REA I LOVE U!

Mellandagsrea! :D

I tried to think of what that would be in English but all I could think of was tweendaysale? or between days sale which just sounds strange. So I looked it up and the result for mellandagarna is "the intermediate days between Christmas and New Years Day". So yeah, there's just no good word for it...

Anyway, I usually avoid the sales because of all the crazy people by this year I've already been two days in a row. The trick is to be there when they open and stay away from Gina Tricot and you'll keep your sanity! :)

So here are my finds. :3

Enough Christmas paper to last me a few years. ^^d

 Pretty Clothes!

The sweater was the first thing I bought, couldn't resist it, so cute!

Then I found the jeans shorts and they were only 50:- so I felt they needed to be mine.

Then I found the black shorts! I've been searching for a pair for a while and here they were, and in my size as well. :D I had to stand in line for like half an hour to get them but they were worth it! In the same store I bought a pair of capri leggings with lace at the end and a pair of fold over mittens.The mittens weren't on sale but I've been searching for a pair of those as well so I didn't care, and they were missing the buttons so I got 15% off. ^^d

The colourful thing in the middle is a skirt which I had had my eyes on before and now that it was on sale I got it.

On the left is a black cardigan (sorry Nathan but I like cardigans) that wasn't on sale either but it was cheap and my mother paid for it. :3

All in all many nice things that I have been searching for and I'm very happy (and a bit poorer).

But the ultimate find is this dress from Whoops Fashion which is gorgeous and I will wear it on New Year's!

 

:DDDDD

The people at Whoops are always so nice, she recommended their leggings which are in a great material and don't have a thin elastic in the waist so hopefully they won't create blobs around your waist. And she was so nice I had to buy them. XDD
And I know we said we'd go together during the "mellandagsrea" but I couldn't wait, and I can always go again! Or more like, I want to go again! :3

Baking and making sweets!

Christmas is getting closer and closer and I'm a person who absolutely adores Christmas. The decorations, the lights, the mood and all it means in spending time with you family and friends and just having a cosy time with people you love. If it wasn't for the cold (or if I could stay inside all the time) it would be my favourite time of year!

I mean, who doesn't love this?

Every year when Christmas gets close I just get an urge to stay at home, drink glögg, watch sappy movies and relax, which is quite dangerous when you, like me, have a ton of school-work to do over the holidays. :((

I also get an urge to bake, make sweets and eat stuff with sugar in it. :D

In my family we have long-standing tradition of making gingerbread cookies on the first of advent and I always look forward too it. This year, however, it was moved to the second of advent since my sister had broken her hand and it hurt her do drive. But in the end I got to make gingerbread Christmas trees to my hearts content!

This is all that's left of the ones I brought home, because not only do I love to make them, I love to eat them too. And I'm good at it. XD

We always have a ton of pigs and trees since I only make trees and my sister only makes pigs. Sometimes the pigs migrate and infiltrate the other cookies but I've already eaten all the trees with pigs in them. :)

I've also managed to make saffron buns (yum yum)...

 ...and for the first time ever I tried to make fudge. It went really well!

Making fudge was really easy and it turned out great! I made banana-chocolate ones and they taste heavenly. They should considering there's nothing but fat and sugar in them. XD

The ones on the top are banana-chocolate and the one on the bottom are banana-white chocolate flavoured. The ones with the white chocolate are really sweet.

I'm really impressed that it's actually fudge-consistency. I thought they were going to become harder and more like toffee but they're creamy and nice. The banana flavour comes from melted marshmallow bananas.

I found the recipe here: http://www.kokaihop.se/recept/bananfudge

I really recommend it. :3

Telephone!

I've had the same telephone for almost three years now. t has served me well and I've always liked it, and still do. But lately its age has been noticeable; it's been acting up when I try to answer so sometimes I haven't been able to pick up incoming calls. So I decided to get a new phone!

