OCD or Anal Retentive?

Today’s Daily Post prompt is about what is messier: my room or my desktop or favorite device’s home screen.

To be perfectly honest, not too long ago that probably would have been my room. When I lived in my childhood home, my room was notorious for being a sty. I had no pride in my room and I usually was the only one who would go in there. I would sleep with clothes all over the bed, sometimes sleeping on a bed made of clothes. Shoes were nowhere to be found, art supplies, left everywhere, old plates and cups of food and drink on top of my desk or my headboard. It really was very disgusting.

Since moving out on my own (and it didn’t happen overnight, I can assure you) I have become extra neat. I don’t like to leave things lying around, I get grossed out by old food being out, and clothes on the bathroom floor upset me. I’ve always been a little crazy about my computer desktop and my phone and iPad screen being organized into folders and in a certain order by how much I use certain folders or apps.

I wouldn’t necessarily say I am completely anal retentive although I like to do things a certain way and when they aren’t done that way I sometimes have small freak outs. But I am not completely OCD either. I work like a mess, I just can’t stand to see the mess after I am done.

When I cook, you can be sure there will be dirty dishes everywhere and leftover cuttings from veggies on the counter and open packages littering the countertops. But after I finish eating, I immediately start to clean.

When I am doing homework I have to start with a completely clean space. I can’t even begin to do homework if there is a mess somewhere in the house. But when I start my homework, there are books lying on every open space, snack wrappers in a pile on the floor, pencils getting lost in couch cushions. Total, hot mess. But as soon as I am done it all goes back into its own special nook or cranny. Everything has a place and everything ends up very organized.

So what is messier right now? My room or my technology? I guess my room would be the messiest because I haven’t made the bed today (the only thing I don’t really care too much about unless I am going to be working on schoolwork in the room – which is rare) because my technology is always immaculate.

My immaculately neat desktop. I originally didn’t want anything on it, but realized that wasn’t user-friendly so now I keep it to the bare minimum.

Weekend Review: Movie Marathon Weekend

So this weekend, me and the boyfriend decided to stay in and just watch movie after movie. He has this “guy” that gets him bootlegs so we had a ton of new movies to watch.

The Internship

This was really funny, but I’m glad I waited to see it at home rather than to pay an arm and a leg to see it in theaters. I did not realize how old Owen Wilson was getting. You could really see his age in this movie.

It was a feel good comedy that was about two older guys who are salesmen and are a little bit lost career-wise. They end up without a job or any good prospects for jobs so they lie about their experience and get accepted for an internship at Google based completely on their personalities and their creativity. Even tough they know absolutely nothing about technology or coding or anything “Googley” they are great motivators and are extremely innovative in their ideas. Their goal is to help their team make it to the top of the internship program so they can get a job at Google.

Lucy

To be honest I fell asleep toward the end of this one. It was very action-packed and of course Morgan Freeman (AKA God) was in it so I liked that, but it was very unrealistic and the quality of this disk was not as good as the others so it was starting to give me a headache.

Lucy is a girl who ends up being forced to smuggle a new drug for a crime boss in China (I think) because they surgically insert the drugs in her body. Then she gets beat up and the bag of drugs opens in her body causing her to be affected by this odd drug that lows you to use more of your brain. Because of the overdose, she ends up being able to use the total capacity of her brain. This starts to make her less than human though and more like a machine. I really wasn’t that into it, but I’d be willing to give it a second chance and watch it again.

Game of Assassins

I really did not like this one. This group of people who have all committed murder for one reason or another are thrown into this killer castle obstacle course and are played into making choices about keeping other people alive or killing them for their sakes or the sake of someone close to them. There is also a back story with one of the characters and his father, but it really didn’t make sense to me. Very gory for no apparent reason and I wasn’t really fond of the plot…

Edge of Tomorrow

Tom Cruise. Need I say more. No really though, this movie was interesting. It had the same feel as Dejavu where the main character repeats the same day over and over. It can become a little stressful for those watching it, but all in all it wasn’t a bad movie.

There are aliens attacking the earth. Tom Cruise plays an army guy who is sent with a group of people to kill the aliens in these super cool metal suits that make them almost superhuman and every time he dies, he comes back to the same time not he same day to repeat it and fix his mistakes. There are other people who come back too and they all work together to get rid of the aliens.

Captain America: Winter Soldier

 

If you have seen my post Top 10 Movie Marathons then you already know I absolutely love all things Marvel. The comic books, the movies, the characters, and the villains. So watching this movie was a no brainer. I was so upset when we couldn’t see it in theaters. There are not many times where I actually want to leave the house to see a movie ,but Marvel movies are definitely an exception to that rule.

