We'll all float on~

another year another march

2015-03-01T18:25:41Z

FOOD!!! :D

2012-10-08T20:17:43Z

(part 2/2) I miss the food from home SO much. I don't think I appreciated my mom's cooking the past two years a lot. Last year, I ate out so much... the year before that, I was obsessed with beginning of college. This year, I'm over both and want nothing but some vertebrae soup and duck and all the other wonderful, high-fiber and healthy foods my mom cooks!!! :( here are some from over the summer:

BEIJING DUCK WRAP: HOW-TO
I first had Beijing Duck in beijing a couple summers ago. I might've had it earlier, whatever. Anyway it is SO MUCH FUN I LOVE IT!!! My family started eating it at home since we found this place that makes roasted duck and is really good at it! The duck usually costs $20 and we buy the other ingredients to make our own wrap.

You need some wrap! we use spring roll wrap.

chopped duck pieces. the middle (rib? idk) sections work well for this, except take the meat off the bone obvs.

The sauce is the hardest to find!!! We had this one good sauce that was perfect but unfortunately the Chinese store stopped carrying it... I forget if this is the good brand or the version where my mom mixes it half and half with honey.

wraps

1 piece of duck, dipped lightly in the sauce. add green onions! Very important.

wrap it up... voila!

One of my favorite things about at home is the amazing amount of fruits we have :)

This is like some tofu scramble thing. It's good. It tastes like... idk. lol :P

And this one day I made my parents come with me to this INdian buffet that i really loved (went there with Julia a couple years ago). Dad didn't like it, he likes to "get his money's worth" of food and thinks Indian restaurants are a huge rip-off with all their veggies and lack of meat. So he eats as much goat as he can to make up for the "rip-off". LOL

I actually love the decorations and ambience. check out how nice it is! I love the sink too... but didn't go lol

I don't even know what I got tbh, I always just get literally some of everything in the buffet. and then it's all mushed together. Tastes sort of the same anyway :P A GIANT BURST OF FLAVOR IN YOUR MOUTH! seriously like a party in your mouth, I love Indian food!

Took more photos of my room and eye that I meant to share as well but forgot about all these pics so I thought I'd share 'em first as they're from months ago...

PS: Lol you can probs tell i was experimenting with a good watermark style...

photo time again. two of my favorite things: food and nail polish

2012-07-11T05:46:32Z

Day One: Ten things you want to say to ten different people right now.
Day Two: Nine things about yourself.
Day Three: Eight ways to win your heart.
Day Four: Seven things that cross your mind a lot.
Day Five: Six things you wish you’d never done.
Day Six: Five people who mean a lot (in no order whatsoever)
Day Seven: Four turn-offs.
Day Eight: Three turn-ons.
Day Nine: Two images that describe your life right now, and why.
Day Ten: One confession.

1. pretentiousness
2. rudeness
3. only reads about things and thinks that's "knowing" but doesn't do anything
4. no hobbies

that was easy!

NEXT: photos.
this is how it'll go
misc > food > cute things > nail polish (including a review of 2 competing brands of instant nail polish remover)

On our way to the restaurant, we used to go to this restaurant a lot but actually since I've been back I haven't gone there at all! At the height of frequencies we went there once a week or more... To be fair, it was the only restaurant my parents liked (besides Cracker Barrel and to a lesser extent, Golden Corral). OH these are my new pretty, iridescent, Tom-style shoes by Roxy! They are so pretty and comfortable, I love it!

It was a birthday dinner for a family friend. Our gift to her was this beautiful orchid from Costco (LOL I think it was Costco, maybe Lowe's or Home Depot or wherever you get orchids). Orchids are so lovely, they instantly remind me of Georgia O'Keeffe's works but better, of course, because they are the thing she was painting.

now we digress a bit from the birthday dinner to photos taken earlier that day (I think?) because it'll seamlessly transition back into the dinner, you'll see! Okay, these are the four (I guess I only had four) painted stoneware (?) I did when I was age 8-11, one for each year probably. They're dated on the bottom. I'm so proud of them!! My least fav is the one on the left. I think that might actually be the latest one. My fav is ... well I really really adore the middle two because they're so vibrant and fun. the second from left one is my favorite because of all the designs I did with my name but I also like the no-handled cup because it's very pretty. the right one is nice but sort of "eh", plus doesn't have my name on it so :( OH haha the left cup has my initials on the bottom. I painted all of them quite thoroughly, i.e. inside have different/matching designs and everything :)

buns and ~~mango~~ upon second look, I'm pretty sure those are squash.. we don't really eat them together, i guess they were just put on there together to conserve space.

