My Weekly Adventures #66

Welcome back to another two weeks! We’re getting closer to summer now and the weather is getting hot and humid!

Lots of stuff’s been going on as I look back at the past two weeks with multiple day trips and gardening updates and so much  more. One of the biggest weekends of the year for gaming and of course, Game Warp is just around the corner so I can imagine the next Weekly Adventures might be just a disaster of almost nothing (since Grand Prix weekend is also that same weekend).

Let’s take a look at what’s been up in the last 2 weeks!

Movies and Tea in Full Swing

Movies and Tea Podcast is in full swing this month. Elwood and I have been in quite a groove as we dive further in Paul W.S. Anderson films. After the Event Horizon show at the beginning of the month, we dove into Soldier, featuring Kurt Russell which also saw us joining into our first blogathon held by Return to the 80s and RealWeegieMidget Reviews as well!

Following that, we just released our mega episode taking a trip down the Resident Evil franchise as we take a look at the 6 films!

Take a listen and give us your thoughts over at our blog where we also have each of our takes on each of the films that we review in the podcast. Check us out and give us a follow here.

Hiking on Victoria Day

View at the Observatory

You can see the full recap HERE.

Victoria Day in Canada is a lovely statutory holiday. My husband and I went for our first hike of the season. It was a lovely day and super awesome. We are having some great hiking plans of going out to hike at least twice a month. I truly hope that it’ll work out. Next on the to-do list is to get some new hiking shoes. Doing some research on what to get right now.

Cinema Recall Guest

You can find the episode right HERE.

If you didn’t know, we had a mega That Moment In podcast network gathering organized by The Vern, the host of Cinema Recall. We sat down in our different time zones at all hours of the day to record this mega episode sharing our movie firsts: the scariest, the saddest and the sexiest. The choices were fantastically diverse and it was a ton of fun to sit down to everyone! Its awesome! Hopefully we will be gathering for another meeting eventually.

Ottawa Day Trip

Last weekend was the Ottawa Marathon. I usually would go down with my friend but with my husband’s change in work schedule, we ended up just going down to visit and hang out with him. We did a little bit of a haul HERE. It was a lot of fun. We had some food at Shanghai 360, a fast food restaurant in Rideau Centre. I really love this place and eat here almost every time I go to Ottawa. It was a great trip nonetheless. We had fun walking around and shopping. We took care of some business since my engagement ring needed to be fixed and I had bought it down in Ottawa. Anyways, I’ll be heading back there eventually to pick it up and maybe then I’ll take my husband to check out the diner and explore Byward Market which we ran out of time this time.

Dentist Update

Last time I talked about my overdue dentist appointment. Well, I went for my second cavity filling session. The dentist decided for my own good to split the original session into two visits. Let me tell you that at this current moment and even when I was going home and that evening, I was ever so happy with that choice because the anesthesia took forever (like 4 hours) to go away and then my jaw feels like there is a bruise on it. Not sure why.

Cute Kitty Pic

When the heat hits us, my cat looks at me meows and then lies down. Not sure if its protest or just enjoying the cool floor.

That’s it for these two weeks!
I’ve had lots of things from hauls to garden updates and a ton of movie reviews, TV binge and just an assortment of stuff. 
What have you been up to?

Ottawa 2018 Haul!

Hey everyone!

Sorry for the radio silence yesterday and well…today as well, I guess! Its been a bit of taking time off every week to sort out my own stuff. Usually, this weekend is when my friend has his Ottawa half marathon and I tag along to help him out. However, this year, I opted out of this duty. Instead, my husband and I both went down to Ottawa to hang out for a little today before his first race for the 5 km. Its humid and a little rainy and well, the sun has arrived back in Montreal but not sure how its doing in Ottawa since I’m home as I’m typing this.

The trip came with a lot of stuff on the to-do list. Yes, I shop with to-do lists if not, I might end up going crazy and just buy everything or sit there and be indecisiveness. Shopping with a goal is what my husband calls it. With that said, we had an idea of what places to hit at Rideau Center and Ottawa before heading back home. This is as timely as this post can get because we just unloaded and I took pictures and here we are!

Rideau Centre 

Eddie Bauer

Marathon weekend is always sales weekend for Eddie Bauer. Normally, Eddie Bauer’s stuff is expensive and usually rightfully so because its very durable especially for the hiking lovers like me and my husband. However, the only time we buy it is during sale time or else it would just be way out of budget. This year was a 40% off on everything in store. We both wanted to get new caps and new hiking pants. I got the blue capris and the blue cap and he got the beige pants that can be changed to shorts and the lighter color cap.