 

The old faithful one I will now be saying bye bye to. :'(

 I looked around a bit and decided on the HTC Wildfire. It has a lot of functions and its touch. :) I love touch screens. I can play with them for hours just because it's fun to use the screen. And that's what I did yesterday when it arrived. :) You can connect to wireless networks with it so I surfed around on the web a bit, configured my e-mail and downloaded a few apps. So now this phone is also my new mp3-player. My old one only had 4GB and I was running out of space so yay for combining two gadgets in one. :)

My new pretty telephone.

 Even though I'll probably miss my old one a little bit just because it's always been good and it's pretty I absolutely adore the new one. :D It's very nice. And when I don't like a feature in the phone then I can just download an app that does it better. ^^d

And when you have a new phone, what do you need? A new phone-case of course. So I spent a few hours this morning crocheting a new one. I'm really pleased with the results. :3

 

My crocheted phone-case.

Anyway, to sum up, I love my new phone!

My only concern now is that I'm getting rid of a lot of stuff that I have straps on... which means that I have tons of straps and nowhere to put them. :( I'll have to get creative, hrm.. can you have straps on your wallet?

 Yay, phone! :)

Why Are Thin People Not Fat?

I've been watching documentaries lately, well it's not really lately anymore because I've switched over to watching tons of dorama. :D School is a bit easier for a while now too so I thought I'd catch up on some series that I've been wanting to see/finish watching.

But that's not what I was going to talk about. A while ago I was depressed about my weight and looked on the site where I find documentaries after something about weight-loss. It always makes me feel better seeing people who are worse off than me (does that make me a horrible person...) which is one of the reasons I love watching shows like Biggest Looser and the likes. Anyway, I found a documentary with the title Why Are Thin People Not Fat? and felt that this was a question I wanted an answer to. There were a few different parts to it but the most interesting was an experiment they did with thin people where they had them eat 5000 calories a day for about a month with no exercise to see how their bodies reacted. They all gained weight, around 5 kg each but their reactions to it was different. One of them gained not fat but muscles! His body got a lot of extra nutrient but didn't want to get fat so it produced muscle (this without exercise) which consumes more energy than fat thus using more of the food he ate for things other than getting fat.

I wish my body would do that... :(
And even though they all gained weight they lost all or almost all of it in the following two weeks. The bastards.

What the scientists deducted from this (and other) experiment was that all people have a weight that their body is going to deem ideal, it can be 50 kg or 150 kg, and that it will strive towards. That means that if you overeat your body will try to adjust so that the extra energy goes elsewhere. But it also means that when you're trying to loose weight your body will do everything to go back to the weight that it wants.
They had made experiments with overweight people where they lost weight and then were put on a diet made to maintain that weight, basically eating normally. When they measured their brain-activity it was sending signals equivalent of a semi-starving person doing everything to make the person eat more food. So if these people were going to keep the weight off they were going to have to live with battling their brain for the rest of their lives.

The documentary was very interesting but extremely disheartening, basically telling you that whatever you do your body has the last say in what you weigh. I'm not completely convinced though, there are a lot of people who have lost a lot of weight and kept it off and I'm going to join that group, no matter what my body wants!
I've already lost almost 15kg and I'll fight to keep it sinking! Yeah fighto-oh!

The documentary can be seen here for those interested:

Review of Max Misty Green lenses in green eyes

A few weeks ago me and my friends ordered coloured lenses from pinkyparadise.com and we got them just in time to use for KodachiKun (which is a small convention that Mangakai Lund arranges once a year). When I was browsing aroung trying to choose which lenses to buy I searched for reviews of them and there are a lot of them but I can hardly find any that features people with naturally blue, green or grey eyes. So let's fix that! :D

 First of all, ordering from pinkyparadise works well, the order arrived in Sweden within two weeks (using the cheaper form of transport) and we got one free super cute lens-case for every pair of ordered lenses. :3

Free stuff always makes me happy.