watermelon. i love it but that watermelon wasn't that good so i didn't eat it. i'm picky. You can tell b/c the color's not as bright and it looks a bit... idk the word, it's "sa" third tone. like falling apart ish. it's sort of cool but I like my melons tender

OMG WE'RE GETTING TO THE RESTAURANT OMG YUMM! we were a couple min late so the other family ordered a couple dishes. the girl (6 years younger than me) had decided not to eat any meat except for fish and octopi etc because of the way animals were treated or something so they ordered seafood)

OMG SO GOOOD!!! IT'S THE SAME SPICES AS THE SALT AND PEPPER SQUID BUT ON SHRIMP NOM NOM NOM I LOVE THE JALAPENOS! idk if this is an authentic dish tbh, i've never had jalapenos in China but HEY it tastes super duper.

rofl the girl ate like this entire plate. it was bigger before i think this was already some eaten. also she was moving it as i was taken the pic so that's why it's blurry D:

WOOO MOVE OVER SEAFOOD, TIME FOR CHICKEN!!! this is my favorite dish at the restaurant right now. well plus a couple others. idk what it's called. OK SO THEY GOT NEW WAITRESSES AND A NEW BOSS?? OR ANOTHER BOSS? so like this waitress was sort of annoying and kept assuming we didn't know what we wanted, like we ordered these chives buns and we called them "bao" b/c that's what they are and she insisted we were wrong and said they were "jiao" which is dumplings and we were like, "uhhh no we don't want the whatever you just said, we want the buns!" and there was even a pic of it and we pointed to it and then she said yes that's what they're called and it's like ok last time we were here and for the past 4 years we were here, they were called something different but OK WHATEVER and this girl was so stupid, she didn't even ask us how many servings we wanted. each serving comes with 3 of them, and there were 6 of us, so any normal waitress would've been like "2 servings, right?" so we could each have one but she only ordered one serving and didn't tell us that and when it came out, we had to call over another waitress and tell her to add on another serving OMG THAT GIRL IS SO DUMB I HATE WAITRESSES WHO ARE SO ADAMANT WHICH ARE USUALLY CHINESE WAITRESSES LIKE OMG CHILL THE FUCK OUT WE'RE TIPPING YOU IN AMERICA SO BE A LITTLE NICER OK but then and again tips add on to a lesser than min. age salary so... :/
WAIT that was not relevant to the photos above. so this is a chicken mix with peanuts (?), shun (errr bamboo?), mushrooms, carrots, and idk what else but it tastes divine and underneath are those fried things, idk what they are, and then you wrap it all in those lettuce leaves like a taco!!! so good. I also like to order it out and wrap it at home with spring roll paper, it's better that way i think :P

I only had one fortune cookie (unusual) but had two fortunes in it!! Def thought of Jess for the second one!

okay out of restaurant now, this is a book that i never write in basically but i decided to go through my purse and paste all my recent tix in it. I have since this photo also added my katy perry ticket. Can you believe High Museum of Art was $18???!! ridic. probs cos i only spent an hour in there and had to pay that much. *harrumph*

omg bad news!! You know the hospital i volunteer at?? well the volunteer coordinator is named Joyce and is super nice and hands-on. She runs this gift shop whose profits go towards scholarships for volunteers and community giving and WE HEARD FRIDAY THAT THE PRESIDENT/CEO/WHATEVER OF THE HOSPITAL TALKED TO HER LAST WED AND TOLD HER THE GIFT SHOP WAS CLOSING DOWN THE END OF THIS MONTH! In its place, a Hallmark store will be there, paying rent (right now the hospital makes $0 on the gift shop). Apparently this is worrying NOT ONLY because of the lack of affordable, cute, personalized stuff that Joyce personally picks out and prices very reasonably, but because apparently 1/2 of Joyce's salary comes from sales of the merchandise in the gift shop! Nobody knows if Joyce will be let go at this point :( so sad. Also it's so dumb b/c Hallmark is so stupid and literally every Hallmark store I've seen in the past 5 years have closed down b/c they are ridic expensive and not personal and who wants to spend $6 on a stupid card?? or $25 on a stuffed animal that's worth $5?? ugh so dumb b/c after the Hallmark lease is up, I'm almost 100% sure they will not renew their lease b/c it will fail as a business.
Anyway the following 3 pics showcase some things I bought at the gift shop last time.

