A Quiet Blogging Weekend…

Hey everyone!

Hope you’ve all been having a great weekend! I don’t know why I don’t think about mentioning these things until after they’ve happened.

This weekend has been a crazy one as I went to do event coverage at Dreamhack Montreal 2017 for Game Warp as press. (Yay!)

Friday and Saturday was dedicated to coverage and I spent Friday after work and most of Saturday at the event hall running from competition to live tournaments and checking out games. It was a crazy busy event and I’ve found some new things to check out including sparking a sudden interest to finally try out Hearthstone. Day 1 recap for the Indie Game Zone is now live on That Moment In HERE. I have a day 2 to wrap up the coverage to work on.

With that said, other than being busy with Game Warp and Dreamhack Montreal coverage, a new situation has presented itself which I’m caught up with making a rather heavy decision right now. Its put me in somewhat of an emotional tangle. I need some time to put some thought into that. Seems August till September has been a roller coaster in terms of feelings and all that stuff. Regardless, its why I’ve opted to just tell you that this weekend is off from any normal blogging schedule. Hopefully I’ll have something up for tomorrow. But honestly, I really just want to de-stress and calm a bit of those feelings as I make an important decision after I wrap up coverage. Not that the blog isn’t important but I need to find back that right mindset to write up the next post which probably will be a Dreamhack coverage tailored for here. Expect that soon.

Sorry for the sporadic blogging yet again. I’ve been apologizing a ton this past month. I leave you all with a few quotes of how I’m feeling…

That’s it for today! At least I got something up even if its a lame update.

Pinterest Spring/Summer Inspirations!

Its been forever since I’ve shared some fantastic Pinterest stuff! Mostly because while pinning is super fun and therapeutical, putting together the posts can be tiring.  Just deciding what to do takes so much time that it becomes less therapeutical than it actually is even if I love putting those posts up.  However, maybe this is what Pinterest is going to be: Therapy or Inspirations! Spring is pretty much almost over and hints of Summer is landing in Montreal.  The last few days have been hot and humid and I love it! 🙂

This also means spring cleaning and garden/outdoors stuff needs to be taken care of! I have some rhubarb to harvest and maybe make some nice drinks.  The heat also means that I kick in a much healthier lifestyle.  Lots of things that I seek out Pinterest for! Lets look at some of my faves and ones I hope to pursue if not now, eventually!

The Anatomy of Sangria

Hot summer days calls out to me in the form of Sangria. I don’t drink a lot in general but a great sangria is so hard to resist. This infographic breaks it down in an interesting way and peaks some new ways to use different ingredients next time.  For the record, I’ve recently realized that I’m intolerant or maybe allergic to red wine so any sangria’s now have to be with white or rose wine. I have also done a autumn sangria with brandy and that turned out pretty good.

Popsicles

I’ve tried out a few popsicle recipes before and I’m not really good at it but its something I’m trying to learn to do better. This one looks delicious.  They are called Fruit Salad Ice Pops.  I love fruits and especially fruit salads and wrapped up in a popsicle. Yummy!  I’m already thinking of what fruits to get to make it and wondering where those popsicle molds are.

Infused Water Combinations

Last year I started getting into infused water. I like cold drinks and water is super healthy so I’ve tried something with blueberry and basil before if I remember correctly.  This summer, I want to keep with the healthy stuff and try some other ones.  These ones are pretty neat especially detox and weight/sugar control and metabolism booster. I guess everything but the lower blood pressure one looks like choices I want to try out.

Watermelon Strawberry Sorbet

For those of you who are new here, I’m lactose intolerant or at least it seems to be in an extreme phase again.  Its really built a love and appreciation for Sorbets in my life. I’ve been wanting to try to make sorbet for a while and if these recipes say its easy, I’ll believe it! Its one of my goals this summer to give it a try.  This combination particularly looks great. I love strawberries and watermelons and yet, no one really pairs these two together. I wonder what it’ll taste like.

