This year I’ve been making more of an effort to eat healthy by cooking more and buying less processed foods. Last year a lot of my work lunches have been canned soups or those pastas and pizza pockets you can microwave. I wanted to make eating lunch exciting again by finding fun ideas on Pinterest and creating them myself.
I found this perfect salad bowl at Home Sense by Smart Planet that has a separate layer for dry ingredients. The bowl also collapses when you are done so that it doesn’t take up space when you carry it home! How cool is that?
I was really excited to find out that The Face Shop now has a downtown location at the Eaton’s Centre. Previously, I would have to go to Pacific Mall to obtain any Asian beauty products.
Winter really dries out my hands so I purchased this Olive & Argan oil hand cream. A little goes a long way and the sent is very light.
I also purchased more of the Real Nature face masks. A set of 15 different ones only cost $20!
I bought this Blackhead nose strip for $1 so I could get an extra discounted face mask below:
I’m excited to try this honey mask that is a different line than the Real Nature ones. Hopefully I won’t look like a pig haha!
The lady at the cash suggested I sign up for a points card so I can collect points towards future purchases. If you ever want some affordable beauty products, be sure to check out The Face Shop.
As an early adopter of social networks, I joined Peach last night! It’s a mix between the timelines of Twitter, and the design of Slack, but with more privacy, since you can only see the timelines of people you add as friends.
I still don’t entirely understand what it is for, but I see some potential in it being a fun platform to share photos, thoughts and more. The more I use it and find people to follow, the more I like it!
I don’t know what kind of crazy people follow this blog where I do nothing but talk about myself and other random subjects, but thank you all for your support!
I love everyone and all your comments and encouraging feedback. Blogging has changed my life in so many ways: socially, professionally, personally, mentally. I couldn’t even fathom what my life would be like if I didn’t blog.
I recently purchased the teleconverter for my Fujifilm x100 camera. It’s a 33m lens (a 50mm equivalent) on my crop frame camera. The results with this thing are beautiful and don’t affect the aperture at all. It’s also as easy as flicking a setting in camera. For $250, it was totally worth it to have this in my arsenal for my mobile camera!
I decided to start a new 365 project this year (well technically I started a little bit before January). In addition to blogging, I will also be taking a photo a day. I’m using tookapic to keep track of it.
Tookapic is a site dedicated to 365 photo projects. It keeps track of how many days in a row you take a picture and even has a thing for tracking how may days you uploaded in a row. I personally decided that my challenge will to snap a photo a day with a professional camera (my x100 or 60D) but not necessarily upload it the same day. Tookapic’s “in a row” analytics resets itself when you don’t upload photos within a 2 day period of taking them, but they won’t mark it as a “missed” day. I don’t plan on missing any days, I just don’t think editing photos every day is a realistic for me.
Taking a photo will be an awesome challenge. It will help me to appreciate a moment of every day and I will have an archive of blog photos for the year.
I added little tabs so I could keep track of months.
I love notebooks, but I’ve always been really bad with filling them in. I found a lot of planners didn’t guide life in a valuable way. Often they were full of schedules denoting what you are doing at every hour every day. The hours where you had nothing plan would just be a waste of half a sheet of paper. I gave up on purchasing daily planners for the past couple of years until I stumbled on and Kickstarted the Spark Planner for 2016.
It begins with defining a 2016 theme and having a space to brainstorm all the things I want to achieve this year. There’s even a space to mark the dates you make those achievements on the next page. I decided that my main theme for this year is to be Brave & Creative. I’m still defining some top goals but I jotted down some weird ones.
Along with your regular monthly calendars there is what is called a “Weekly Outlook”. I love this because you can plan your days without defining every single hour (a thing which I obviously hate). This gives you a general guideline of things you want done and is actually far more motivating. Plus, if you have nothing to write they make good doodle boxes.
There’s also a weekly goals page and space to reflect and celebrate. Occasionally there are also random reflection questions that you can answer in point form or write an essay if you really wanted to.
I’m super excited for this journal and know that it will help me be the best me that I can be in 2016!
I wanted to make use of my new record player so last month I signed up for Vinyl Me Please, an online record club. Note: This doesn’t count in my 30 Day Challenge as it is something that I previously subscribed to for 3 months.
My December package arrived in an adorably labeled package, in hopes that the mail carriers would handle with care (which thankfully they did).
I was surprised with Nils Frahm’s Spaces, the 36th record in the series so far.
Inside the package were record notes, original art prints as well as recipes for a drink that the record could be paired with. The record sounded beautifully warm in my player. It wasn’t something I would have consciously decided to go buy but am super proud to have on my shelf. I’m looking forward to what record I’ll be surprised with in January.
Subscribing to the club also gives you access to a store full of exclusives. If you want to sign up for Vinyl Me Please, use this link for $10 off!
This may be a seemingly ridiculous and easy goal but my January challenge is to not buy anything online. December was an expensive month. I did a lot of Christmas, Boxing Day shopping online. I bought things I may not have needed because the holidays gave me an excuse to be impulsive. Holidays are also when online marketing for the strangest and most unnecessary stuff is at an all-time high.
This January I will keep all my shopping offline. It will allow me to save money because it’s harder to plan time to go to a store compared to clicking on a digital shopping cart. This will also encourage me to support brick and mortar local stores, which are the future of the local economy.
Stay tuned for more 2016 planning and resolutions!
Tiana Feng 