$3 for this cutie!

$1 jingle bell ring!!

$4 bracelet (original price is $10, there were SO many of these glass bracelets that were more summer-y last week but i wasn't sure i wanted to commit to buying one so i gave myself a few days to think it over and LITERALLY ALL OF THEM WERE SOLD OUT WHAHHAT so i bought this before it was sold out (only 1 of 2 left!). Such good things Joyce picks out! How pretty is it, though? I love the color scheme and the day of the dead theme :)
OH btw if you'll notice, my nail polish colors are also july 4-th themed but not the same as on july 4. That's b/c the day after, I got bored of the sparkles (meaning I had them on for less than 24 hrs lol read on) and decided to do a pastel version of July 4, except it was July 5 but whatever, I only kept them on for the photo shoot basically (i.e. were off by end of day again haha).

Its eyes were 3-D! only on one side, of course :D so cool, i love it.

This leads to my impulse buy earlier today (err technically yesterday). Ever since I bought the bracelet, I wanted a nail color scheme that would match the bracelet, only to find out that despite having a bajillion nail polishes, I didn't have many of the colors from the bracelet!. So today I stopped by Target and picked up 2 colors: Rimmel London's purple (which I had been wanting for quite a while now! Under $4 and honestly the best polish I've ever used. too bad they only produce such a narrow color palette), and Essie's new Mojito as part of the latest collection. I tried on the color in teh store and it was SO BEAUTIFUL i jus thad to have it. It also went on really smoothly. It was just so pretty. The flash doesn't do the colors justice. So now, combined with the other two Julep nail polishes, I can do my combo!

I also bought a new nail polish instant remover because the Sephora one I was using was running out. Here's the thing: I change nail polish a lot. Every 2-3 days is normal. If I have it on for a week, that just... doesn't happen. I mean, it happened more often before I had the Sephora Instant nail polish remover if I didn't want to take up time to take off colors but with the instant nail polish remover it takes literally 5 secs per nail so I change colors very very very very often. I often do try to give SOME breathing time for my nails, i.e. a day. hahahahaa. or a couple days.

My old remover: as you can see, it is foamy inside with a small hole to stick your nails in and you wait a couple secs, and then it's all clean! Well unless it's getting old like mine, now I have to rub against the foam. Or if you have sparkles. Sparkles are really hard to take off D: glad I didn't buy the Essie sparkles, those took FOREVER to get off. I had to claw at my nail to get all of the sparkles off. This bottle (Sephora's Instant Nail Polish Remover) is quite nice and very effective. I didn't even know such a thing existed until I saw it at Sephora and tried it, and even though it had a bajillion other people's fingers down it and I could see polish in it, it still worked remarkably well so I bought one, thinking it was $4. No, this tiny bottle is $10. It leaves nails very nice after, and doesn't smell too bad like cheap acetone nail polish remover. It actually leaves a super nice smell after a couple minutes and I usually paint another polish on RIGHT AFTER i use it, without washing hands or anything. THE ONLY DRAWBACK is how expensive it is, so I decided to buy the cheap generic version from Target, assuming it was the same. OH the other drawback is that it's thin but deep so I feel like it's not as efficient as it could be... i.e. unused clean foam at bottom of bottle.

OK so i finally bought a new bottle from Target b/c i figured my Sephora one was running too low (had it ... 4 months? at least 3 months). First of all, when I opened it, I knew it was different. The strong is like 5x stronger, and not pleasant AT ALL. Secondly, it's not foam inside like I presumed. It has bristled (pictured) where you rub your nails against, and besides those plastic bristles, it's just acetone liquid inside. Ingredients are acetone and denatomium benzoate, which I googled and turned out to be the most bitter compound known. but with no scientifically proven long-term health risks... UH OK i'll take their word for it. Oh this MUCH LARGER (9 fl oz vs 2.5 of Sephora's) was $3, making it wayyyy cheaper. After I used it on my nails, however, it was obvious it lacked quality... First of all, I had to rub against the plastic which was ok, but it was obvious that if I just left my finger in there, the polish wouldn't come off as quickly as if I did with the Sephora one. PLUS afterwards, I was shocked to find my finger was WHITE, I presume dried-out or something. I immediately washed with water and it looked normal. Still, I'm shocked by it.