It was excellent as always, regardless of what other people told me. I remain faithful to my Marvel movies. Action-packed, lots of great background stories and charter development. Interesting twists and conflicts, great graphics, costumes, etc. Basically, everything you could expect from a Marvel Movie.

The November Man

My boyfriend convinced me to watch this one because the guy from 007 was in it. I’m glad I watched it. It’s an action packed, spy/assassin type movie and those are always fun.

It takes place in Russia and there is a corrupt politician that the CIA is trying to take down. Turns out that the corruption goes into the CIA and needless to say the god guys win and the evil Russian politician dies. Exactly the way I like my spy movies to end. I’m easy to please.

Vampire Academy

This movie was picked out special for me because of my love for all things vampire and young adult. I swear I will be 80 and still reading young adult books and watching the movies that come out because of them. I am not a fan girl of Vampire Diaries (yet) but I already downloaded the first book after watching the movie.

It was definitely a different take on the whole vampire/human relationship than I’ve ever experienced. In this vampire story, there are special humans, Damphirs, that are the guardians for a race of vampires called the Moroi. These are the good, cultured vampires who do not kill. The Damphir protect the Moroi from the Strigoi which are a race of vampire that are evil and ugly and awful in every way.

Lissa and Rose are connected, Damphir and Moroi, and they are both extra special in their world. They attend the “Vampire Academy” where they learn respective skills as well as all the regular subjects such as history and math. Someone is threatening Lissa though and it is up to Rose to find out who and stop them from hurting her.

Life After Beth

I had ever even heard of this movie and now I know why. It was… strange, to say the least. I can’t even really say I liked it, it was so odd. it has the guy who plays Harry Osborne in the new Spiderman movies starring in it.

It’s a zombie apocalypse movie where this guy’s dead girlfriend, Beth, comes back to life after her funeral and slowly turns into a creepy zombie. He could tell there was something weird going on with her but it isn’t until she tastes human flesh that she really, truly goes bonkers. And it isn’t just Beth whose come back. All over town, dead people are showing up back at their houses. Eventually the zombies start attacking and people have to start re-killing their loved ones again. What was weird was that the zombies were completely cognizant and had most of their old memories so they are like their regular selves until you make them angry or they eat you.

So, that was my weekend in a wrap. Did you watch any good movies over the weekend? Any recommendations for me to watch (preferably at home)?

Top 10 Things I Would Do With an Extra Hour a Day

One of my most frequent statuses on Facebook is that there really is not enough time in the day. With all of the schoolwork and house chores I have to get done on a regular basis, I am most often then not, left with no me time. If they could add just one hour extra to each day, there are so many possibilities for my day.

Here are the top ten things I would do if I had just one hour extra a day (not in any specific order):

1. For one thing, I would have more time to blog and maybe I wouldn’t have had such a hiatus. I love to write, whether it is in my blog or in my own private journal, but I usually don’t have the time, which really sucks because I think that self reflection is extremely important psychologically.
2. Another thing I could do with my extra hour is yoga. I actually need to do yoga per doctor’s orders, but with all the schoolwork that needs to get done, my physical fitness and health usually has to take the back burner.
3. If there was an extra hour in each day, I could read more books for fun. It sucks having to read textbooks all the time. They are boring and make you think you hate reading, but that’s not true. I just hate reading textbooks. With an extra hour a day I could read fun books to get me out of my head (and that would probably keep my stress levels lower too).
4. I could play with my cat, Athena, and make some pretty great cat videos that would eventually be posted to this blog. She is just a kitten and I feel like she doesn’t get all the attention she deserves since I am so busy with school all the time.
5. I could start taking pictures again. I would actually have a little extra time for photography. I’m not talking about long photo walks or anything like that, but I’m talking about a nice 15 to 30 minute walk after dinner with just my camera. It’s got a layer of dust about an inch thick, I swear.
6. I could bake yummy goodies for the house. My boyfriend is always saying he wishes we could have fresh baked brownies and cookies every once in a while and I love to bad, but it really is very time consuming. However, with an extra hour a day, I could actually bake something at least once a week to have some yummy sweet treats in the house for my hubby and me.
7. I could spend some more time with my family if I had an extra hour a day. I could actually visit my grandmother or mother. My grandmother says she hasn’t seen me since early September. That’s really unforgivable, but with all the homework and chores I have to do on a daily basis, I can’t afford to visit with Grammies even just for an hour.
8. I could start crafting. I love doing crafts and DIY projects, but I just don’t have the time for stuff like that. I started learning how to crochet and want to crochet an Afghan for our couch, but don’t have the time available to put into it, but I bet if I were to crochet just for an hour each day, I could have that Afghan ready by the time the cold weaner comes (it comes late here in Miami).
9. I could spend time on my hygiene and appearance. I’m not saying I don’t shower every day (I do), but an extra hour would give me the time to straighten my hair or actually do something with it. Maybe I could start putting on makeup and making myself look pretty. I would have the time to actually take care of my face the way I’m supposed to, not just the quick wash I do in the morning and at night before jumping in bed. I could use exfoliators and moisturizers and astringents, and all that crap they tell me is good for my skin. It would be nice to be pretty every once in a while instead of looking like the crazy, burned out I feel.
10. Finally, with an extra hour a day, I could actually get a full nights sleep without worrying that I won’t have enough time to get things done. I could actually use the snooze button on my alarm that I only dare to use sometimes and then regret it later.