Liquid Sunshine

I know, its a lot of alcoholic beverages here! In general, there’s a lot of drinks. Thing is, I was going to do a cruise dedicated post after my cruise recap last year and I forgot about it. I flat out forgot. That’s just how I am. A year after, I remembered and was thinking maybe this year, I’ll start a little drinks segment to experiment different recipes.  I don’t mean alcoholic cocktails, even if they are resistible, I don’t usually drink that much but even for like lemonades or infused waters and other healthy stuff. I think its well worth a shot! 🙂

That’s it for this Pinterest Inspirations!
Originally, it had a ton of other stuff for the garden and whatnot, but I just wanted to keep this fun and short! 🙂 

Let me leave you with this lovely quote!

Happy Friday! 🙂

Little Life Lessons: Things I’ve Realized Recently

I love quotes.  Love them to bits and I have a growing and thriving Pinterest board dedicated to it.  When I did the My Weekly Adventures, I’d always add a quote to the end.  That’s just how I am. My Weekly  Adventures has somewhat diminished but Tranquil Dreams formed because I wanted to be inspired with life and find a means to stay positive.  I say that because sometimes I get caught up with life and forget to live. My Chinese name may mean Tranquil Dreams but I bet you that my brain is never tranquil, its always moving.  Probably why this space is crazy versatile…

Maybe this is a little excuse to ramble a little about things but 2015 is proving to be quite an exciting journey (even with a few frustrating and mind-boggling experiences). But, doesn’t mean that I’m not learning everyday.  After some thought about doing this or not, I decided that it’ll be nice to have this little random segment.  I might keep this a “regular” segment, something like monthly instalments like Music Obsessions or Pinterest Therapy (I should get one of these done also).

Lets see how it goes first! It could be about anything.  Its my place to talk about random things pretty much. And it could be fun and maybe a little inspirational, I don’t know 😉

 1) I have some phenomenal organizational skills that makes it possible to stuff everything into my one room when I find it hard to put it into an entire house

Maybe its not fair that I use this as my exhibit.  Thats our movies all organized.  More than half of those resided in my room before.  Moving issues right now pretty much become HOW I can possibly fit everything in an organized way into the house.  I’m approaching actually physically moving in and this is just the movie collection, I forcefully got 80% of my books on shelves and another 60% of my clothes tucked away in storage or closet or new dresser. How did all this stuff fit in my room before? I’m in constant wonderment about that.

What did I realize? Yes, I’m a pack rat but my organizational skills only appear in confined spaces…I guess thats what I wanted to say.

2) My world is easily in a constant nerd mode (aka finding my Kakuro books and being obsessed all over again)

 

I used to be a huge Sudoku fan.  Thats until one day, I discovered Kakuro.  Its more challenging than Sudoku and I bought two of these books to work on that logic that seemed to be slowly slipping away.  After realizing I really sucked at Kakuro, I tucked it away and because of moving, I found it all over again.  Apparently, getting older has caused a lot of pretty bad changes: lower (than my already low) alcohol tolerance, unable to stay up as late as I used to, not being able to eat a lot of junk food (not necessarily a bad thing) but my logic is better now and Kakuro is becoming easier.  I found the trick to it, or I think I did.  In a day, I go through about two of these in my spare time.

Well, spare time..haha! Thats probably why I’m falling behind with TV and movies.  Netflix has been slightly ignored for the past week or so…I promise to get back on track, especially since I have another 5 movies expiring on March 30th.

3)Being Creative is not a hobby!

Over at my other blog, Days Nights and Daydreams, I had a really busy week a week or two ago because inspiration was crazy flowing.  I was on fire just because I saw something that made me thinking of something else and just how to work the story out.  I even had a little discussion with my boyfriend to help sort out some thoughts.  Creativity really rocks when its around and it felt so awesome! You can follow the link to read the first part of my little apocalypse beginning of the idea in a little fifty word thing.

On that note, I’m pushing for one of my projects to start, the Disney one.  I’ll have an update on it soon. That takes a little more work and I think I just found a way to expand it? I don’t know how to make it work but you know, things always work out last minute 😛

4) When spring refuses to arrive, I start thinking about gardening..

