My August 2019 Adventures

Its been bothering me a while on how to change up these adventure posts because they are no longer weekly and I have no intention of making them weekly especially because biweekly collides a lot with the What’s Up already and there is some overlap there. So, the solution to it all is to just make it a monthly segments. It gives me time to get some of the recap posts together and also gives it a little more content to work with. This will be set for the last day of each month starting with this month’s recap of August!

Let’s get things started!

Fantasia Festival 2019 Wraps – Up (Aug 2)

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Its a wrap for @fantasiafestival 2019! Still have a few reviews to get out but here's everything that I saw (excluding shorts). #movies #fantasia2019 #film #indie #anime #horror #action #thriller #mtl #events #filmfest #fantasiafestival

A post shared by Kim (@tranquildreams) on Aug 1, 2019 at 2:49pm PDT

Every year’s Fantasia Festival is a more and more ambitious feat as I try to pile in as much as I can and work with as much of the stuff as I can. This year was a bit different. It was a lot more time at the festival as less screeners offered off site but there was the screening room that I took advantage of to get conflicting films watched and round out the schedule better. Other than some hiccups on Day 1 for myself getting the pass, things actually panned out pretty well. Tallying 24 films (as shown in Instagram post above) and 6 short films.

My Top 5 films of Fantasia would  probably go to :

• White Snake
• Daniel Isn’t Real
• Riot Girls
• Paradise Hills
• The Fable

Honorable Mentions: 1BR, Harpoon, Aquaslash

If you may have missed any of the reviews, you can find it all HERE.

Hiking: Parc National de Plaisance

Festival season is done so its time to get back to some hiking and taking advantage of the outdoors before winter hits us in a little while. Weather is already starting to cool down a smidge, at least in the mornings. We went for an easy hike to Parc National de Plaisance and to explore their boardwalk (which seems super new or just newly redone) over the marshlands. We totaled around 6.5 to 7 kilometres of walking.

You can check out the recap of it HERE.

Girls Day Out

Its been a busy summer for everyone so after a few months, me and my girl friends finally found time to meet up for an overdue get together to catch up on everything. We had brunch at Petino’s in La Prairie area and then went to do some cake shopping for a bride to be in our group then went to have a beautiful afternoon snack at Sugar Marmalade. I had the herbal jelly above which I’ve been craving for a while.

Finding More Non-Dairy Choices

I don’t always post about these new things I find at the grocery store usually but I think that some of these brands do deserve a nice little mention for going the non-dairy selections. The next to join the selection which I found is Magnum which has a very cool texture especially the ice cream is not as hard as the normal ice cream bars but feels like soft ice cream covered by rich Belgian chocolate. I liked these ones a lot. Its a bit more expensive than the Haagen Daz ones even on sale.

Toronto Weekend Getaway: Fan Expo Canada 2019

Fan Expo Canada was a 4 day event where we met up with my awesome blogathon co-host for our annual Toronto meet-up to check out this event for its 25th anniversary for Saturday and Sunday. Went to a ton of panels and didn’t have enough time to check out every thing and it was definitely an adventure. You can check out the recap HERE and the general trip shopping haul HERE.

Gardening Update

It feels like its been a while since I last talked about it (because I realized that I decided to do the format change at the beginning of August. Either way, I lost some plants (zucchini) and then some are doing quite well. We had some harvests. My mom who is the gardening expert came by while I was away at Fan Expo and told me that my garden needed to level up on the soil which has me thinking to raise up the sides of the garden a little and fill it with soil. Its something that has to be done since the wood around it are starting to rot and break apart. Lots of projects to deal with. Yet again, I have to reiterate the importance to not buying your house in the winter where there is heavy snow and you can’t see the condition of both the garden and the roof which the latter is 80% solved with the gutters still needing to be changed while the garden is a constant nuisance of crap to deal with. Either way, one step at a time and soon, we will get this house stuff settled once and for all.

Ending on a positive note, if there’s anything I’m proud of, its my flower garden which has really grown well. I just need to get some more mulch to cover it up properly and tend to some weeds but overall, it looks really nice and has a nice group of flowers and alternate in blooming season so the whole summer has been colorful.

Cute Kitty Pic

That’s it for this August adventures!
Its a new frequency but same format!
Hopefully you will enjoy it!

Ends, Beginnings and Everything in Between!

A lot to talk about this week.  Well, kind of! Lets just get straight to the 8 little bits and pieces 😉

1) End of Fantasia Film Festival 2014

I had a blast at Fantasia Film Festival this year. After 11 movies, I learned a lot about myself and the way I understood movies and just a lot about movies and their purposes in general. If you want to check my reviews, click on the menu and Movies, Festivals, Fantasia 😉

If not, here is the list of the movies and I’ll link it to the reviews I’ve done and update as it goes!

Fantasia Film Festival 2014

Open Windows
I Origins
Cybernatural
The Harvest
Jack et la Mecanique du Coeur
Hal/short: Sonny Boy and Dewdrop Girl
Into the Storm
Dys-/short: I am Monster
The Drownsman/short: Picket
Time Lapse
The Demon Within

I still have 1 movie to review for the festival.  They will be going up soon!

2) Resuming workout

There is nothing to say but that I’ve really taken a LONG break from working out.  I still go out to bike rides and did some jogging in between but I’m ready to get right back into it now.  This week, I got in two 20 minutes yoga sessions and some other activities which I’ll talk about in a little bit later of this post!  Here’s the awesome yoga sessions if you’re interested:

Starting next week, I should resume with the 4 weeks Nike Training Club program (if everything goes as planned), I might just boost up my strength with some random circuits first and start the week after!