Breaking the Block: The Reader’s Block

I’m going to start using the Daily Post prompts to help me write every day. Just so I can start getting back to blogging regularly. The Daily Post for today was about Reader’s Block.

I think the longest I ever went without reading a book that was for fun (I’m always reading after all, such is the life of a college student) was three months. Sometimes I get so caught up in school stuff and reading textbooks or children’s picture books for class that I don’t want to read, that I forget reading is for fun too.

Whenever this happens I get antsy. I’m an avid reader after all. I spent a whole summer in elementary school where I only left my room to eat and go to the library to get more books. I must have read over 75 books that summer!

However, I wouldn’t say there’s one particular book that gets me reading again when this happens. I’m always itching to read, but when I find myself stuck reading only things I HAVE to read as opposed to reading for pleasure, I always go back to my favorite series.

See, my theory is that I stop reading because of my excuse that I don’t have time to read with everything going on in life, but that simply isn’t true. I start to read one of my favorite childhood series such as Harry Potter or Anne of Green Gables I don’t have the pressure of having to focus so much on the plot because I already know it and I have that safety blanket that if I can’t finish the book I won’t be upset because I’ve already finished it before. But what starts to happen is I realize there is always some time to read for fun. There is always a need for some me time. And I start to see new books I want to read.

That’s how I break the block. Easing myself into reading new things by starting with some old favorites.

If one cannot read a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at all. – Oscar Wilde

 

The First Cat Video of Many to Come

Kittens are funny. I always catch Athena doing odd things and we have only had her for a week. One thing is for sure: I’m never bored with her around. Especially the later at night it gets!

It’s Been a While…

It’s been a while since I last posted and a lot has happened to me in that year. Here’s what I’ve missed out on:

• I moved again, to a smaller on bedroom with my boyfriend within the same complex and I am totally obsessed with my apartment. It’s beautiful and all my own again.
• We got a kitten last Sunday. She’s all black with hello-green eyes and about 11 weeks old. She is absolutely precious.
• I am in my final year of school and have had to stop working all together to keep up with school work and all my assignments.
• I’ve learned how to crochet. I’m not a pro yet, but I can crochet a blanket or scarf if I wanted to.
• I started gardening, and then my brother got into a car accident and my garden died, and now I am trying to regrow my garden. Right now I have two strawberry and two tomato plants trying to grow on my balcony.
• I went vegetarian on the weekdays, then full veg, then vegan, then back to vegetarian eating fish and chicken very occasionally for health reasons.
• Oh, and I’m doing yoga now too (at home of course).

So basically, I am still a homebody and proud of it. In fact, I am leaving my house less and less every day. I had been caught up with work and school and I had stopped blogging, but I am finding that if I don’t start making some time for me, even if it is just little projects like this blog, I am going to drive myself crazy so I want to start using this blog to motivate myself with little projects that are just for me: gardening, cat photos and videos of the newest addition to our family, reading books, watching movies and TV shows, and cooking new and delicious meals.

Here are some of the pics of the new place! I’m super psyched about it. The wood-looking foods (it’s really linoleum but it looks great either way) makes the place seem homier than the last two apartment we had. The kitchen is all updated with brand new appliances, countertops, and cabinets.

The updated kitchen in my new apartment. I love that the floors look like wood.

Smaller living room, but it just feels cozier to me.

Panorama view of our bedroom with the new furniture inside it.

Panorama view of the living area and kitchen in the new apartment. I’m totally in love!

Here is our beautiful new kite Athena. We adopted her from PetsMart when she was 10 weeks old last Sunday, so she is now 11 weeks old. She is playful and cuddly and wonderful. She also keeps me company when I’m home alone. She’s kind of like my boyfriend and I’s child since we aren’t planning on having any children of our own.

