My July Adventures!

These might be some unusual times but July has been right on cue with the hot and humid weather along with some random downpours. There’s a few changes as things get back to some form of normal since Montreal is pretty much in their last phases of deconfinement as offices has the okay for up to 25% of staff to get back to work and masks are mandatory on public transit and indoor public places. I’ll talk about all those things below as well as some updates of July.

Hiking: La Boucle du mont des Trois-Lacs

After some rainy weather, we finally found a day to go out for a hike to hit the other trail in the same spot where we went in the previous hike. You can see the recap of this hike HERE.

Movies and Tea Podcast

Movies and Tea Podcast is still going pretty strong. We’ve been wrapping up Season 4 for Ang Lee and After Hours this month and will be starting up Season 5 for David Fincher shortly.

On Youtube, we’ve been posting up on a weekly basis and we’re pretty much updated almost the entire first season. As we step into Season 5 for Movies and Tea, it will be updated on Youtube while still catching up on the older episodes in between. Above you can find the latest episode updated on Youtube.

Back to the Office

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As #workfromhome ends for me, I've been preparing by checking out different #facecoverings as it becomes mandatory to wear #masks on public transit. In the last few weeks, I ordered from @sofsdesigns @hoplagogosses which both are pretty good. For both, I had to make slight adjustments to the ear loops to fit more snug. #sofsdesigns has a space to put a 3rd layer for filter and nose band. It has its pros especially in high heat to choose whether to add that extra layer. #hoplagogosses has a nose band and is 3 layers fitted which is good as already all done so very convenient and the nose band is good quality. The black cherry one is a free trial from my friend @surprisesdephoebe who has been trying to make her version of the best mask suitable for her family and kindly made me one to try which turned out really well. Its not for sale but I had to share it since it fit the best. #buylocal #madeinquebec #quebecproducts #handmade #covid19life

A post shared by Kim (@tranquildreams) on Jul 12, 2020 at 3:38pm PDT

Back to the office doesn’t really have much to talk about. I wasn’t exactly excited about it since the whole public transit thing is rather stressful mentally. It was okay for the first week or so until the buses started getting more people, probably because of 25% capacity of office able to open. I’m trying to keep a relaxed mindset about it all and just make sure to stay on high alert. Of course, with masks mandatory not only on public transit but expanded to indoor public places, its all about amassing face masks since the government has said that its something that will likely remain mandatory for the foreseeable future.

Gardening Update

All the garden vegetables are doing fairly good. Everything’s have some kind of vegetable growing. We have an abundance of cucumbers and Hungarian Wax peppers. I’m hoping that at some point we’ll get more than the one or two squashes. The downpours will hopefully  help.

Quick Road Trip to Ottawa

I didn’t take any pictures but I went to Ottawa for quick Chinese grocery store run since I had some things that I needed but some Chinese grocery stores here don’t have a lot of. At the same time, it was mostly also a chance to take care of a wrong delivery item from an online order for Eddie Bauer that I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of calling and getting a Fedex pickup and whatnot. Its just nice to take a road trip since there’s no other form of travelling that seems reasonable in the current times. I got a chance to pick up a hiking bag on discount at Eddie Bauer, half a dozen of donuts from Maverick Donuts, ciders from LCBO as well as the above-mentioned grocery run. At least one less thing to deal with for the whole Eddie Bauer wrong item situation that got sorted out fairly easily.

Workout Update

• Run: 8.19km/ 1hr1min
• Pool Workouts

With only one hike and one long run this month due to the extreme heat, I’ve been moving every week’s workout into a few pool workouts. Its been mostly about endurance and resistance workouts as well as swimming. Going back to the office also means that I can get back to the normal everyday walking. Point is, I’ve been trying to get more active and lose some weight and stay fit.

Cute Kitty Pic

That’s it for this July Adventures!

Workout Roundup: A month later….

I think with this one done, we’re pretty much all caught up with this one month Fantasia break and getting things back on track to be right back to normal.

Clarification #1: I may not have updated it here but I didn’t completely turn into a slob.

Between Fantasia Festival and work, I actually did get some working out done. I did a weekly Zumba session of 30 minutes whenever I had time to slot it in. While I don’t remember the list of songs or the length of the whole thing, it was my attempt to keep on working out at the very least, especially since there was a wedding at the beginning of August to attend. However, working out may have decreased but we did step into the direction of eating healthier. So progress in general.

Clarification #2: Fantasia is a pretty physical activity!