I normally wear glasses so I ordered the lenses with strength and after some searching around for how to convert the perscription for my glasses I settled for this:

Right: -3.50 ---> -3.00

Left -3.75 ---> 3.25

I heard that lowering by half would be good and since I didn't want them too strong I went for that. The strength is not perfect, it's a bit weak but at least I see well enough to get around. I wouldn't have them for every-day use but for once in a while it works fine though I think I'll increase it by 0.25 for the next pair I buy.

These are my very first pair of lenses ever and it was both harder and easier to use them than I thought. I have quite dry eyes so I was a bit worried and after wearing them for several hours my eyes did become dry but that might just be a case of getting used to it. But it was really nice walking around without glasses, I haven't done that since fourth grade. :)

Anyway, on to the pictures (which is probably the most interesting part for potential buyers of these lenses).

 

This is what my eyes look like without lenses...

 (this picture was taken at the end of the day so my make-up is falling 

and I look really tired, please ignore these facts)

 

...and this is with the lenses.

Looks: 5/5

It's a big difference from my normal colour and since these lenses become a little yellow towards the middle they blend well with my eyes. On this close-up they're more noticeable but from a distance and when the light is not so bright you don't see it as much. 

With these lenses it's apparent that they're not real, they don't look natural but they give a great effect and really enlarges and defines your eyes. This would be the only minus about the looks, since they're so unnatural I won't wear them just anywhere but instead wait for a time when unnatural-looking eyes is OK.

Comfort: 4/5

They're OK to wear, they became uncomfortable when my eyes dries up but that might just be me so don't make or break your decision on that. :) Before that it was all good, I felt  them but didn't feel any discomfort.

Overall: 5/5

I really am very pleased with them and can't wait for the next time to wear them!

 Photos from a distance, thank you Kajsa for taking lovely pictures as always!

Playing with my hair

I love this song, it makes me feel better about my life. You can listen to it as you keep reading. :)



Yeah, sometimes I get a bit depressed about how incredibly boring my life is and how it feels like I'm headed nowhere, just standing still waiting for life to come to me... I don't even know what I want to happen, just something...
I have two different future dreams, in one of them I'm a rich, strong, independent woman that people respect. I travel the world and always learn new things and am proud of myself the way I am.
In the other I have a huge family, no money but lots of love. I don't even know which of these I want, I guess it depends on whether I find someone to make a family with or not. :P

Anyway, enough of this and on to more important stuff; hair!
I don't really like my hair, it's thin and super shiny (which I guess is a good thing but it also makes all hairstyles fall flat within 30 minutes...) But even so I tried playing with my hair a bit. This is a hairstyle I've been wanting to try for a whil and now I felt I had a little time to do it.

Yay, mohawk inspired.
I also bought blush today, can you see it?

It took quite a while to do it, since I have almost no experience in doing hairstyles and since my hair never does what I want but it was fun.

Another picture. :)

I'm pondering whether to have this hair on KodachiKun or not, it depends on how long it lasts and how much time I have to get ready in the morning. And also the weather.
It's already gotten a lot flatter, and it's only been about 40 minutes... I hate my hair. :(

Sapeurs

On my way home from the book fair I read a few of the magazines I'd been given and a came across one that really caught my eye. The article was called "Gentlemen from Bacongo" and what really made me stop and look were the awesome photos, here are a few of them and a few more I've found. :)

This was the first page photo,
can you do anything but love it?

Here are all the photos included in the article.

And a few more based on pure awesomeness.

Now at first I was caught by the photos but as I read the article I started to admire these peoples whole nature and lifestyle.
They call themselves Saepur from the French wordSape which is slang for “dressing with class”. It takes a lot to be accepted into the circle, most of them live in the slum but spend all their money on beautiful clothing, going by "A sapeur is a happy man even if he doesn't eat, because being well-dressed gives nourishment to the soul and pleasure to the body".
They also have ten commandments (although two of them haven't been written yet) which go:

• Believe in God
• Honour Sape
• Be hygienic
• Don't be a racist
  
• Don't believe in clans
• Don't discriminate
• Be a pacifist and a gentleman

This restores my faith in man and I respect them so much. If everyone abided by these rules the world would be a better place. (OK, I'm not to fond of the believe in God rule but to each his own right) I do believe that food is more important than clothes but apart from that I totally support their lifestyle and absolutely adore their fashion!
Apparently they have rules so as not to become to showy such as never combining more than three colours. :)

Well, anyway, I had to become their instant fan and share their existence, it you want to read more this page has a short article, a few more photos and links to some other places.