Here is Athena on adoption day. She was too cute and she was the most loving and playful cat there. My boyfriend chose her because she licked him and looked like a panther. (Can you believe they had named this beauty Maxine?! That had to be changed right away.)

Here is Athena in her new home, loving life and obsessed with watching TV like me. Definitely my child.

And here is a sneak peek at my garden. It’s not much to look at right now but soon I can transplant those tomatoes and hopefully I will have tomatoes and strawberries in the spring!

Strawberries and tomatoes growing on my balcony.

So that is my update for today. I’m going to be posting regularly about the movies and TV shows I’m watching and the books that I’m reading as well as some fun new recipes!

I’ve got a new home

This weekend we moved into a two bedroom with my cousin. I love this place! We have our own little hallways, my bathroom is bigger and my closet is bigger, since we are living with someone else all of our office stuff and books are in our room now.

When we lived in the one bedroom on our own I didn’t spend much time in our room except to maybe watch tv before I slept. Since moving here I feel like my room is my sanctuary.

Not that moving in with my cousin was a bad thing. Actually, so far it’s really great. I have someone to eat dinner with. I’m not home alone when my boyfriend is at work. No having him here is great, but my room feels like a special place now.

Moving has also given me the chance to become more organized. I’m setting up a place for everything and everything in its place (now if only I could get my boyfriend to understand how that works) and I even set up a cleaning schedule so the apartment can stay nice.

Hopefully everything will be organized by the time fall semester starts so that I can be organized with school too and still manage to have a social life.

I can see myself spending lots if time in this apartment. Baking days have already been arranged and I’m looking for a day that we can craft or have a sketch in.

On the Move

The rent in our apartment is about to go up so my boyfriend and I decided to find a roommate. When we first moved in together we were a little bit of a snob about this. We wanted a place that was completely “our own”. We didn’t want to have to share space.

We also weren’t positive about who we could be comfortable with as a roommate. My girlfriends weren’t close enough to my boyfriend so he would be hiding in his room all the time and my boyfriend wasn’t comfortable leaving me at home for long periods of time with his guy friends since he has a night job. And plus, his friends, although I love them, are not the cleanest of people and we wanted to be able to control that.

So we did the living by ourselves thing for a while. But it is getting increasingly more difficult to do that without a roommate especially when we both want to go to school and can’t work full time or two jobs anymore. My cousin and his girlfriend were also wanting to move out on their own but as his girlfriend isn’t ready yet and even if she were they wouldn’t be able to afford it, my cousin needed to find a place and rather than pay $700-800 and stay in a little efficiency or room for rent with people he doesn’t know, we offered to share a two bedroom two bath apartment with him and then where never his girlfriend is ready to move out she can move in too.

It works out for us all financially and I’ll have more company instead of being home alone all the time. My boyfriend is comfortable leaving me home alone with him because we are family and him and my boyfriend are good friends by now so he will be comfortable hanging out in the common area.

We don’t move into the new apartment until mid-August but I am just bursting with excitement. I can’t wait to start saving money and planning dinners and EVERYTHING.

Of course there are things that I’m worried about: privacy, having enough me time alone, keeping the place clean, and of course what if we all end up hating each other by the end of it. But my and my boyfriend moved in together in closer quarters and we have flourished. I don’t see why this should be any different. Pus, I made a roommate rules and agreement contract stating what we should do for privacy, couple time, cleaning and any other minor issues we thought might come up.

I this this is just one of those life experiences that are good to have and I can’t wait to get started!

Here is a floor plan of the new apartment we will be moving into. My boyfriend thinks I am a dork, but my favorite thing about this move is that I’ll finally get a walk in closet. It’s the little things in life that tend to make me happiest.

Book Nook: Skippyjon Jones and Khaled Hosseini

I’ve decided to add a category to my blog about books. I am a huge book worm and quite obsessive about them.

Lately I have taken to reading a lot of children’s literature for my reading class at FIU, but I have completely fallen in love with them. Adult books just don’t really do it for me like kids books do. Especially the Skippyjon Jones books by Judy Schachner. They are officially my new favorite kids picture books.

The Skippyjon Jones books are about a little Siamese cat whose ears are too big and who head is too big so he likes to imagine he is a chihuahua to the dismay of his mother and the bewilderment of his sisters. He gets into all sorts of crazy adventures with his friends in his closet to Mexico Los Chimichangos, a wild band of colorful chihuahuas.

The stories are all “roll on the floor laughing” hilarious, the pictures are beautiful, and they have these great little songs and rhymes. In conclusion, the best Read Aloud books I have ever read in my entire life and my only regret is that they weren’t around when I was little so I have top use the guise of buying them for my future classes or nieces and cousins when we all know I’m  buying them for myself!

