Some updates from my little life 🍀
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Life lately
First of all—
we moved to a new apartment! Major QoL update hehe. Aian and I had been wanting to move out for the longest time, but it only became a priority for us when Miu came along. Our old apartment was just way too small. We looked for affordable houses for rent within our area, and in April we were able to find one just a few streets away. We signed the papers in April, and then officially moved in mid-May.
I'm going to be completely honest though, Aian and I were super excited when we first moved, but not even a year of living here and we already want to move out. The only good things about this place is that 1) it's way more spacious than our old apartment; 2) this place allowed cats; and 3) we were able to connect with our upstairs neighbors who were actually acquaintances we've known through the internet for years already (but never actually talked to until now!). Other than that....I don't know. It's not like we can just pack up and move again right away, so there's not much we can do. These days I'm just waiting for the home blindness to start kicking in, lol.
I started learning how to cook! At the tender age of 34, lol. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I started learning so late, especially since both sides of my family are Kapampangan! My younger brother is really good at cooking, but I never learned myself. I knew I had to though, especially because living on delivery food is expensive, and we now have a tiny human whose nutrition we have to think about...and so I decided to finally learn how to do it. I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit! Right now I've only learned how to cook basic stuff like pasta and curry, but I also finally mastered tinolang manok, which is one of Miu's faves! Thinking of attempting sinigang or nilaga next. There's still so much to learn!
Miu was baptized early August. We initially planned for the baptism to be on the same day as her birthday celebration, but because of scheduling conflicts, we had to move the baptism a week earlier. And because it was so sudden, we didn't want to hassle our other chosen ninongs and ninangs, so only the primary sponsors were invited. It was a group baptism, so I was worried about Miu crying when it was her turn, but she was pretty chill. The only unexpected thing that happened was Miu slapping the priest's hand away when she was being anointed with oil....
Miu turned 1 on August 16th ♡ This is also our first year as a family of 3 (+ 7 cats hehe). Can you believe it's been a whole year already?? We blinked and now we have a toddler! We celebrated with a big party and everything which I worked SO HARD on planning 😭 I put in so much effort into organizing it so definitely expect a detailed post about it next time lol
And then I turned 35 on October 16th ♡ My birthday fell on a Wednesday this year, so we had no choice but to stay at home (coding + I didn't want to worry about window hours while we were outside). We had food delivered from Ooma instead. I also got a cake! From
Aggy's Cakes & Sweets aka this household's new favorite cake shop 😭 They also made Miu's cake! (Anelle truly this year's MVP 🙏🏻). I wasn't sure about ordering a custom cake because I only decided to make an inquiry less than a day before my birthday HAHASHSJSK but they came through! Look at my pretty cake!! The ribbons are actual ribbons!! (Yes of course I kept a bunch of them for my journal 🎀🎀🎀)
Lastly, I've made the decision to slowly move away from beauty-related content. The reason is simple: I've grown tired of content creation. I started writing beauty reviews because it's something I really liked. I loved that I got to try new makeup and skincare, and that over the years I got to work with brands that I liked. But these days so many brands seem be taking advantage of growing beauty creators, refusing to pay for services and instead asking for gifted collabs all while giving ridiculous guidelines and deadlines. I've become unhappy that this hobby has begun to feel like work when it's unpaid, and so the quality of the content I produce has, in turn, deteriorated over time. I've also realized that the content that gets popular with this niche is the type of content that promotes overconsumption—videos that show off drawers with about a hundred eyeshadow palettes, etc., etc.—something that doesn't align with my values at all. Content creation in general has become increasingly difficult for me; these days if you're not posting at least once a day, you're not doing enough, and with Miu now in her toddler phase, I don't have the energy for that kind of work, especially when I don't even get paid for it.
Tbh sometimes I miss the early days of deviantArt and Tumblr, where I would share photos and stories, snippets of my daily life, no matter how mundane, and I'd still get real engagement from people who shared similar interests. These days there's only a handful of people who still remember me from my semipopularity during that time, and with how difficult trying to keep up social media is, I find myself just watching the online presence that I worked so very hard for slowly fade away. It's a little sad, but as I'm not able to adapt to the fast pace of content creation (my 90% introvert ass is just not cut out for the Tiktok life), it's time to throw in the towel. I don't think I'll be quitting completely, because I honestly enjoy yapping about makeup and skincare! But from here on out, I'll be returning the focus of the blog and my Instagram to my boring little life ♡
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Reading
I'm always looking for new manga to read, and at some point I ended up going down the BL manhwa rabbit hole. I've read a lot of the more popular titles, but the one that really stood out to me is
Fate Makes No Mistakes (SHIN). I'm a sucker for supernatural stories like those that involve mythical creatures, so when this one started off introducing characters like reapers and goblins, I knew immediately it was gonna be my cup of tea. I really like the storytelling, the characters, and the worldbuilding, so the smut is just an added bonus for me now, lol 🙈
Here's some other (non-BL) titles I recently picked up that are worth mentioning. I started reading
Fall in Love, You False Angels (Uzuki Coco) after seeing so many people recommend it on shoujosei twt. Typical school life romcom, but it's just sooo cute and wholesome. Right now there's only 9 chapters translated, so you might want to let it marinate a bit first before diving in.
Bless (Sonoyama Yukino) is a shounen manga about a former male model who challenges himself to become a make-up artist. It's very interesting and the art is very nice, so it's worth a read. Last but not least,
Shibatte Mitsumete (Zawayuki Taki). If I were to describe it, I guess it's an office romance drama story with BDSM elements..? Tbh the reason why I picked this up is because the reds on the cover just called out to me. I'm glad I did, because from the story to the art, everything is 100% my type.
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Watching
The only free time we get these days is during Miu's nap time, which is around 40 minutes, or 2 hours if we're lucky. That gives us just enough time to watch a movie or a few episodes of whatever's on Netflix. This includes the super popular
Culinary Class Wars, which quickly became one of my favorite shows in a while. Can't wait for Season 2!
These are all the movies we've seen this year, so far. It's....quite a mix, I know LOL. Aian REALLY likes horror, so I've had to see so many of these films against my will 🫠 I was the one who suggested we watch
Exhuma and
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person though, and those two are my favorites from the horror titles here. (Sadly, watching
Longlegs was also my idea, so clearly my judgement is hit-or-miss...) I've also taken it upon myself to give Aian a crash course in romcoms, starting with my favorites,
13 Going on 30 and
Clueless.
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Listening to
I still mostly listen to K-pop, but I heard
Florence + The Machine while my mom was watching
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children one night and it made me miss listening to F+TM. It's been years since I last listened to their discography so I was so surprised because there's so many new songs. A new one I really liked is
Dream Girl Evil, but all the old songs on
Lungs (2009) still hold a special place in my heart.
Wasn't expecting this post to reach essay writing contest levels of length, sorry! This took way too long to write, partly because there's so much I wanted to talk about, but also because these days I've only been able to type these stupidly long blogposts on my iPhone 11 while my toddler's busy watching her favorite episode of Elmo's World for the nth time. If you stuck around til the end, thanks so much for reading ♡
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