And now…What’s up for 2014 here?

Yesterday, I posted up my personal New Year’s Goals HERE!  I don’t usually document most of those goals on my blog so, before I update my About page, this is whats going to go on here regarding goals for the new year! I’ll probably figure some spontaneous stuff as the year rolls on but for now, I put a lot of thinking and made some decisions.  Of course, I’d also love to hear your opinion on it 🙂

Let’s start with the stuff that will stay from 2013!

1) MOVIES!

Shitfest 2013

Movie reviews, participating in blogathons and the whole thing has really increased in the past year.  I’d even go so far as to say that it probably was the most grown part in the past year.  Writing reviews really takes a lot of time for me and I’m still finding a good balance as of how to really review movies.  BUT, I’ll do what I did last year and review what I’ve seen.  I will try my best to make it to the theatres more but I will also buy less movies and watch more on Netflix! 🙂

Aside from that, we’re looking at the same marathons going on like below:

January: Catching up with as many 2013 movies as possible (with some other older ones as well)

February 1-14: Valentine’s marathon (I already have a general plan for this)

March & August: Recommendation month (check out THIS post if you’re wondering what that is)

July: Fantasia Festival 2014

September: TIFF 2014 (I’ll try my best to make it there)

October: Halloween marathon

December: Christmas/holiday/winter marathon

I have a few months just to do some random movie viewing and I’m aiming to take it easy in general.  Nothing like daily movie reviews because that can get tiring so I’ll try for 2-3 movie reviews a week.

Any other suggestions? Marathons? Recommendations (if not I’ll take suggestions given to me over the course of last year in the comments)? 

2) Baking & Cooking

Hamburger cupcakes!

For the most part, baking is my passion.  Seeing as my goal is to improve on the appearances and decorations of my baked goods, I’m going to do a little cupcake project.  Maybe I’ll put themes to them or whatnot.  I haven’t worked out the details but I did get Betty Crocker’s Big Book of Cupcakes so I’m aiming for a little bit fancier desserts. How does Cupcake project sound?

As for cooking, I’m sorry to say that Bite of China Project was something I really couldn’t get going.  However, I do have plans with my best friend to revive it once she feels like she’s ready to blog in her life.  So, maybe I’ll open a blog with her some time down the road the bring the project up to pace.  I’m disappointed in myself for not being able to do that BUT, this year, I had thought about taking down cooking entirely but the last while of using healthier foods and substitutes for a healthier eating lifestyle, has really made me excited about cooking again.  So I’m thinking of making that into an official thing.

What do you think? Should cooking stay and exploring healthy foods/vegetables, etc? Look into healthier substitutes and that sort of thing? 

I’m aiming to get at least one recipe up every week and gradually increase to 2 or 3 as my priorities drop a bit.

3) BOOKS

Sadly, this is the one that I’ve been thinking of cutting out.  However, in the light that I don’t want to really cut it out completely, in 2014, I’m going to do small reviews  on monthly basis.  The only ones that are going to take full reviews will be when its for books written by bloggers.  Some of the best books I read this year were written by these authors.  If you do want to see more of what I’m reading, just search me up on Goodreads or drop me and email and I’ll add you 🙂

My goal is to read 40 books this year as per the Goodreads Reading Challenge.  I might change it to 35…depending on how crazy life gets 🙂 Still, not writing full on reviews will make life a lot easier.

4) WEEKLY WORKOUT ROUNDUPS

I’m not sure how many of you actually find this motivating.  This is more of a personal thing.  It gives me the illusion that I have people watching my progress so I keep going and pushing hard.  So, my plan is to stop once I reach Week 52.  However, if this does motivate this, I’d gladly keep doing it but on monthly basis, which I actually think is a pretty good idea.  Its something I’m thinking about 🙂 I’m at Week 43 right now so there is only 10 more posts to go up.  However, if you do want to join me in my quest, you could always follow me on Tribesports 🙂 It’ll be fun! If not, my workouts go directly to my Twitter feed as well.