Disney Store

For those who don’t know, I collect Disney plushies. I had stopped the actual normal sized plushies for a while and was trying to get all the Animator series ones which are much more reasonable in storage. Regardless of that, when I see one that I like, I always tend to pick it up. I’m actually planning on keeping track of my collection over on Avenue of Daydreams some time this year. It would be fun to have an archive of the many things I collect and that seemed like a nice place to do it. Either way, Flower from Bambi was on sale so I picked it up. At the same time, I also saw little Piglet as well. I have a Tigger which is in the same style. These two were definitely coming home with me.

Squish Candy

Last year I had gone to Squish and got the Prosecco Bears and they were super delicious. They expanded their cocktail line and this time, my husband chose the Bourbon Cubes ans Sake Sakura and I chose the Wine O’Clock. I’m hoping that these will turn out to be equally delicious. They had a few other ones with sangria and such and those definitely has peaked my interest but for another time.

LCBO

Embracing the love of trying out VQA Ontario wines, LCBO was a must-go. I found a Riesling to try out eventually and my husband’s colleague had recommended the Big House Pinot Grigio and we saw it so we ended up picking up the bottle and he wanted to also get the can version. As for myself, I also saw another Cider from Brickworks Ciderhouse. I had tried another one earlier this year and was really impressed so having some high hopes for this one also.

Second Stop: T&T Supermarket

I mean, I’m pretty much thinking about groceries all the time so T&T Supermarket is always one of my stops. I don’t usually post about it but this time, we had some interesting finds. The herbal drinks from Hung Fook Tong had a new flavor. My husband picked out the Orange Ramune soda drink. I always get some dimsum, which I did but ended up eating on the trip back so not shown here. But there is also some pot stickers and vietnamese chicken lunch box and some BBQ Pork. The main goal this time was to get some sticky rice for the Dragonboat Festival. They had fresh ones which would be preferable if I had gone 2 weeks later but for now, I got the frozen in case I don’t end up going. However, the snacks we picked (and saw) were quite unique to say the least. Lay’s had these cucumber chips (and they also had lime flavor). I wonder if its an excuse to feel like you were being healthier when making that choice. Then we saw these Potato Wish brand which had the Steak and Red Wine Flavor and well, it looks like Ringolos but they are called Roller Coaster.

That’s it for the haul!
Nothing too special but a few unique finds!

Hope you are enjoying your weekend!

My Weekly Adventures!

Its been a month since I’ve posted my weekly adventures. That is mostly because the past month didn’t have much happening (actually there was…). It was really Fantasia Film Festival and Just for Laughs Festival. BUT, I have a few things to update in the general situation and a few little questions to ask you or some little suggestions that I have. I wanted to do a vlog style thing (yet again) but I just got a little shy and the perfectionist thought it was too much rambling to put up.

I have a vlog planned soon though. Expanding my YouTube channel is something I’m thinking about just for the fun of it. We’ll see what I come up with. 🙂 I have a lot of stuff that I’ve been thinking about. To be fair, I’m heading into six years of blogging and I think some bigger changes are in order. Fear not, domain is set to be for 2017 as I settle a few other things here and give myself time to make some well thought out decisions.

Enough rambling!

Fantasia International Film Festival

This year’s Fantasia Festival was amazing. It celebrated their 25th anniversary and totally in style. There were some huge guests there like Guillermo Del Toro and Takashi Miike. Obviously, those sold out in a flash. Guilllermo Del Toro’s master class after the documentary was the reason my first movie started late. That doesn’t matter because all the movies I saw were really awesome. I mean, sure some had a little flaw here and there but they had a lot of style and passion and heart. So much heart! You could hear it in the Q&As and the audience and the film watching experience, particularly for Lights Out and Don’t Breathe was awesome. Then, there was also Christopher Lloyd which had the most honorable standing ovation ever that I’ve been to any of these Q&As.

Here is the list of Fantasia Films linked to their reviews in case you want to check it out! They are all spoiler-free!

Rupture
The Unseen
Lights Out
We Go On
Kidnap Capital
Train to Busan
Before I Wake
Bed of the Dead
I Am Not a Serial Killer
Don’t Breathe

Also, don’t ask me which was my fave. I wanted to do it in a 1-10 and I just can’t decide. There’s so many factors: pros and cons, hype, enthusiasm, the Q&A, etc.