VERDICT: Even though Sephora's instant nail polish remover is twelve times (12x) more expensive per fl. ounce than Target's, it may be worth it. I looked up the Sephora ingredients and they seemed more natural (with scents and stuff). Plus it's made in France. is that just cool or what? Actually I'll have to see how long this Target remover lasts, how my nails feel after a prolonged time of usage, and I'll get back to you on the official verdict.

ETA: OR I may just buy Sephora's normal nail polish remover, which is the same formula as the instant-remover but without the foam, and i could use cotton or something. the thing i don't like about that is i feel like im wasting the remover, like most of it is going on the cotton/my other fingers and not the ones i want cleaned. OH PLUS sometimes i just want one finger's nail polish off but then the other finger's colors get messed up

OMG I just know I am going to regret staying up for 2+ hours just to write this because I have to be up tmrw at 8 fml

July Julep Maven polishes (photos) and comparison with other nail polish prices

2012-07-07T21:03:01Z

they got here!!!! wow I guess posting this caused them to come :P
I'm not putting them on now because I just took off my other colors and I don't want my nails to be brittle or ugly :( Gotta give 'em a couple days to breathe.

I don't know how I feel about this program. One the one hand, THEY KEEP HAVING BEAUTIFUL COLORS THAT I CRAVE. on the other hand, the consistency of the polish texture isn't that great, and I'm not even a fan of their normal brush (unlike Rimmel London's more flat brush). I still think OPI and Rimmel London are better polishes, and OPI is cheaper than Julep by... A LOT. Julep costs $14 for a mere 8mL ($1.75/mL), whereas Rimmel London's polishes are under $5 at most stores for 13.3 mL ($0.37/mL) and OPI polishes contain 15mL for just under $10 ($0.67/mL). WOW ok after making that comparison I definitely want to cancel my Julep Maven program... Wait let me work out Julep Maven's program: three nail polishes for $20... that leads to each polish being $6.67, or $0.83/mL. Still more expensive than OPI and Rimmel. The ONLY advantage it has against those companies, arguably, is the colors they have (and lack of "bad chemicals", but I feel like Essie, Rimmel, and OPI have that too?). And yet... Essie has colors in every shade. Let's compare Essie vs. Julep prices: Essie is 13.5 mL for $8, or $0.59/mL... WOW and tbh Essie has all the shades I want (well they have almost every color EVER), I think I've just figured out I need to cancel my Maven subscription ASAP. as soon as I can get a hold of someone, GRRRRRR so annoying. If for nothing else, I hate them for having shitty customer service. I am sorry, but you cannot succeed as a company if you have bad customer service and very expensive prices.
MEANWHILE here are some of the beautiful polishes, after all that math and ranting...:

Mila, Kate, America, and Daphne
yeah they usually give some appropriate candy or something to go along with the box, I think. For Oscar month they gave a big chocolate Oscar, and for Easter they gave chocolate eggs. Cute touch/idea!!

I don't know why this pic came out blurry D: I thought it'd be nice.

The last color is darker irl :( makes me sad, I thought it'd be more light/minty.

The first month they shipped it in a huge box, 1/3 bigger than the box i got today. I was hoping for another box so I could squish all my polishes in 2 boxes. Here are some of the nail polishes I have stored, my favorite polishes :)

This is the sparkly glaze I used over my July 4th nails. It actually goes on less purple (err no purple!) and just contains blue and red individual sparkles (which together, make purple when seen from the bottle I guess). I should catalog all my nail polishes like this... I might.

OK AND I got a free polish voucher code with the box!! I have just used it for Susie (after much deliberation... was also considering getting Oscar and Hayden as the closest runner ups). UNFORTUNATELY their receipt didn't mention the voucher AT ALL, and I'm worried I'm going to be charged for this polish despite it supposing to be free... (I've heard bad things about Julep double-charging people's credit cards and other problems.) I've called Julep Maven headquarters. This is how that went: "Press 1 for orders... Pres-" Pressed 1. "We value your blah blah. Please hold." On hold for ~10 minutes. Finally a woman's voice speaks! It was an automated message, telling me to leave a message for them. WTF man. They better respond to me. Or just have not charged me. I'm keeping my eye on my credit card statement!

don't do heroin

2012-07-05T06:11:46Z

deb mentioned she likes these national geographic drug documentaries and linked me to one. it's super duper interesting! Who knew holland was such a big distributor of drugs?? not me.

also OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG @ THE HOT AFGHAN GUYS UGH THEY ARE SO BEAUTIFUL

photo dump (nail polish, mountains, and flowers)