Although, kids literature is amazing, I do realize that I am an adult so I have to read some adult literature too. A couple years ago I read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. It was an absolutely amazing read and really opened my eyes to how different life is outside the United States.

The Kite Runner is about two boy characters and their relationship, but Hosseini has another book with two girl characters that I have begun to read. I thought that it would help me get a view of what my life could have been like if I didn’t grow up here in America. Once again, Hosseini hit a homer.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is absolutely incredible, illuminating, touching, and surprisingly it feels like a girl wrote it, not a male guessing at how women feel. It intertwines the stories of two girls who grow up in Afghanistan and the troubles and adversity they face and how too completely different lives can go through such similar things.

 

Skippyjon Jones books

Skippyjon Jones
Skippyjon Jones in the Doghouse
Skippyjon Jones in Mummy Trouble
Skippyjon Jones and the Big Bones
Skippyjon Jones Lost in Spice
Skippyjon Jones, Class Action
Skippyjon Jones, Cirque de Ole

Books by Khaled Hosseini

The Kite Runner
A Thousand Splendid Suns
And the Mountains Echoed (5/21/13)

Have you read any of these books? Which ones? And what did you think about them?

 

Two Computer Games That Have Made Me More of a Homebody Than I Already Was

I suck at video games. I can’t use an Xbox or Playstation controller to save my life. No hand eye coordination when it comes to buttons. But I do love them. It’s like I have this sick need to be really bad about something so I can laugh at myself.

I bought my boyfriend Borderland for his birthday and he wanted me to try playing it with him because I thought it looked so interesting, and when I tried and he was trying to teach me the controls… I cried. I mean sobbed. I mean totally broke down and died crying.

It was awful. I couldn’t even stay looking straight ahead and all I saw was sky the whole time until I just was just mercifully killed. Needless to say he doesn’t let me play video games like that anymore and we stick to the sighting games where I can button mash my life away. I’ all about the button mashing and I’m quite lucky in it, making some pretty impressive wins.

I am, contradictorily enough, pretty god at computer games. Maybe it’s because I’ve been using one since I was like… 4? I think. The commands are more familiar to me and I kind of kick butt. So I’ve started playing two games that have totally taken over my life: Sims 3 and Spore.

For those of you who don’t know, Sims3 is a game where you create and control a household of individuals, creating their house, building their careers, hobbies, skills, and relationships with other Sims. The game is very detailed, I found out I can zoom in close enough to actually watch TV with them, see them eating food and read with them (although you can’t understand the Sim writing. The Sims have complete lives, they make babies and are mortal and die, but after your original Sims die, you play with their offspring, who have physical traits and skills and personalities that are a mix of the two parents like in real life.

Now, I ask myself, why would I play out someone else’s whole life instead of living out my own, but see I am living out my life! My genus self actually created a Sim for myself and my boyfriend. I am working as a journalist until I can find a teaching position, and my boyfriend is a prep cook at the local restaurant. I modified the Sims so that we look like ach other and have the same traits and characteristics we have in real life. I look at it as a kind of study as to how we are doing. My guess is that Sims uses what would most likely happen if two people of certain likes and dislikes and skills came together. I just want to make sure we are on track. A little creepy, no? Well, I love it. Plus, I can’t afford to have a house right now and this way I get to design my own home, which is one of my favorite past times.

The other game that I have quickly become obsessed with is Spore. I could actually see me using this game in a Biology class to show how the evolutionary process takes place and how we mostly likely came into existence. It is a game where all your choices have consequences and each consequence will determine whether you evolve to see another day or die off.

You start off as a cell, you can choose to be an herbivore or a carnivore or an omnivore. You find pieces of the meteor that brought you to this planet and gave you life that contain more parts that you can use when you evolve. Once you have evolved enough t have legs, you move on land where you must mingle with other creatures who are trying to evolve like you. You can choose to fight them and dominate or befriend them, remembering that all choices have consequences. After mingling with creatures you can receive new parts that you use in evolution. You also grow in brain size.

This goes on and on until you are evolved beings much like humans. It really is quite an addictive game and I got to make my OogieBoogie (that’s what I named my creature) pink and blue. She is awesome!

Last night was Friday and no one could come over and I spent six hours playing these games and woke up this morning thinking about them. I have found my new passion. I always kid around with people telling them that I’m going to be dictator of the world one day and control what people eat and how they dress and everything so that I can live in the most perfect world. With these games I have this power… and just as I expected, the world is a better place in my games.