3) Catching up with TV!

This week, I finished Season 7 of Psych.  Thanks to Netflix for updating it!

Psych has its up and down moments.  There are some episodes which are a bit meh.  I can’t really blame it since its at season 7 now.  However, compared to season 7, this totally rocked.  I particularly LOVED the season 7 finale. I’m going to try to find Season 8 now since thats the final season and I hate to keep these things hanging.

I also took the time this week to catch up on True Blood.  I like to watch them in bundles of episodes just so some stupid episode endings don’t bother me as much.  I was about 3 episodes behind so I sat down and took care of that. Its the series finale in just a few episodes and honestly, I’m still not quite sure if I like where everything is going.

My goal this little while is to keep up with True Blood and Pretty Little Liars, so next line of business will be to catch up with the last 3 episodes of that. I will be binge watching Season 1 of Arrow right after though 😉

What series have you been watching?

4) (Kind of) Secret Weekend Getaway!

My boyfriend and I went off on a weekend getaway this past weekend.  One of the reasons why I’ve been slightly quiet and well, I didn’t even bother to say anything because since we’re just a few hours up north, I had my cell that worked and its a little escape.  A few of my friends knew about it and our parents but in general, its just a little bit of a breather to recharge.

We did some hiking (a part of resuming my workout) and we did some visiting in Saguenay region in Quebec.  Its about a 5 hours drive or so away and we had a lot of fun.  I’ll be posting about the few places we went in the next week.

As much as we love buying a house together and spending every living moment making it ours, its nice to just get away by ourselves and take a little break.

5) Lovely Surprises in the Garden

Hello raspberries! Thats right! I amped up the bottles for self-watering system in the raspberry plants and when I came back, I had some ripe raspberries waiting for me.  There’s still a good bunch waiting to ripen but so far they are delicious and sweet. My mom was also a sweetheart and dropped by to help me water the plants to keep the soil wet during our very hot weekend.

I have some strawberry, yellow zucchini and tomato harvests happening and coming up.

There are few other things on my agenda for the garden:

• Orange thyme harvesting and drying,
• Figuring out why my basil all died and was so weak when it was alive,
• Looking at the uses of lemongrass and how to harvest it,
• Searching up what to do and how to harvest lemon verbena.

Plus, I have to figure out my front yard and pull out some over abundant plants and by the end of the season, shift some plants around.

Green thumbs anyone?

6) Geeking out!

Mario and Dinobot Yoshi!

While I was on the getaway, I used my ton of overtime and took Friday off.  Much to my surprise, somehow this package arrived that exact day.  Thank goodness, the mailman was great and put it in my mailbox.  Its a tank top that I ordered from For Human Peoples and its the totally awesome crossover of Transformers and Mario.  Excuse me, Dinobot Yoshi! Allow me to geek out just a little bit and tell you that I saw this and I knew that I had to own it!

*ahem* I’ve regained myself a little! Moving along…

7) Finding the Perfect Gluten-Free Article from Popsugar Fitness

Click on the image to get to the article! 🙂

Everyone read this already? So, some of you know that I’ve been trying to go gluten-free.  I’m about 80% there.  I’ve cut out a lot of foods including bread and I make an effort to make and buy lots of gluten-free products.  Its helpful because now it opens up the options I never had when I was just dealing with lactose intolerance.  Except, cutting gluten and lactose is like double hard and I absolutely hate it when people make it harder.

What really gets me all the time with any food intolerance is “just give it a bite, it won’t kill you” or “Its all your head”.

If gluten-free was me doing this just to have fun and lose weight, sure thing but its not.  I truly believe that its going to make my life a lot better and reduce a lot of this recurring discomfort from IBS symptoms.  Just to make things clear, its really hard to go gluten-free.  Almost everything on store shelves has gluten, its really a pain so lets refrain from any comments that will just make it worse.  Because no, its not in my head and no, it won’t kill me but it will put me in a state where I’d like you to kill me.  You know, just to skip the disgusting details….

Rant over but that article made me laugh a little 🙂

8) Home is Where My Cat Is 😉

My Cat Taking up All the Space

My cat is a huge baby and she’s the princess of the house.  She’s making a point that she’s hot and that she deserves the best spot in the house where the wind hits or the A/C.  So here’s her the night before I left for my getaway and not letting me sleep.  And she’s not joking, she’s in full dream mode 😉

By the way, Aeropostale actually has a shirt with “My Home Is Where My Cat Is” . Its true though.  I always miss my little girl (even if she hogs the bed).

BEFORE I SAY THE GOOD NIGHTS…

Here’s a little something to help you go to sleep a la Disney style 😉

Its getting late, so I’m off to bed! 🙂

Hope you all had a great weekend! 

Home Sweet Home!

After a 3 day weekend getaway with my best friend, I finally  have made it back home.

I’d like to apologize if I haven’t been on any blogs or posted anything as I had wanted to do.  My hotel ended up having some really sporadic internet that caused my phone, tablet and computer all have trouble at the same time.  It made everything from uploading pictures to typing up blogs and saving drafts a pain.

Things will be back to  normal tomorrow morning! I have a few movie reviews planned for next week.  The TIFF movies that I saw being the priority.  My best friend and I had 6 hours to discuss both of the movies driving back to Montreal from Toronto here and there.

Aside from that, expect some restaurant and food posts along with a few little extras 🙂

Just a short post to say that I’m back and Tranquil Dreams will be up and running starting tomorrow.

I also have about 700 posts to read from all of you and its making my email inbox look a bit intimidating and overwhelming but I promise, I’ll get to it slowly during the week.

Hope everyone had a fantastic weekend!!