The last clarification is that while Fantasia Film Festival as it says is really watching movies. The pre movie stuff includes speed walking almost every day of the event from work in Old Montreal to Concordia University to make sure that I got there in time to get in the movie. With that said, my speed walking time improved crazily. The cardio I put in was fascinating as I speed walked 30 minutes almost every day and then had to do the same after the movies to catch the bus back home. That’s an hour of some intense walking pace. Fun stuff…especially by the last few days of the episode when I was running on like 4 hours of sleep or something. Then we have the waiting around part which involves a lot of standing. I kid you not..my calves were cramping for the entire week after the festival ended.

With that said! Things have calmed down and we’re back to business and workout round-ups are resuming now. I might put them back to biweekly round-ups as I work through slotting in more workout sessions.

Let’s start on last Sunday..because well, that was when I got back into the determined mind set to get back into the groove of working out more than once a week.

Sunday: Pool Workout

The weather is no longer murderously hot so the pool was on the cool side but still, I wanted to head in to destress and workout. Water has a cool and calming effect and boy, did I need it!

Moves picked up a combination of Popsugar Fitness Pool Workout Videos.

Here’s what I did:

• Jog (in-pool) 5 laps
• Core Rotation (30 reps each side alternating)
• Jump with Knee Tucks (40 reps)
• Shuffle
• Superman Kicks (30 seconds)
• Jog 5 laps
• Straight Leg Kick (30 reps each side alternating)
• Core Rotation (30 reps each side alternating)
• Jump with Knee Tucks (40 Reps)
• Superman Kicks (30 seconds)
• Breaststroke (5 laps)
• Freestyle Swimming

Monday: Zumba

Sunday: Weight Training

There you go! That’s how the week went down!

Two workouts is pretty decent for myself honestly. This week was a little rough for our home so, I’m fairly happy that I still managed to do this. Honestly, that is what I’m hoping to achieve on a weekly basis: a cardio workout and a weight training. Cardio can be something like Zumba or running but it can also be a long walk. So we’ll see what I come up with. Its honestly finding the motivation to keep going on and just staying active. Eventually, I’ll move it to three times a week. Especially with hiking in our plans, I’m hoping that things will be good once things once again settle down because apparently the theme of 2018 is not a moment of nothing.

Workout Round-up: Week 9 &10

I’m going to be reasonable now and say that from now on, I might be changing this to biweekly. Weekly commitments are a little intense. Even biweekly sometimes gets a little crazy, mostly because as much as I want intense workout schedules, its actually proving to be more stressful than it being a healthy change in my life. So I’m doing mostly workouts on day offs from work. During the week, I tend to do a lot more walking and well, with Fantasia season, its a lot of standing also.

I think right now, I have some great routine set with Zumba and pool workouts. Honestly, I know it sounds crazy but these two things combined actually do quite well plus they put me in a fairly happy place even when I’m dying of fatigue to push a little more.

Week 9

Monday

We opened our pool finally so I’m super happy to get back on a back to back day following off last week’s Sunday pool workout with a little of the same. I did do an extra round here from the day before.

To be fair, I didn’t write it here as workouts but Friday, Saturday and Sunday was Montreal Comiccon. I spent 5 hours on Friday, 6 hours on Saturday and 6 hours on Sunday pretty much walking and standing around a lot covering the event with the exception of four 45 minute conferences. Its one of the main reasons why I kind of took it easy during the week to kind of rest up for the intense weekend.

Week 10

Saturday – Zumba & Freestyle Pool Exercises

Pool exercises: Knee Tucks, Shuffle, Breaststroke, In-pool jogging

As I thought back to the past week of recuperation and trying to get a workout in, I doubled down on the Saturday workout with a longer Zumba routine than usual and put in a few more routines that I had to learn so it was harder as it switch things up. After that sweaty cardio session, because we’ve just been stuck back into a heat wave, I went into the pool to cool down but also get some freestyle pool exercises inspired from the pool workout above. I love doing a few rounds of 30 reps for knee tucks and then doing shuffles in between. I did a lot of jogging around the pool and also worked in some swimming with practicing the worst form I have which is breaststroke so I had to focus a lot on the form and getting that slow and steady but effective.

Sunday – Zumba & Pool Workout

Pool Workout (2 rounds)

Another hot day over here in Montreal! I took the time to do a normal set of Zumba workout, this time with a few more familiar routines. I did research a pool workout and this time decided to focus on abs and core. It was a 2 rounds cycle. Because my pool is different from the one here, the crunches were a little harder so I fell for a few more reps and longer times for the other workouts while adding in some knee tucks at 30 reps. I still did some cardio with jogging and again, some more swimming.

