Meet Larry B. Jellyguts – My Cat

This here is Larry B. Jellyguts. He is my pet cat.

Truth be told, there's absolutely nothing special about him. He's fat and lazy and sheds too much, just like any other middle aged house cat. Still, I want to share him with you because I've wanted to do a post about pets for a while, and today he was just lying on my bed and stretching adorably, so I thought, "Why not." This is kind of a random post and I'm not sure exactly how to format it, so to keep it simple, here are five facts about Larry.

Food Friday #001

If you don't know already, I am a huge fan of food. I feel extremely lucky to have a high metabolism that let's me eat basically whatever I want without easily gaining weight. It's balanced out by being a picky eater, and also the fact that I get extremely nauseous from eating anything more than small amounts of fat, but I'm glad I don't have to count calories every time I feel hungry. Since I don't have an Instagram, I thought I'd share some of my favorite foods this week here on this blog! Please excuse the crappy collage; please let me know in the comments if you know of any good collage making programs. I hope you enjoy!

6 Beginner Bare Basics Beauty Budget Buys & Brands

I've noticed that a lot of popular blogs include fashion, style, and product review. I'm not really into that kind of stuff, but I thought I'd give it a try and share the basic products from my favorite beauty brands that a bare minimum high school makeup wearer like me should have. I do consider myself very much a brand loyalist (#obsessed!); consistent quality, value, and customer service have proved the merits of these brands to me again and again, so I recommend them to my friends quite often. This is my first time doing a product review, so bear with me. If you have any suggestions please let me know in the comments! Here are the items that I am reviewing:

Half a Year of Blogging (Quick Update)

If you've noticed lately, I've been trying to do daily posts. However, I have been too busy and tired, and I was working on two other large posts, so I didn't get a chance to think about what I wanted to say. I really wish I did, because I just noticed that yesterday was the exact half year anniversary of the day I started blogging!

Since then, I've published 35 posts, updated my layout and background too many times to count, and most importantly, after joining numerous blogging communities, received great feedback and connected with a girl named Melia on the other side of the world in Jakarta, Indonesia as an email pen pal! Maybe blogging can make a comeback after all. Through our correspondence, I've found out that we're remarkably similar in many ways, including our birthdays, which are just two days apart. Her blog is http://meliaslittlejournal.blogspot.com/ and I love reading her posts, which make me realize, being a teen in high school is a similar experience no matter where in the world you are.

It's only been half a year into blogging, and I'm so excited for what's to come. I love blogging as a form of letting my thoughts out into the world, while not having to force them on to people. So if you're reading this right now, I think you're an awesome person!

25 Things in My Garden

I went outside today (woah, wait, what?! Outside?! Yes, indeed!) and I was pleasantly surprised by all of the plants and flowers growing around the house. In order to be more eco-friendly, there's no lawn in the front or back. As a result, the front of the house is a flower garden, and the backyard is a vegetable garden. All pictures were taken by me with a Nikon D3100 camera at around 6:30pm with (unbelievably) no editing. Excuse the boring taglines; if you happen to be able to identify the species of any of the flowers, a comment is greatly appreciated!

5 Quick Tips for Cleaning Your Room

Not my room, but I wish it were.

I've often been told that I am a very organized person, and indeed I do take pride in being neat, but despite this my room somehow turns into something like a tornado wreck at the end of every week. Even if I don't do anything but surf the web all day, clothes will end up everywhere, and stacks of papers and random items accumulate on my desk. A messy room severely affects my ability to concentrate and my mood in general, but luckily over the years I've picked up (no pun intended) a few tricks on how to clean up quickly. Hopefully you'll find this useful too!

PSA: Trolls on the Internet

No matter what corner of the internet one is on, one will always encounter trolls. According to Wikipedia, a troll is "a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion." The natural reaction of a rational human being is to respond with logical, sane explanations of why the troll is wrong, but beware! A troll is an idiot and will not respond to reason; the more you try to explain, the stupider it gets, and then it will start insulting you. Likewise, if you see a hungry goose, do not approach it. Do not offer your bread and nourishment. The goose will see it as a threat and attempt to murder you. The best thing to do is to just leave it alone to its simple little life and do not get involved. Stay safe everyone. ∆

I'm Bored of Social Media!