Last year was my first official year gardening in my own space.  My dream is to do an indoor herb garden and make it work even when my house doesn’t get all that much light.  Still, this concept up there makes me realize that it could be doable.  That’s whats been occupying my brain a little more these days.  Plus, I have a desire to use some of my garden in the backyard to turn into a butterfly garden.  Walmart also had seeds for a hummingbird garden.  I saw ONE hummingbird in my garden so long ago and never again but I think its worth a shot.

For now, I’m wishing away the snow and hoping that my tulips and daffodils are going to pop out and that I didn’t bury them too deep.

Who knew I have a secret desire to be a gardener? I sure didn’t…

5) Video games are getting more and more real adding that touch of adventure and action at the same time

I knew this before.  I  watched my boyfriend play The Last of Us and hints of Heavy Rain but its the first time, I’ve sat through an entire game with him.  We only made it through one ending for now with Beyond: Two Souls, but I really wanted to talk about it.  This game is a big YES! I love heavy story based games.  And I love that it reminds us that life’s about choices and you chart your own ending and everything amounts to a certain ending. Thats pretty cool.

Not exactly a realization, but where else would I talk about Beyond: Two Souls being an awesome game.  But I’m sure a ton of you already know.  Oh, and it goes well with my whole movie review thing because Ellen Page, Willem Dafoe and Eric Winters does voice work and are the characters here.  Technology, I really do love you…sometimes.

6) Quotes that really hit certain feelings I’ve been having in the past month

This is getting long so I’ve been having some personal stuff going on and these quotes are exactly how I’m feeling.

 

There you go! My little life realizations.  I don’t know how to make My Weekly Adventures work, instead I want to dedicate multiple little posts than one big one.  Here is a little way to make Tranquil Dreams stay true to how it started and I probably will do this on a monthly basis.

Hope you enjoyed! 🙂 

What do you think about this little segment? Thoughts and suggestions?

Valentine’s Day Finale a la Pinterest/Music Obsessions! :)

I’m still taking in how we’re halfway into February already! I don’t usually do much for Valentine’s but it does give me this awesome excuse to sit around and watch lots of romantic comedies.  This year’s marathon will be updated and you can check out the complete list of reviews in the menu under movie.

Usually, I do these special posts and piano covers.  I’ve been extremely lazy at those because it takes time to practice and record over and over and over again in the middle of the night when its all quiet and then have to upload and all that stuff.  So none of that, I’ve put together a Pinterest therapy crossed over with Music Obsessions post Valentine themed!

Strawberries and Cream Heart Cake

Pink Chocolate Berry Oreo

There you go! A little mix of some cute love quotes and Valentine’s baking choices.  I have to actually do those one day.  AND… a ton of music obsessions 🙂 If you like any of the Pinterest stuff, just click on the picture and it’ll go straight to the link.

Hope you all had a fantastic Valentine’s Day spent with your loved ones! 🙂

**Psst! For those reading this, the next week is going to be Academy Awards/Oscars week.  I’ll be watching as many movies as I can nominated in various categories.  I’m not sure how many best picture ones I’ll get in but any ones nominated, I’ll try to see what I can get access to 🙂 Remember to drop by again!**

LOVE YOU ALL! STAY AWESOME! xoxo

Pinterest Therapy!

Its been a while since I’ve had Pinterest Therapy.

Today has been a horrible day completely out of proportion.  Maybe its because NaNoWriMo has really killed me.  I apparently don’t get inspired till about 11pm at night and even after 2 hours of writing, then its 1am and then sleeping only a little bit and heading to work is kind of crazy.  Along with that, work has been a basketful (more like a shipping container full) of crazy. I’m ready for vacation right now, but already used those up.  Well, with nothing much else to do about it.  I figured a Pinterest Therapy session would be good.  Especially since I’ve been spending a lot of time there of late 🙂

1) Ultimate Cuteness Overload

Nothing starts off a good Pinterest session like some cute animals and this is oodles of it 🙂 I’m already smiling a lot just going “Awwww…” over and over again.