Overall, a lot of the same but I was pleased with just getting that bit in.
I did have some walking around here and there to get from one spot to the next for the events, just didn’t bother to write them in.
You should expect that Zumba and Pool workouts (hopefully find more workout options) to be the summer focus.
If the weather cools down a little bit more, I will go back to getting in some jogging time, probably in August.

With that said, biweekly recaps is the new structure so I’ll see you with an update in 2 weeks! 🙂

Weekly Workout Roundup – Week 7 & 8

Week 7

Week 7 was quite the fail but I did manage to get one workout in on Sunday. So I’m going to just cut to the chase and talk about that!  Its time for a Sunday Zumba workout!

Week 8

We are starting fresh this week and I vow that now that everything is pretty much done, I’m going to get back on track.

Monday

Walk – moderate speed
Distance: 3.7km
Time: 40 minutes

Saturday

• 2 Hour Gardening (a lot of squatting..)
• 1.5 km moderate walking (evening walk)

Sunday

Our pool is finally open and today is literally 42C with the humidex and for those who don’t know, we rig up an A/C unit in our bedroom to cool down the house with our fan. Surprisingly with the new roof which is white to repel the heat, it helps to keep the house pretty cool. However, no better time to go hang out in the pool that my husband finally got to work after last year’s crazy algae problem. We spent almost an hour in there and of course, it wouldn’t be right to not own up to my promise that if he got the pool open again that I’d do an extra lot of pool workouts.

I did a variation of this one about 2 to 3 times depending on which moves. It did definitely give my obliques the most workout. Refreshing and fun. I actually even did some swimming but its hard to really quantify how much of swimming it did. We didn’t sit around so we were just moving about a lot. Anyways, I love pool workouts because my shoulder and knee joints sometimes take the zumba and the weights really badly so this helps a lot. I’m hoping to find some more exercises to keep some variety going.

That’s it for the last two weeks!
Sorry for combining both together but Week 7 was kind of a disaster so it was just easier to do it this way!

My Weekly Adventures: Festival Season is Here!

I did it again! There was supposed to be vlog but then I got a little intimidated of putting it up. Anyways, it was not so great since I recorded super late at night and was all rambling and stuff.

Summer festivals are here and its just the start of a lot of fun stuff here. The weather is hot and humid and while I did recap a lot of the stuff in actual full posts. I’ll talk a little a them here and I’ll have a little update of little life stuff.

Before we start, I guess the most important is that I want to address the crazy weird schedule here. I usually do have a schedule but I’m seriously thinking of going back to a five posts week and leave a break as optional days on the weekends. Especially during festival season as I need to find some time to work on some other projects. Nothing changes here but rather I think I feel a little burnt out. It could be because of the heat that kills a bit of the motivation for everything. However, I feel the energy coming back now that it isn’t 40 degrees Celsius outside. What I’m saying is that 5-7 posts from now on. I’m still working on some backlog for my upcoming vacation in a good few weeks so it’ll be fun! 🙂

I’m skipping the rambling so I’m going to just get going! 🙂

Trying Out Miss Fresh

I’m huge about being efficient as mentioned in my post unboxing the Miss Fresh meal service subscription. You can find that HERE. I think this is such a great idea. Obviously, its still a little expensive to have every week but its a nice treat when its a busy week. I won’t be unboxing my later ones since I don’t think it’ll have anything new to offer except different recipes. However, I did manage to make one of the recipes and still mix up the ingredients a little. It was a Tuna Bake. In the end, here’s how it turned out.

For a good idea of what it is, the ingredients are on the top pre-portioned for what your plan is set at. This makes for two people. However, my husband was the only one that could eat this meal and it served three meals for him.

Montreal Comiccon

 Montreal Comiccon was last weekend. I only made it to the Friday but it was a ton of fun. I did a general coverage earlier this week HERE! I chatted with some cool indie game developers and tried out games, saw the Outlast 2 live demo and more. I didn’t get an autograph but walked past the autograph booths and saw a ton of celebrities from afar. I’m not sure if I mentioned in Comiccon recap post but I specifically wanted to see Bob Morley, unfortunately I had to skip Saturday so I didn’t get to his Q&A but I did walk past his autograph spot which was at the side so I got a really close look at what he looked like in real life. I was pretty happy about that.

Overall a very cool time there. I’m going to try to get a media pass for next year or simply get a 3 day pass and check it all out. Something to think and plan for in the coming year! 🙂

Song of the Deep!