Gothenburg Book Fair! :D

Yesterday I went to the annual book fair in Gothenburg and it is awesome!
The faculty arranges a bus to and from the book fair every year and even though I'm totally swamped with school I love going so I didn't care and went anyway. XD School will work itself out somehow. The school's offer is great, all you have to do is tell them you want to come, no charges or anything, they just give you a free ride to and from Gothenburg. And I managed to get my hands on a free entrance ticket ans well so I was happy. :)

The fair is held at this huuuuge venue, it takes a full day to explore the first floor and that is if you walk past most of the booths. Then there's a second floor as well! I didn't even go there this year. They hold lots of interesting seminars but they cost freakishly much, 500 SEK per seminar! I can't afford that ;___; so I didn't even look at the program so as not to be disappointed in not being able to attend.
For you to get a slight idea of how big it is, here is the map of the first floor:

This is also your survival guide since
you'll never find anything without it!

I always get totally hyped at fairs, and become a total shopaholic (even more than usual) and therefore I was carrying around a ton of stuff towards the end. I returned home with this (and my normal bag which is not in the photo).

The black and the yellow bags were free (yay for free stuff, another reason to love fairs :D)
and the green one you got if you bought a book from them,
so I bought a book because I wanted the bag. XD

And since this is a book fair you can't return home without books right. :) Oh, and there's a dish rag there too, it came with the purchase of the Cookies for Rookies book. :D

Cookies for Rookies I bought for Kristina since I know she loves to bake,
the two on the bottom came in a gift bag from BTJ,
the one in the middle is the one I bought to get the green bag
(and I've been interested in it for a while),
the green one I got for free upon entering a contest,
the fairy tale book is a present for my niece and
the one on the top will get its very own review because it is so awesome!

And some magazines:

There was a booth where they handed out free magazines so I took a few,
some of these were handed out in other places as well.
I will make a post about a thing I found in one of them because it made me an instant fan.

And other stuff:

I also bought three calendars, got myself a library lovers pin
and got a free note book for my mom.
I'm really happy about the calendars, the small one is great and only cost 30 SEK, a find!

These are the pictures inside the calendars. They had so many great I could have bought all of them but I have no use for 10 calendars... I got two though and thought I'd give one to my parents. :)

I also shamelessly took free candy from here and there XD

I got one more thing as well, maybe I just fell for their marketing trick but we'll see. A man stopped me and asked if he could clean my glasses, I though that it can't hurt, its free and all (yes I'm a sucker for free stuff ^^''''). It turns out the thing he uses is anti static and it makes your glasses not fog up! I found it awesome and bought it straight away. It actually works really well, and if there's one thing I'll always have to do it's clean my glasses so at least I'll use it.

I also attended a few "events". I listened to a woman talking about how to market your library and watched a demonstration on how to make interesting gift wrappings. I also saw Mark Levengood in SR's monter talking about how his mother can't cook and I walked past Björn Hellberg giving autographs to a few teenage girls, which was a bit odd to say the least. XDD

All in all it was a great day, I met a few people I know as well which is always fun. :)
I wish I could have attended the other days as well though and have seen more authors and listen to interviews and such. I hope I can go next year too. :)

Sunao ni Narenakute

This is a Japanese dorama about a group of people who meet over twitter and their relations to each other. This kind of theme is quite common in Japanese doramas; a group of people who didn’t know each other before become friends and these new relations change their life. But they always make me wonder; didn’t these people have friends before this?

