually came across a place, where I bought a T-shirt (which is going to be delivered to me in 2 weeks) from TeeTurtle but they also sold posters and this one caught my eye. The Totoro bus with a bunch of Ghibli characters on board just stole my heart away.

TeeTurtle Posters

Luckily this poster is still in one piece.  This was a free poster from Warner Bros booth celebrating the 75th anniversary of Batman.

Warner Bros free poster: 75th anniversary Batman

5) One Day Road Trip to Charlevoix

Along the shore of La Malbaie

After taking a few months to figure out when to do it, my friend and I finally decided to go on a one day drive through Charlevoix to take pictures and see the area.  I’ve already been before with my boyfriend a few years back but when my computer got attacked by a virus, those happened to be the only photos that were not backed up AT ALL.  So this trip was essentially for me to do a reboot of those photos except this time, I have a more powerful camera on hand 😉

I’m still sifting through Comiccon pictures so these ones are the next ones to go through.  This post will go up nearing the end of the week 😉 Prepare for some breathtaking moments!

6) Finds in Charlevoix

I love going to different regions and looking at some wine stores because some times they carry some alcohol different from the ones in Montreal. This time, I stopped at the SAQ in La Malbaie before turning around and heading home and found a Rose wine La Rose Gabrielle and a Dry Gin made from herbs called Ungava.  I haven’t tried the gin yet but we did open it to smell (when I got home, of course) and it has a very distinct smell.  I’m intrigued as to what it would taste like 😉

7) Some Funny Moments!

Some of you may have missed my funny moment on TV and the post and that was pretty much the most funniest moment of my summer.  YouTube offers mostly hilarious moments from Ellen Show channel and I’m so happy that its back because it means I get to share those again! This week’s video that cracked me up the most was Channing’s Biggest Fear…

Fears, my friends! No matter how awesome you are, it just destroys you.

8) Awesome Music!

You all know by now (if you’ve followed me a while) that I love Youtube artists or in general, independents artists.  I’ve talked about Sam Tsui, Kurt Schneider and the whole crew.  This time, the spotlight is the extremely talented Daniel de Bourg.  This guy has such an amazing voice.  I love listening to his originals and his covers and its pretty crazy that I haven’t mentioned him yet.  Maybe its because he doesn’t have as many covers come out.

I’ve never heard the original yet so I can’t really compare but I’m liking this one a lot 🙂

Thats it for this week! Life’s adventures just never stop and they almost always give me inspiration for something new to check out.

How was your week or weekend, my lovelies? Happy Monday!

Welcoming Autumn with Mid autumn Festival :)

Nothing much happened this past week but nothing did feel quite right either.  Maybe its the fatigue from the long driving back from the previous weekend away or maybe its just the things at work that aren’t really going my way, I don’t know the reason but it definitely felt so exhausting.  Somehow blogging was one of the few joys I had other than watching a bunch of movies and reviewing them (also blog-related).

What was I up to this week, you ask?

First of all, in Chinese tradition according to the lunar calender, on Thursday was our Mid-Autumn Festival, also called Moon Festival 🙂 My boyfriend’s graveyard shift also meant that I would be passing it pretty much alone as he slept through the evening before work.  I’m okay with that, not complaining. Work is work, right? This gave me time to head out and take some pictures of the beautiful full moon.  I don’t have those kick ass lenses for my DSLR yet so thats the best zoom I have. Still, I’d say, it was a nice night to sit outside and admire the moon.

Full moon on Sept 19 🙂

After that I came back in to eat some moon cakes.  My mom bought me two before she left for her Europe trip.

Traditional Moon cake: Lotus Seed paste with two yolks

The inside of the Traditional moon cake

Five Nuts Moon Cake

Inside of Five Nuts moon cake

Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of the second time.  I’m more old-fashioned and like the traditional ones, although I prefer the ones with one yolk 🙂 Have you eaten moon cakes before? They also have one type which is modernized called snowy moon cakes.  I plan on making those one day, along with testing out how to make some moon cake cupcakes.  What do you think?

My mom’s friend also came by and dropped off some moon cakes which resembles snowy moon cakes that she made and they look adorable.

When Friday came by, I was relieved when the day ended and enjoyed a nice meal with some delicious rose wine.

Gallo White Zinfandel 🙂

While I was watching lots of movies on the previous weekend, I ended up binge watching and finishing the Season 1 of Under the Dome!

Have you seen Under the Dome? Do you like it? Its totally awesome! 🙂

I’m asking all of you that need skincare! This week’s huge expense was in a matter of 10 minutes.  I’ve been on the low of taking selfies because my skin is flipping out on me so I had to talk to the beauty skincare specialist to suggest what to do which ended up in a 10 minute chat that cost me $120.  *faints*

Those two little bottles…ugh! Lets hope it works, so far it seems to be on the right track 🙂

Today was supposed to be apple picking day but we’ve been having crazy winds so I’m typing this after my baked goods just got out of oven! That recipe will go up on Monday morning :).

This week’s music obsession is from a very awesome local band called Perfect Sideline.  Hope you enjoy!

Its partially in French but its really good and I love the beat!

For some nice Pinterest combination since I didn’t get a post up yesterday! I would love these two baked goods!

How can I leave out cute animal pictures, right?

I can’t believe that Halloween is just coming up in a bit over a month.  My boyfriend’s sister already told us the two possible themes for the party and now its brainstorming on what to do. Some of you know already that I went as Alice last year from Resident Evil: Apocalyse.  I would’ve preferred the 4th or 5th but that getup was a lot harder to find the stuff for.  Any of you having some Halloween parties this year?

On the note of Halloween, I’m drafting up my list of movies for the Halloween marathon.  Originally, I wanted to do a full slasher month, but I figured I’d go crazy after it so I’m going to do a movie of the 6 Halloween movies and then continue on with some horror thrillers.  It’ll be a month of very limited sleep once that second part starts, but hey, it might just be fun 🙂 Plus, I also have jotted down some baked goods with Halloween themes and can’t wait to test them out.  Last year was Glow in the Dark cupcakes and they were a massive hit 🙂

Lots of planning coming along.  The weekend away really recharged my energy for writing so I’m happy to be right back on track! I have a few festivals I want to visit also. October will be a busy month, but first, lets get September over with first, right?

Have a great weekend! I’m back to my chores and making some dinner 🙂