It's only been two weeks into summer vacation and I AM BORED OUT OF MY MIND.

I've spent these last two weeks just sitting on my bed aimlessly switching between tabs, only getting up to eat or use the bathroom. Getting enough sleep and not having any stress for once is nice, but there isn't anything to do. I'd rather be going out with friends, climbing mountains, getting coffee, watching movies, doing actual things with actual people. Or, alternatively, I wish it were more socially acceptable to just go out and do things like going to the the movies alone. There are so many new movies I want to see, but I don't want to have to ask all of my friends, only to find out that all of them can't or don't want to go. It's disappointing and frustrating, especially to an extremely introverted person like me who does not prefer to socialize in large groups and therefore rarely gets asked to go places. Additionally, most people are already busy or out of town, so the only form of contact I have with them is through social media.

I have been an avid user of Facebook for many years already, and have gotten involved in Pinterest and Youtube frequently over the last year or so. I very recently made a Twitter and Tumblr this summer under a different name because I don't want to get too attached to them. I also kind of use Google+ with this blog. However, this rapid infusion of social media into my life has left me already exhausted with all my accounts. Not that I don't use them anymore, it's that they're not as interesting as they seemed when I first started. A brief period of discontent forced me to reevaluate the function of these sites, why I don't really need them, and why I still use them anyway. Here is what I've come up with.

BakeFest: Variations on Pie!

After over a month of delays due to schoolwork and whatnot, Sonia and I finally managed to get together for a bakefest! In the first two pictures, you see Sonia's delicately crafted Apple Pie Rosettes. I don't know how she did it – they turned out so well! If it were me, the products would probably be featured in a "Pinterest Fails" article. The last two pictures are of my Lemonade Pie Cookies, which look far from the picture in the recipe, but nevertheless tasted amazing. Rather than using store bought crust, I opted to make my own (due to the fact that I am broke, not because I'm good at it) so the cookies turned out a lot thicker and took a lot longer than the 45 minutes the recipe claimed. In fact, Sonia had made two batches of the apple roses before I had even finished my first batch, despite skipping one step in crimping back the edges. Towards the end, I also realized that some of the cookies didn't have enough filling, so I attempted to stuff some more in through the cuts in the top, but the difference was negligible; they were still delicious. We ended up burning our mouths on fresh out of the oven cookies, but overall it was a very fun activity and I look forward to having another one soon, possibly again this summer. ∆

Impromptu Beach Trip

On Monday, my family dragged me along with them to the beach.

#obsessed: Selene – Imagine Dragons

I haven't been posting for a while because so much stuff has been going on; I actually had a lot of heavy, depressing stuff lined up, but I'll do an update post soon instead. In the meantime, I've been quite obsessed with this song for the last few days. I found it through mobile Spotify, which was obnoxiously suggesting songs (you don't know what I like, you don't know my life!) and even worse, not playing a single one of the songs on my playlist. I was trying to sleep at the time, and I had a very specific playlist set up that helped me fall asleep, so it was extremely frustrating to not be able to access it. I tried deleting and reinstalling the app twice, but nothing worked. I ended up awake until 2:30am. I was so frustrated, I probably could have thrown my phone at the wall, except for the fact that it was an old Android and would have left a dent in the wall and ended up with not a scratch, so I didn't. I did, however, retake my old iPod touch that my parents arbitrarily confiscated years ago, in revenge, because the "smartphone" that I have currently is more useless than a brick. However, through the Spotify song suggestions, this one kept popping up and stuck in my head when I was in a more awake mood. I ended up going through the entire Night Visions album by Imagine Dragons and finding that some of the less mainstream songs were quite happy and catchy. I actually downloaded the entire extended edition onto the iPod, as well as some other songs, and the whole ordeal has ended quite satisfyingly. I still like this one the best and I've been listening to it on repeat; it has an American Authors meets Lorde kind of vibe, and it's the type of song that I would listen to first thing in the morning. Enjoy!