With Game Warp comes great responsibility! Song of the Deep is one of my most anticipated for this year. I ended up preordering this one even if I kind of knew there really wasn’t a point but I was just so excited for it. Plus, its the first time I pre-ordered a game! Kickstarter projects don’t count. I’m still waiting for most of those to see the light of day. You know I love shameless plugs for Game Warp so maybe you’d be as excited as I am that Song of the Deep is August’s featured game!

We have a new episode for Game Warp coming up next week and we’re getting ready for the episode of the featured review for this month’s game, Oxenfree! 🙂

Garden & Harvest!

We had our first harvest! The crazy rain grew my zucchini plants so much that after two days of intense rain, my plant was like 40% larger and the zucchinis were ready for harvest. Well, two of ’em. Look at it! They are huge!

We even had some delicious lettuce to cook with it, all from the garden. It just makes me so proud that I didn’t manage to kill anything else and that the fence reinforcements have been fantastic. I’m going to probably be harvesting more lettuce and kale this week. I don’t have pictures yet but raspberries and some strawberry harvests are happening also! 🙂

Fantasia Festival!!

Fantasia Festival is here! It started on July 14th and runs till August 3rd. Unlike most years, I actually have it really easy for the first week so so far, only one movie! This was from the first film that I attended on Friday night. It started in delay so I guess its cool I was standing in line next to some cool people that I striked up an interesting conversation about everything. If some of you don’t know, Fantasia Festival usually means at least 45 minutes to an hour of line-up, at least if you want decent seats. Since I go to this alone a lot, its really nice to meet people at least for line-up company. Regardless, this was also the first time I’ve ever experienced delay at Fantasia Festival but the movie ended up starting half an hour late but I think its alright even if it meant that I couldn’t stay for all the Q&A since I needed to catch the last bus home. Thank goodness, my schedule doesn’t usually hinge on these crazy moments this year mostly.

I’m pretty excited about the rest of the movies. You can see my line-up HERE! And usually expect the review about two days later to give some time to think about what I’ve seen and gather my thoughts. Which means that my first one I saw, Rupture’s review will go up tomorrow (Monday!).

Calypso Water Park

While the heat is getting me super tired and just not want to do anything in general, I’m also loving it because it means that I can go in the pool and cool down. Last week, I actually did and enjoyed some outside reading time and Netflix time and even got in a pool workout session which was really great.

However, the thing I looked forward a lot was going to the water park with my girl friends. We’ve been trying to plan it for two summers and we’re finally going. The weather threatened us a little but we decided to give it a go. It turned out to be the perfect weather. We ended up going to Calypso Water Park near Ottawa.

Great company, nice weather, and a ton of fun! We weren’t all about doing the super adrenaline rush stuff but we ended up doing the wave pool which was definitely a winner since we went back four times. We also did two times of the Kongo Expedition (which is something like a lazy river concept). There was a part in there in a dark cave that kind of tapped into my fear of the dark but still it was really fun even if I got capsized by some stupid kids on purpose. It was more unexpected than that I got angry or scared. We also went for two rounds of the Jungle Run which is like balancing on a paddleboard and letting the current push you through the course and it was done really well. There was also the Canyon Rafting that was a ton of fun to get drifted along the sides of the tubes and then we had the fancy idea of going up one of the tallest rides thinking it wouldn’t be intense and it freaked me out. It was a ton of fun actually. Its the double-edged sword of amusement parks in general for me.

After that, we headed back home and had dinner….

Trying Out a New Restaurant Jerry Ferrer

What’s a perfect day without having a great meal at the end as well. I told you all about Jerry Ferrer on opening day and just trying a few things but we went to try it out.

We ended up sharing a fried calamari.

Fried Calamari

I loved the texture of this so much! It was super delicious!

While all the girls got burgers, I was really craving a pulled pork sandwich so I got exactly that!

Doesn’t that just look scrumptious? It was so awesome! 🙂 I think this place might be a new fave spot for me. At least I’m definitely coming back to try out a few more things. Plus the decor and service was nice and that is always a plus.

A perfect way to end a fantastic day out with friends, even if I got home and realized that I forgot sunscreen on my chest area and super sunburned…haha!

Cute Kitty Pic

Some of you that follow me on Avenue of Daydreams would have seen this pic but this is just so cute I couldn’t let you all miss out on it! 🙂

Upcoming:

• Fantasia Festival Movie Reviews!!

That is the recap of the last two weeks!
What have you been up to? Any festivals, summer heat, activities, etc?