Showing posts with label Personal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Personal. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Friday, February 12, 2016

Convention Spotlight: Wizard World Tulsa - Day Three

Day Three – October 25, 2015

On the last day of Wizard World Tulsa I actually got to the convention kind of early, partly because I was terrified I would sleep past my check-out time at the hotel so I woke up super early and grabbed breakfast downtown. Afterwards I walked around to see more of the city until the convention started. Downtown Tulsa is very walkable.


(All photos are my own.  Please let me know if you'd like to be credited as one of the below cosplayers.  Thanks)

Convention Spotlight: Wizard World Tulsa - Day Two

Day Two - October 24, 2015

I arrived at the convention center on Saturday close to noon and walked around the Exhibition Hall, where I found out vendors were selling beer!  Beer at a comic con?  How is this possible?  This is allowed?  I love Wizard World Tulsa!!!  I spotted the most adorable mother-daughter cosplay team walking past me, I love – LOVE that the mom was Peggy Carter and her daughter vintage Captain America, because, really, any mom will tell you their baby is the absolute love of their life.


(All photos are my own.  Please let me know if you'd like to be credited as one of the below cosplayers.  Thanks)

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Convention Spotlight: Wizard World Tulsa - Day One

Hello again.  In my first post for 2016, I mentioned how I wasn't ready to review 2015 in full.  This is because I got the opportunity back in October to cover all three days of the Wizard World Tulsa Comic Convention 2015 for a pop-culture website for women, PaperDroids.

Update - My full coverage has been posted at PaperDroids blog - please read for coverage of all three days.

(All photos are my own.  Please let me know if you'd like to be credited as one of the below cosplayers.  Thanks)

Day One - October 23, 2015

Before Wizard World Tulsa, my convention experience was limited to the time I went about 8 years ago with my younger sister to a local anime convention inside a halfway crumbling janky-looking mall, in the pre-streaming anime days, when you had to buy dubbed DVDs from Sam Goody and Borders.  I went more recently with my friend to Dallas Comic Con Fan Days for Saturday only, where I dressed up as a casual Wonder Woman lugging around three to four merchandise bags at a time, and not generally knowing how to do “hero poses” despite dressing as superhero.  Would I be able to stand all three days of full blown convention put on by Wizard World in a different city four hours away? 

Day One, I got to the Cox Convention Center in Tulsa just as the door were opening at 3pm.  I didn’t take a costume this time, preferring to dress comfortably, but I did bring a back-pack with an empty water bottle.  The convention was nicely laid out, well-staffed and brimming with excited volunteers.  The building itself is very pretty inside and it’s hard not to go “ooh” and “ahh” immediately as you walk in.

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Re-reading and Re-watching: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two


Who could have known?  Who could have known that esteemed and hallowed British actor Alan Rickman would have passed away last week, along with David Bowie?  Both after battling forms of cancer. 


I first became aware of Alan Rickman when my dad made us watch Die Hard on VHS.  Before Die Hard, the most effective villains were either Emperor Palpatine or the Nazis, not even counting Darth Vader because he redeemed himself in the end.  All other villains, in my limited child-hood knowledge of movies, mostly came from the earlier Bond films and many made the most bone-headed moves that would later spawn the Austin Powers parodies.  

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Re-reading and Re-watching: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Happy New Year, guys and gals!  I didn’t want to stop in my on-going series of re-reading and re-watching the Harry Potter series to do some sort of 2015 year in review.  Most of what happened you probably saw on my blog and to be honest, I wasn’t into reviewing the year, not just yet anyway.

So, to continue on, I have just finished the penultimate book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.  I’m re-reading from a more adult perspective ten years and some months years later from the original summer release of Book Six back in 2005.  Initially I started this project as an attempt to pick out more details of Houses Ravenclaw and House Hufflepuff since Pottermore, would later sort me into Ravenclaw and my best friend into Hufflepuff.  Like almost everyone else I was convinced I would be in Gryffindor. 

Book Six is one of my favorite books in the series, along with Book Two.  As soon as I finished reading Book Six for the first time, my mind was ablaze with the possibilities of what kind of object the seventh Horcrux would turn out to be.  Like my pronunciation of Hermione, the actual pronunciation of Horcrux was, way, way off from my interpretation.  (Why can’t they be Hor-cruz/Hor-cruise?)  Book Six has one of the better endings being entirely open-ended and somewhat cliff-hanger like, leaving ALL Harry Potter fans salivating in anticipation for the final installment. 

As always, spoilers to follow.


Book


Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Postcards from Milan


Milan likes to have fun.  On the way to see the Duomo of Milan, my parents and I were weaving through the beautiful streets lined with impossibly tall, incredibly old ornate buildings, the kind you'd see in most major cities in Italy, when we came across clearing and saw a modern sculpture of a hand flipping you off, placed right in the middle of the street.

Friday, September 25, 2015

Venice/ Venezia - 2 Days in Venice


When we, my parents and I, first arrived at the train station in Venice from Florence we saw the beautiful greenish water immediately.  All the canals and all the buildings fronting them, their stone steps entirely immersed in the lapping green waves. Walking alongside canal there are quite a few souvenir stands, filled with captain hats and those elaborate glittering Venetian carnival masks but as I was passing one such stand I saw for a brief second a t-shirt that featured a square shaped maze and along the bottom of the maze there was a phrase in white letters, "Venice - Get Lost".