5) TRAVEL/WRITING/DAILY PROMPT/PHOTO CHALLENGES

Other than Photo Challenges, everything else is something of a part time thing here.  I like to do it but I don’t travel all the time; I don’t do creative writing because I think I write bad and daily prompts are really when I’m inspired by the topic.  First off, I’ll try my best to keep up with Weekly Photo Challenge and A Word A Week Challenge.  I know that I’ve slacked off a bit at the end of the year but I’m ready to do well. I have a side goal to improve my photography skills and get to know my DSLR camera better. 🙂

Do you want to see more creative writing or daily prompts here? 

6) PERSONAL/VLOG/PIANO COVERS & MONTREAL EVENTS

Boyce Avenue Concert

The last section is also some new stuff I’ve implemented in 2013. Montreal Events and possibly just events around me that I go to, I’ll see cover all those things.  Its fun and I do it already.

BUT, my big question is whether you all would like to see more vlogs, piano covers and my personal posts (mostly about staying positive and stuff related to that)? How about my expanding the TV series and music obsessions? Do you like those segments? Which would you like to see more out of these?

OVERALL!

This has been a really long post, or it felt that way because it took me a span of hours to get it all down. I’d love to hear your opinion on where I want this to go. Is there something you drop by to check out? Is there something I did rarely but you want to see more of? Help me out by answering some of my questions?

Please leave me a comment, tweet, email (if you’re shy).  I’d really love to hear from you 🙂

Thanks for everything! I’ll be updating my menu and my side bar widgets this week to keep this organized a bit more.

Let’s play! My cat’s way of welcoming the New Year!

Now that this business is pretty much out of the way, I have reviews and photo challenges lined up for the rest of the week! Final note, I felt last year was a bit crazy, hence the chopping off or slowing down of certain segments and also, I was going at 2 posts a day but I’m going to gradually drop down to a post a day and maybe just round up to about 7-8 posts a week.  I’m trying to find a decent balance to match with my personal goals and not overload on stress 🙂

Extra: Workout Roundup Updates!

I usually only post once a week to track my weekly progress.  I will still do that with selfies but I have just decided to take the 30 Day Fitness Challenges by Tribesports.  There is currently 11 different 30 day challenges targeting different areas of the body.  I might try to post updates but with that 30 Day Challenge in progress, maybe I’ll just do some Twitter updates.  I will definitely check back at the end of 30 days to tell you if I succeeded or failed.  Well, if I come back sooner, probably means I lost track and need to restart…

NO! NO! Positive energy has to stick around!!

Here’s what I’m starting with:

30 Day Squat Challenge!

I’d feel ridiculous if I just did 50 squats on one day so I decided to pair it up with 30 Day Arm Challenge!

30 Day Arm Challenge

I can tell you after the first two days.  Those 250 squats end goal looks quite far.  BUT those pushups look even farther, even unattainable. My boyfriend told me that I have to work the muscles that I dread because they are weaker and the aftermath just hurts more. Here’s my chance, right?

I’m already saying this, if it gets too crazy, I will stop one challenge mid month.  My bet is the arms because I probably need some extra training first.  I’m just giving this two challenges at once a shot.  I will definitely finish one! If I do quit one before, I probably will try to start another challenge on a stronger part of my body while I strengthen my upper body more 🙂 Sounds like a good plan? I think so…

I can tell you this also.  With this, I will definitely try to get in more cardio since it’ll leave me more time to do that with shorter workouts 🙂

NO EXCUSES! I CAN DO THIS!

All of you are my witness now! I’m dedicating to do this challenges which means at least 11 months, whether consecutive or not, I’m not sure, but I will do it 🙂 I’ll be back with an update post on October 1st!