2012-07-04T21:32:15Z

so for new friends, i used to post photos here sometimes... haha but not in a year or more. because i am a lazy bum. well i was bored so i spent half an hour taking some pics and here they are, along with pics from our road trip to georgia earlier this summer. only time i've picked up my camera... but now that i have, i have a feeling i'm going to be addicted to it again. which is much better than being addicted to online pixels, i have to say!!! also today's july 4th which is America's Independence Day! Not the day exactly that america got its independence but the day some guy decided to celebrate independence. SOO I'm thinking of sitting on my rooftop tonight and taking fireworks pics! I've never taken firework photos so eek *fingers crossed*. I can use my spider-tripod-y thing that my parents got me last year now!!! I'm excited.

so we went to georgia earlier (to renew my passport so i dont get deported rofl) and we decided to make it a family trip instead of a big pain in the butt that it was. my parents researched some nice places for us to go, including this mountain place that i forget the name now. we also visited a cave in northern florida, which was cool. although afterwards I got a ton of mosquito bites. I have photos (I thought???) but I cannot find the SD card they're on because I ran out of room on that one so all I have are the later shots from that day, which include the mountain shots when I finally decided to run back to the car and get the camera, but by then the sun was very low in setting so I didn't get very good lighting... ACTUALLY what happened was we didn't know all the great views (seen below), we saw all these stops along the way to the welcome center but we were like "WTF there's nothing there, it's just grass..." so we kept going to the end, where the welcome/info center was, and started hiking (that's why I didn't bring my camera, hiking + camera doesn't go well). By the time we finished hiking, it was around ... 5? 4? and we still didn't realize the great views near the picnic tables/parking lot UNTIL the very end of hiking when it leads you not to the beginning but to some of the rest stops and we like "oh. fuck. we just spent so much time down there climbing and whatnot and the great view is from up here" but i guess it was still a good experience/exercise.

these were taken the next day when we visited a dam (I think?) in georgia. not a hotspot for tourists, i can tell you that. It was cool riding through the area, it was very southern and rural :) Like a movie. I'd like to live in a house there, sort of... I wouldn't fit in because everyone there is in agriculture or the state parks.
The guy who worked in the plant even let us in!! even though it said "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY". my dad works with water control, that's why we visited this dumb place... :P it was cool to see i guess because not very many people have seen it. It was quite scary on top of the dam actually. There are "water wars" between georgia and florida all the time (apparently, idk if anyone except farmers, environmentalists, and water control ppl know about this) because georgia wants to drain water to florida (or keep water i dont remember) but blah blah blah.

here are my nails i just painted earlier today :)
I used

→ base coat- Rimmel London "base coat and top coat"
→red nails: sephora by OPI "cover me in petals" , overglazed with NYC "Broadway Burgundy Frost" and then topped with NYC "Big City Dazzle"
→ blue nails: Sephora by OPI "teal we meet again" overglzed with NYC's "Starry Silver Glitter"
→ white nails: Wet n wild "French White Creme" topped first with Nails Inc's special effects "The Donmar" and then with NYC's "Broadway Burgundy Frost".

Have I mentioned how I like Lauren Conrad's dresses at Kohl's?? Yeah they're pretty cute tbh... I bought 2 dresses and a blouse. I love her patterns and colors, so on.

random shots of what little there is around my house... sigh i wish we didn't have neighborhood rules about so much stupid stuff like gardening and what color to paint your house etc... i miss iowa!

can you guess where the following were taken??

ANSWER: cars :)

Ooh going through all the used SD cards I didn't bother deleting, such a chore to see which photos I've already backed up... sigh another project for me I guess. I need to clean them out. and maybe I'll post more photos I come across.

July 4 / Summer blinkie collection

2012-07-03T08:52:27Z

my collection of blinkies for july 4 / summer, made for me by others. omg so fucking tired it's 5am so right now credits are in the image name but i'll hover credit asap and make this public after i do that..

Favorite Female Models

2011-06-15T07:09:50Z

Didn't realize the last time I did this was more than 3 years ago!
I tried to do this in a model card type thing, simple photo of each model that I think showcased their features, with a nice name type.
preview

CLASSICS

YOUNG'UNS

extras:

Share your thoughts :)

THIS JOURNAL IS SEMI-PERMEABLE.

2009-08-14T23:48:50Z

kinda back!! open to new friends <3

Inactive communities I once ran:
blinkies / sigtags @ lepetitstar
screencaps + icons @ dearskies
fashion graphics @ parfumeries