These people don’t know each other when they first meet, yet they depend on each other from the start, when a major crisis happens they call the person they have only known for a week… New friends is always nice but if something happened to me I wouldn’t call a new acquaintance; for more than one reason. Apart from me being uncomfortable with a person I hardly know, consider the other person, a new friend you’ve only met once calls you and wants you to (as in this dorama) accompany her to the maternity clinic and pretend to be the father of her child. I would be extremely suspicious and feel the stalker warning light coming on. But maybe that’s just me…

Ignoring this part of the dorama, (maybe Japanese people don't have friends and bond very quickly with strangers?) it has a nice feel to it. The characters are well developed and feel real. They also have a nice chemistry between them, especially Eita and Ueno Juri, but they’ve co-acted in several doramas already so they’re probably comfortable with each other. I also want to give a special mention to Mr. Park (I don't know his real name) who did a great acting job and made me find him adorable even though I don't like him as a person.

This doramas strength doesn’t lie in the plot, which is quite a mediocre plot about love and relationships, but in its characters and their chemistry. It reminds me of Love Shuffle and Last Friends in it’s atmosphere, though Love Shuffle had even greater chemistry between the characters and Last Friends had a stronger story.

All in all I enjoyed it and would recommend it to people who enjoy human doramas.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

This book was recommended to me by a few friends who said it is awesome so I borrowed it and read it. The basic story is that Armageddon is upon us and the Antichrist is brought to earth to eventually destroy it while heaven and hell fight each other. The problem is that an angel and a demon who have lived on earth since it's creation about 6000 years ago are quite fond of it and would like to keep it around. They both try to influence the Antichrist during his upbringing but when he turns eleven they notice that the boy they thought was the Antichrist is in fact just a normal human. So where is the Antichrist and can they stop him from destroying the world?

Apart from this there are quite a few sub-plots, we get to follow the four horsemen on their journey towards the centre of destruction, there is a witch whose ancestor predicted the end of the world and a witch-hunter that are also involved, and many more but I liked the parts that involved Crowley and Aziraphale the best. Their relation to each other is interesting. They are angel and demon which makes them enemies but, as Crowley puts it, “an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him a sort of friend.” They are the only ones on earth that don’t die and so they hang around each other, besides they are very similar and when Crowley does something like changing paint-ball guns into real guns so that people really begin killing each other Aziraphale’s reprimand is more like a habitual one than one with real conviction behind it. In the same way Crowley tolerates when Aziraphale does good. They are like an old couple who put up with each others bad habits for the sake of the general peace of the relationship. These two characters made the book for me, I love them. The rest of the book with all its sub-plots and, truthfully speaking, quite boring characters were mostly long-wound and made me loose the urge to keep reading.

The book in general is quite slow-paced and with quite detailed descriptions of all the characters doings, especially the few hours before the supposed end of the world. Some of these parts seem to be included for the sole sake of wittiness, which is confirmed in the interview with the authors in the end where they say the goal of what they wrote was to make each other laugh. The book is admittedly witty and smart in an amusing way but wittiness for its own sake can push it over the line and make it tedious.

The concept is smart and clever and the way the Christian theory of evolution is used is spot on. It is a well-written book and I like the wittiness, even if it goes overboard at times. Good Omens is a well-loved book around the world which it could not have become without being as well-written as it is, but its strength lies more in the technical skills of the writers than the content of the story. On a whole I liked the book, if not all parts of it, but to me it will not become the tattered worn copy that has been read and re-read dozens of times.

First post

Well, you need a first post when you make a blog and since I can't figure out what to write about just now I'll just make it a random first post. ^^d
In my mind I kinda wanna make this a blog about series I follow, books I read and those kinds of things (yes, notice my extremely varied and detailed English :P). Well see if thats how it turns out. I'm generally bad at writing about myself and stuff going on in my life because I find my life uninteresting. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy it for the most part but I can't imagine it being interesting enough to report about.

So yeah, that was my first post and now I'll go back to my uninteresting yet slightly enjoyable life and I'll write again when I find something I want to write about. Welcome to all followers and yeah well, it ended up being in English for some reason but hey, a reason to polish my skillz. :P