2) Tulips in a Vase

Did I just blow your mind with this? I love pretty flowers.  Spring bulbs are absolutely fantastic.  I’m thinking about spring while autumn is here because it gets me a step closer to warmer weather next year.  Imagine planting bulbs inside? That idea makes me excited 🙂 Plus, I just bought a bunch of ’em and couldn’t find enough space in the garden to plant them all. Next project idea 🙂

3) Spaghetti Squash Pad Thai

Its a pity that the link for this doesn’t work anymore.  But still, thats a pretty awesome idea.  I’d use spaghetti squash as actual pasta replacement but vermicelli is actually noodles of sorts so spaghetti squash is a great choice to replace it.  Maybe I’ll try it out one day 🙂 First things first, let me attempt to make a normal pad thai first.

Whats a little pinterest with some food, right?

And you know whats coming up next, do ya?

4) North Pole Cupcakes

You got it! Whats dinner without dessert?  I’m  compiling my Christmas baking stuff.  I seriously miss baking A LOT! I haven’t baked in so long.  I’m starting to question my baking capabilities when I look at a recipe.  But its my absolute peace of mind.  When I bake, everything vanishes.  All my problems just go poof! Life is just so beautiful.

What are your must-have Christmas baked goods?

5) DIY Christmas Ornaments

A new home means a lot of new stuff.  Sure, we got a lot of hand me downs. But my boyfriend and I are massive Christmas people.  We love the holiday and we’re getting into the mood by already purchasing our Christmas tree 2 weeks ago. With a big tree, we got very little hand me down ornaments so I’m on a mission to make all my decorations.  I bought a lot of plain baubles to decorate. I’ve done it as two gifts for family.  Now its time to do it for my own home. Pinterest has lots of cute ideas and I’m pretty excited to start working on it 🙂

6) Quotes: Fairy Tales & Creating our sunshine

Nothing like ending Pinterest with some inspirational quotes.  Fairy tales, love them!

Second quote reminds me of this post.  This is one of my ways of creating my own sunshine 🙂

I’m definitely feeling oodles better now!

What are you pinning? 

Happy Wednesday, my lovelies! 🙂

Pinterest Therapy #2!

Let’s have some fun, ok?

I’ve been in desperate need of some Pinterest Therapy and honestly, it gets me through my day just a little bit more.  If I can try out half of these things this year, I’d be pretty pleased with myself 😉

I kept my little rant at the end of the post to just clear some stuff off my chest so its up to you if you want to read it or not.

Here you go! These little things have kept me sane in the past 2 weeks or so.

1) Spring Sangria 

Tea usually is my relaxant and thats why I usually have two thermos that I take to the office with me.  But when I’m at home, nearing the weekend, having a glass of alcohol usually helps. I love Sangria.  I love the normal red sangria during the summer and the white Autumn Sangria. I recently saw this Spring Sangria.  I know spring is kind of almost gone but this looks pretty awesome.

Whats your favorite cocktail?

2) Live in the Moment

That was this week’s goal.  For the most part, I’ve been able to remind myself to breathe and to focus on the goals every single day leading to the final result. One of my coworkers did get a good laugh when I sat upright and said breathe out loud and then inhaled and exhaled in the middle of the day.  At least its not only relaxing for me but entertaining for others, right? 😉 In short, this is where I remember what my boyfriend tells me: take things in steps and don’t look at the entire mountain. No correlation but I get what he means.

3) DIY Bug Off Candle/Mosquito Control Plants

DIY Bug Off Candle

I never thought I’d say this but gardening has been my little escape.  Stressful as it is that I’m trying to get everything done, its also a pretty fun experience. Right now, I bought some torches and citronella oil for the yard but I’m looking at how to have some more natural mosquito repellents.  Because of the pool, its like I became a buffet when I step out at night. And let me get something straight: I’m nobody’s buffet. So first choice was this: Bug off candles with lots of herbs and whatnot.