Just For Laughs Festival

I had thought that I had posted about this. But I didn’t. And of course, I went ahead and accidentally deleted most of the food pictures which I had wanted to post about. It is really just for street food. There was lots of delicious stuff. If you ever drop by for food trucks and you like lobster rolls, go to Lucille’s. They are the best! However, there is a shot of the Tapas 24 booth making their paella on spot above. That was really good.

Game Warp & Twitch Stream

There really is no other place to talk about Game Warp other than here. Game Warp isn’t exactly here because its part of That Moment In. However, while many of you might not be particularly interested in this, its kind of like a baby of mine. I enjoy doing so much for it and its been a while that I’ve felt this enthusiastic about something. Maybe its the change of pace that has me hooked. For the first time, I’m feeling that awesomeness of doing something that I’m extremely passionate about that I lose track of time. On top of that, its making me break out of my shy shell and go out to conventions and meet people. The last podcast was an interview with the co-founder of Maitop Games which has this cool puzzle adventure mobile game called Bomb Conflict.

And recently, we’ve been working on streaming more. I tend to stream on the weekends of all sorts of games. Mostly, its the featured game of the month or its a Playstation Plus free game. Right now, its mostly a binge of Song of the Deep and Furi. To be honest, Furi has me challenged, frustrated but stubbornly continuing on. I have no idea why some people sat and watched my horrible gaming skills but hey, I guess its the improvement, right? Who knows. If you like watching games or just having some background noise of game music or story or whatnot (since I don’t do commentary, still debating whether to), drop by and hang out. I try to play games where I can interact in chat as well. My Twitch account is like here: Twitch.tv/tranquildreams

New Gadget: Luuup Litterbox

I feel like there are enough people out there doing product reviews so I’m just going to say that I backed this Kickstarter project earlier this year for Luuup Litterbox which is pretty much a litterbox which makes the whole scooping process much easier. The design is that there are three traps which interlock and instead of scooping, you lift up the top level where the litter that isn’t clumped will fall through and you can wipe it down if its dirty, which we usually do, and slide in the bottom to interlock again. It makes it quite a lot easier and less of a hassle to put into the trash bag. It might seem silly to invest in convenience of a litter box but I thought this was worth it.

Garden Update: The Start of Harvests

Look at this! Harvests are coming in! Broccoli is starting to form. Cucumbers are here as well as my single eggplant. We harvested kale as well but we didn’t take any pictures and its already cooked and eaten.

Dreamhack Montreal 2016

Thanks to my interview of Maitop Games mentioned above, they asked me whether I would be going to Dreamhack, an event that completely went over my head. I immediately looked at the info. While esports, tournaments and LAN party isn’t exactly my thing (maybe it will one day), there is an indie game zone and I took a quick look and a lot of the studios there are new to me and their games looked really intriguing so I went right ahead to buy a ticket for Friday. I went after work and stayed for a few hours.

I spent most of my time in this area, walking about the few booths, waiting for some of them to open up so that I could either talk about the game or try it out. This picture is before I left so the crowd thinned out quite a bit. Most of the people still there were staying overnight for the overnight gaming probably. I’ll have a full coverage of what games I tried out over at That Moment In. Like I said before, gaming isn’t the focus here and its only an avenue of showcasing it here because its part of what I do now. There’s a lot of stuff to see from on-stage friendly battles and broadcasts of retro games and Starcraft 2 tournament (which was livestreaming on Twitch via Dreamhack). And of course, some shots of the gaming gear booths and the actual BYOC crowd there to play games.

I’ll be doing a post next week some time on the general coverage of just the venue.

Ottawa & Rideau Centre Extension Opening

Okay okay, lets be honest. People went crazy apparently over the opening of H&M in the extension but I went for the Disney Store! They had a sweet deal on the plush. I’m not supposed to get another one and it was like the second one at $5 so I split it with my friend who got a BB-8. Then I saw that mug while I was lining up to leave. I really like the concept of the animator’s version of the princesses highlighted at the store. The plush themselves didn’t quite appeal to me for the princess but I’ve NEVER seen the Beauty and the Beast plushes anywhere so I ended up getting Beast. Why? Because if I got Mrs. Potts and Chip, I can’t split them up, same goes for Cogsworth and Lumiere and I didn’t want to get two plushes. I have no idea where to put Beast right now so he’s kind of just hanging out on my bookshelf in the office.

Upcoming: 

• Book reviews
• Netflix A-Z
• Dreamhack Montreal Recap
• Vlog, Movie Reviews, Baking Through Disney (maybe…)

That was my month!! It was tons of fun!
What have you been up to?