Anyone want to join my craziness? 🙂

Weekly Writing Challenge: Wrap it Up

Wrap it Up is this week’s Writing Challenge.  If you’d like to join or see more entries, please visit them HERE.

Initially, I was going to do this (and had already drafted the beginning of this for the end of the year) to be posted right before New Year’s came by.  But since,  it was brought up in this week’s writing challenge, I don’t think there would be much of a difference anyways.  We’re going to look at stats of 2012, because its been an AMAZING year here.  I’ve commented or “talked” to a lot of people that I’d love to call as my friends on this blogosphere.  Many of you have opened my eyes, some have given me a lot of laughs to get me through the stressful, boring, long days, others have introduced me to movies of all genres.  Its been a fun year running around here.

I started this year, changing my old blogging ways and kicking it up.  I started getting more involved and gradually, things did move uphill.

To wrap up the year, I’m going to do some stats and small facts:

1) Followers (only on WordPress, not other social networks):

2011: 2 –> 2012: 204

2) Views (annual totals)

2011: 673 –> 2012: 6,394

3) In October, I finally beat my highest daily views of 31 from January 19th, the first day I started on WordPress officially and now, my highest daily views is at 142.

4) Since February 2012, viewers from 88 different countries have visited.  Some of them, my common knowledge does not even know where they are exactly on the globe.  Time to polish up on my world geography!

5) As of late October, I’ve been working hard to expand myself on Twitter and understand how the whole tweeting works.  If anyone has crash courses or tips, please tell me.  Most days I stare at the feeds and wonder how people write all these awesome messages with multiple # and @.

6) I have gone from posting weekly in the beginning of the year and to mid year 2-3 times a week and now I try to post at least daily.

7) Comments:

2011: 0 (around there) –>2012: 824

8) All-time Views: 7,072 (as at 1:09am EST Dec 21, 2012)

9) One of the search engine terms was “Kim (klling) @ Tranquil dreams”.  Isn’t that amazing?

10) This post will be my 257th.  Pretty good, right?

EXTRA: I received 2 awards this year: One Lovely Blog Award and Beautiful Blogger, and a few days ago when I started writing this draft, I had received a 3rd award, which I will post up soon.

It was hard to come up with all that information about my blog.  I realized how much info the stats section provided. Now with just a bit more.  I’d like to introduce you to  my 10 most popular posts in 2012.  Maybe you didn’t follow me back when they were up, feel free to click on the links and take a look.

1. Who, What, When, Where, Why…The Last

2. Pumpkin Inferno

3. About Tranquil Dreams

4. A Word A Week Challenge: Love

5. A Word A Week Challenge: Journey

6. Christmas in Hong Kong

7. When Is It Okay…

8. My FIRST: One Lovely Blog Award Nomination

9. A Word A Week Challenge: Celebration

10. Thanksgiving Dinner: Honey Garlic Chicken Thighs

Looking at this list, I learned quite a bit about this and what is a good focus for my blog.  I’m surprised at how many people did read my About page.  I actually change it every few months to keep things up to date.  As for A Word A Week Challenge, Sue over at A Word in Your Ear has reblogged the three challenges there and is probably the reason my view count was increased.  A huge THANKS for everyone who has reblogged one of my posts and a huge THANKS for just taking a moment to like and/or comment.  It means a lot that you like what I posted up.

I should wrap it up for real, its getting a bit lengthy.  Since this was posted up earlier, I have decided to give you a view of what to expect in 2013.  I have a few long-term projects I plan on working on, just have a few more details to work out to make it my own original one.  Choices and decisions on the final direction.  You can call them goals or whatnot, but it will open up more segments and over the holidays, I plan on changing the layout (and maybe the theme) to make it easier to navigate.

If there are any comments on my current layout or something you want to see more on the blog or to keep on doing or doing more frequently, feel free to contact me by email at kim.tranquildreams@gmail.com or send me a tweet or leave a comment below. Its fun to get to know all of you and what you think.  Don’t be shy!