4) Stress vs. passion

Technically I can work for something I don’t care about but if I find something that makes me care about it, then I may not love it but I won’t hate it.  Is that still called stress? I don’t know.  Either way, the dream is to one day do what I’m passionate about. Thats the goal, right? But then, who doesn’t have that dream.  I sometimes think I lean towards my realistic side more than my dreamer side.  Its being able to take that leap of faith but reading that makes me want to go home and either watch a movie or play the piano or bake a cake.  Happy thoughts 🙂

5) RAISED GARDENS/CONTAINER GARDENING

Yeah, more about the garden.  Thats what happens when you buy a house (my mom told me that).  I’m really into this container gardening business.  This is just a raised garden and I’m serious when I tell you, I hope my boyfriend reads this and builds this for me.  That looks so awesome! Would be perfect for what I need. And from what I understood, the previous owners left us a bunch of wood in the storage area.  Maybe it could be used for my benefit. Well, if the garden has stuff, its not just mine now, is it?

6) True Friends

It always makes me a loner when I say this but I don’t have a lot of friends but I have true friends and strong friendships.  I know they are there for me and for some them, sometimes they know exactly when to reach out to me and same for me to them.  And that thought makes me grateful and happy every single day.

7) Butterfly Sanctuary

Noted, Disney! I love flowers and butterflies so its a future goal for my garden 🙂 Think about how awesome that would be! You have birds and squirrels visits you? Well, I have butterflies 😉 Just kidding! Its also pretty awesome that this festival exists and one day I want to go check it out.

8) Regrowing plants from scraps

Yesterday, I went to eat with my friends and I realized that the joy that comes with gardening comes a lot in the challenge of seeing your success when something sprouts.  So my next little project is regrowing from food scraps like the tops of pineapples and try my hand at some ginger or garlic and maybe some bok choy.

9) The Beauty of Silence

Yup, Chinese has a saying that one hand can’t clap out loud.  Pretty much if you don’t reciprocate, it won’t escalate to an argument.  But of course, some people will just get frustrated and be even more furious.  I don’t know.  Either way, there are times I just choose to answer with silence just simply because there are no more words to say and I refuse to continue going in circles. I’ve moved on, why haven’t you? Thats all I want to know.

10) What does it take to be strong?

Totally true. Which is why after this craziness, I’m taking off some time to calm my body and think up some wonderful alternative to how I’m treating life itself.  I’ll be walking away from the nonsense hopefully but at this point I’m not even sure if its with my head held high.  I’m just too tired 😉

A Little Extra Rant Before I Go…

You know that feeling that you’ve done all you can to make things better and ease the situation and yet, its never enough. I use kind words and soft phrases and they use rude blunt disrespectful replies. There are no second chances, there are no mistakes. Suddenly, I realized that the prerequisite in taking care of this client is to be perfect.  I can’t even try to be perfect because its not enough.  I’m sorry, I’m done with this.  I’m not perfect and I’ve accepted that.  I’ve tried my best to better my flaws and I’ve done all I could but if the client can’t let go of the little things, then I’m also done with it.

I don’t need someone like that to diminish my self-worth or to disrespect me. I’ve sat here and pondered how to make this work because I don’t want to give up, especially not leave my boss in a bad position.

Finally!

This Pinterest therapy helped me out! And now, off to work I go for some lovely overtime.

Have a great weekend, my lovelies! 🙂

Daily Prompt: Pick Me Up

Daily Prompt (May 6, 2014): What is the one word or phrase that immediately cheers you up when you hear it?

Its been a tough week at work with  my coworker and my boss both on vacation with a lot of loose ends to tie up at my office and then problems always float in during these times.

My go-to pick me up , other than chick flicks and TV are always in the form of Dr. Seuss.

As silly as that sounds, Dr. Seuss has brought on an immense amount of joy in my life 🙂 I can sit down and read myself one (or more) of his stories out loud and it’ll just soothe my mind.

Life just gets so much better and more positive.

Here’s a few:

Maybe its the childhood innocence and maybe its better to be simple and know the value of yourself and the people that matter to you or its just the immense positive vibes that emit from the work of Dr. Seuss.  Whatever the reason, this always works for me. 🙂

What word or phrase picks you up?

 

Daily Prompts: Normal/Might As Well Jump

Calm down! I’m not going to do anything stupid!