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Roman Holiday - Part Two


Probably surprising no female ever, I actually did some research prior to packing for my trip to Italy. Dreamt of it, fantasized about what perfect little outfits to pack.  See, I wanted to look like I belonged in Italy and decided upon the advice of travel blogs and posts to pack mostly layers and mostly black clothing.  Black is chic and fits in anywhere, right?  Well the truth of it is, you can pretty much wear anything you want to, especially in Rome.  There are SO MANY tourists, everywhere, that you can wear shorts, flip-flops, sports bras, sweats, yoga pants.....whatever you please, and no one will bat an eye.  

Monday, September 14, 2015

Roman Holiday - 3 Days in Rome


There is much to be said about traveling overseas with your parents once you are in your 30's.  I won't go into too much detail here, as there are probably not enough words to describe all the little moments of stress, laughter, joy, tears, minor fights, being completely lost in Venice and after an exhausting 20+ hours of flights and layovers, harmonizing with your mom to Phil Collins' Land of Confusion in totally deserted airport.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

The Power of Mindfulness


Before we delve deep into the concept of mindfulness, I just want to scale it back a bit and confess something to you all.  Ya'll, online dating is hard.  It totally messes with your mind and any remote amount of self-confidence you may have.  Subjecting yourself on a weekly basis to complete and total strangers for the purposes of romantic involvement is draining and somewhat unhealthy.  

Thursday, August 6, 2015

Oh Hai


I'm posting again for the first time in four months, and you know what?  I'm not even going to apologize.  Because life happens and it's not even a glamorous life in which so many amazing, exciting opportunities and adventures are going on, that there is simply no time to blog.  It's because work gets busy, or relationships rise and fall, or your inspiration falls flat, because let's face it, I don't live a life worth blogging consistently about on a regular basis.  No one truly does.  Why are there five Kardashian sisters on one show?  Why doesn't Kim or Kendall have their own show?  Because even their lives can't sustain enough footage for a on-going series.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Austin Calling

 

Man, sorry for the infrequent posts.  I can't seem to find extra time these few weeks to catch up on my blog but I wanted to share some photos from my recent trip to Austin with my friend Christina, back in February.  

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Thursday, January 22, 2015

The Height of Luxury – Pizza and Sushi


One day last week I treated myself to lunch at Central Market’s indoor café.  Central Market is an upscale grocery store similar to Whole Foods.  You can get fancy bread, fancy wines, fancy cheese, fancy to-go meals, fancy cooked to order meals and you can sit down for lunch or dinner in there indoor café.


Friday, January 2, 2015

5 New Year's Resolutions That I Promise Aren't Lame


Happy New Year!  Hopefully ya'll spent New Year's with friends and family!

Normally I don't do New Year's Resolutions, and if I do they are almost always super easy like say smuggling a hot dog into a movie screening.

Yes that was really a resolution of mine for 2012!  Then I lied to my mom, when she called me and said my resolution was to get in shape, which is what I always say and never, ever do.

This time around I thought I would pick five doable yet legitimate resolutions.  




1.  Go out to a nice restaurant and eat an amazing meal once every three months.

Around the middle of year in 2014, I started cooking more meals at home, which helped me to lose some weight and helped me to stay relatively healthy during the cold/flu season.  I still plan on doing this but during the weekend, I had a habit of going out to eat at fast food places like Sonic.  I probably spent more money going to Sonic and Fuzzy's than treating myself to a nice dinner once every three months.  Plus, I feel that living so close to Dallas and Fort Worth, both of which have great restaurants, is kind of pointless unless I experience from time to time the good places that both have to offer.



2.  Do not believe the hype for music festivals and only go back to the ones I've had great time at.

I'm notorious for believing all the music festival hype and buying tickets to a three day festival, only to just go on Saturday, spend all day in lines and/or stand in the freezing rain to watch a band waay past their prime.  By this time, I know which festivals I had fun at last year, so I'll only be going to those this year.  I'll be saving time and money.


3.  Be relentlessly and unapologetically, yourself.

Look, some time during this year and any other year, life will throw us curve-balls.  Bad news, funerals, disappointments, injuries, etc.  To deal with any of these things while trying to be a skinnier, prettier, happier version of yourself is just too hard.  Be who you are and you will shelter any coming storms, I promise.

4.  Wear bright colors to work.

Right around November of 2014, I started to tone down the colors in my wardrobe and started wearing more button downs in neutral colors.  No real reason for it.  I was just out shopping with my mom and we found some ladylike and work appropriate blouses to wear under sweaters instead of my old standbys of cotton t-shirts,  I got bought myself some new sweaters at the same time, all in neutrals.  I thought I looked good buy my co-workers noticed immediately and not in a good way.  They missed the bright pop of color that is usually my signature, and now I miss it too.  I'm not skinny, I'm a big girl and I hate fading into the background.  2015 will be the year of color!




5.  Keep reading like a beast and write more!

Since getting my library card back in May to check out Dave Ramsay's Total Money Makeover, which I highly recommend since I was able to work off my consumer debt by year's end (which is probably my best accomplishment all year), I have kept returning to the library twice a month to check out two novels each time and read through them like an absolute beast.  I'm back to my old high school reading speed, which was usually insanely fast.  I love it and I don't plan on quitting in 2015.  Reading helps me to figure out my own strengths as a writer, so now I just need to write more, which is what absolutely every writer says.

What about you?  What goals or aspirations have you come up with for the New Year?



Friday, December 26, 2014

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Give Thanks - The #1 Thing I'm Most Thankful for This Year

I’m thankful for my sisters.

Five years ago, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, my dad passed away.  It wasn't tragic or even totally unexpected.  Our dad just succumbed to his ongoing health problems and passed due to natural causes.  At age 47.  Leaving three adult children and twin 6 year old girls.