I will do a double feature for the Daily Prompts.  I need a little break from movie reviews today but it will resume tomorrow.  Its been a bit of the worrisome and stressful days for me and I’m thinking maybe (even more) writing will do me some good.

Daily Prompt (last week’s): Is being “normal” — whatever that means to you — a good thing, or a bad thing? Neither? Photographers, artists, poets: show us EVERYDAY.

For the photographers showing everyday, I did two challenges in the past year in regards to that.  One is a Weekly photo challenge for Everyday life back in September 2012 (click HERE to see it) and one is the phoneography challenge from earlier this year (HERE).  Both reflect my everyday normal life very much!

Being “normal” is a great thing most of the time but how many of us really believe that we are?  Maybe compared to others such as friends, families, acquaintances, we may not feel normal because of our differences.  Most days, especially in movie discussions, I think I’m just plain weird.  I like weird things and feel like I have a abnormal lifestyle, especially after I had my health issues. Normal to me is the way we live life, the everybodies of the society.  We are all different but our normal is our routine.  No day is exactly the same and its the little things  you see, experience and breath and live through, big or little that make each and every day worth it and appreciated.  Living in the moment or just being grateful for what we have.  We do that when we are being normal.

Normal will seem like being average.  Is that really a bad thing though? There will always be times when reality slaps us in the face with the substantial need for certain things to progress and succeed (whatever that is) linked to money but if we had everything, then where is the satisfaction of earning your first little gadget.  I remembered saving up for my Nintendo DS Lite, my first ever console that I owned.  Its falling apart now but still I don’t want to give it up till I have to.  Treasuring what we have and not thinking about all we don’t have.

Being normal lets me enjoy my family, my loved ones, my pets, the nature every single day with a smile on my face 🙂

Whats wrong with being normal? We can still be awesome in our own way and see even more wonderful things in the process plus we get to realize how lucky we are.

Tuesday’s Daily Prompt: What’s the biggest risk you’d like to take — but haven’t been able to? What would have to happen to make you comfortable taking it? Photographers, artists, poets: show us JUMP.

Risk…

I’m not really a person to associate with risk.  Thats one of the reasons I learned early on in my university that finance wasn’t really my thing so I switched out into another field in business school.  Even now, when helping manage investments, I get worried.  I like to associate life with being safe and stable.  Its the feeling of security.  Having oodles of money never really made me feel that it was going to make me feel secure, so I guess thats not it.

I’ve been talking about starting a business eventually.  Its one of my lifelong dreams to eventually be able to do that.  To take that risk at some point in my life would mean that I would have a portion of dispensable cash that I can put in.  That would possibly be the choice of the biggest risk.  At this point, its finding the business (well, I have an idea of what I want to do) and the start-up money.  However, when I do get the opportunity, starting a business is still a huge risk.  Its putting a lot of things in life on the line.  What would have to happy to make it comfortable for me to take it would be to feel confident that I could do a good job.  I know I have perseverance and I know that I will stay motivated to succeed once I step out of my comfort zone and then readapt to a new comfort zone.  Does that even make any sense?

Thats my risk that I’ve been holding back on.

We all can dream and one day step out to try it out when the time is right.  We all make decisions and take some sizeable amount of risks in life.  We never can see whats ahead of us and just living life and making those lifelong decisions is a risk with unknown outcomes.  Sometimes, we really might as well jump…

Talking about that, life has taken me and my boyfriend into one of those paths due to our jobs.  Let’s hope this change will be for the better.  We’re sizing up the positives and managing with what we have.  Taking it day by day! One day, we will get to where we want to be in the future as long as we work together!  Just as he has chosen to make changes and take risks to get us closer to our goals, I’m hard at work both mentally and physically to get everything together in my life.

Great things are ahead! At least we can work as hard as we can to try to make it that way! 🙂

Dr. Seuss rules! Brings me confidence and encouragement and happiness! 🙂

On the side note, does being risky make me not normal anymore? I think its normal, no? Whats “normal” to you? Whats the biggest risk you haven’t taken yet?