Summary | Best Of 2015

Hey guys!

Can you believe it that after tomorrow it will be the first day of 2016? I find it a bit weird that we all started off wondering how 2015 could turn out to be, how much of the movie Back To The Future would come true. Thankfully the way teenagers wear their clothes didn’t become a trend as the movie had pictured it, but then again the fact that the Chicago Cubs made it into the playoffs really surprised the crap out of everybody, old and young. The prophecy of the team winning the World Series looked to be sincere and then they lost, but hey! They still played their best in years and managed to get themselves that far is an accomplishment in my book!

Between everything in the world taken offensive by almost everybody aggravates me to the core. There was not one thing that hit the internet that somebody didn’t take offense to and spoke their peace about it. And then you had the dress debate; what was it: black and blue or gold and white? I remember everybody just exploding on my social medias over what they were seeing. I saw black and blue and Blondie saw gold and white, I remember looking at her like “what the hell?!” It just didn’t make sense but after a couple of days, it all went away.

For me personally, this year wasn’t the best in my opinion. One example, it reminded me how long I’ve been out of school and knowing I missed my five year high school reunion really struck a cord with me, I think this was the downhill of having any hope for a change. I felt stuck a lot more this year, there’s nothing worse than feeling alone and like you can’t change your current situation. I feel I believed a lot more broken promises. What puzzles me though is that I still had hope for a better day, that part never went away and in a way I was happy it stayed right along with me. It kept me looking forward to the next day or day after to see what happens next.

Despite all of the ugly that was going on from within, there was still a lot of good that happened this year too! I feel as though it was a blessing in disguise when it came during the later months of 2015. My best friend Zack was back! It was a sweet evening when my dad had seen him while he was driving around, he asked him if he wanted to take a ride, it was a little surreal to see him standing in the entrance of my room with a great big smile on his face. I didn’t cry this time around and I’ve enjoyed seeing him every once in a while, according my parents everytime they see him out and about, he gives them a big ole hug! He gives the best hugs, he never gives me the wimpy hugs that my own sister gives me! Everybody thinks they’re going to break me and you’re not so stop doing it please!

Speaking of my sister, Blondie had herself a good year. I think that was one of the best things about 2015 and I’ve been trying to tell myself over and over that maybe this was her year to have some happiness since 2014 was a good one for me. She and her boyfriend Brandon went to Hawaii for a whole week, she got to go to a Taylor Swift concert, she became a CNA, moved out of the house, has 3 kittens, and now they are going to adopt a puppy! Just nobody tell my dad though because he doesn’t know it yet! This year brought back another sister that I didn’t think would come back to us. My older sister Nikki reached out to Blondie and my dad again and we’ve all met each other again and it’s been very interesting. I’ll be honest though I’m still quite hesitant because I don’t want to feel rejected like I did four years ago, so I’ve been trying to take things one day at a time. She has to feel comfortable with her surroundings and one day we’ll meet her boyfriend and kids too. Yeah, I’m an aunt!

We had our last batch of litters, Bootsie and her two female kittens from previous litters Wren and Midget gave us plenty of babies to love on this year. In April, they’ll be a year old! My mom unfortunately lost her big baby, our oldest cat Oliver had to be put down in the first month of the new year! Thankfully, Midget gave birth to a solid orange kitten for my mom. I got to name him Otis! Now he lives with my sister because he was too tiny to be living outside in the cold, but she still got her orange kitty though! One of the promises she made my dad was once she got her orange kitten, all 12 cats were fixed in August and they came back with flu and were sneezing and coughing, which went to ChiChi and then we thought dad was going to have a cow because his baby wasn’t feeling good. They’re all doing good now!

I remember at the last of January, my sister found her old digital camera and she gave it to me as a late Christmas present. I was very excited to have one as I no longer had a way to take or upload pictures from my phone. Everybody wondered if I could use a smartphone, I can use one but taking pictures is disastrous, trust me! I had to learn how to use it because I had never used one with my feet before. I actually looked forward to going outside to spend time with the kitties. I discovered I could hold my camera in four different ways! I’ve finally gotten comfortable with lifting it up in the air between both of my feet without dropping it on the floor and turning it sideways to take a picture now! Now I want to get a tripod and see what I can do with that! Maybe you’ll see me on YouTube someday! 😉

My last good thing to include in this post is one of the goals I had for 2015 was to start doing outfits of the day (OOTD) posts on here. I’ve been inspired by all of my blogger friends that I follow. For me though, it wasn’t about the clothes in general. I don’t really like my hands. I can’t move my arms away from my chest and they always block whatever is on my shirts. I’ve always had problems with hating my arms because they’re just there. So I figured if I did these posts I would start to build on my self-esteem a little. Well, it worked, but I didn’t think I would enjoy doing them so much! I’ve gotten to the point where I’m starting to pose more in the pictures. I even think my mom enjoys the fact that I do them too! I actually asked for more clothes for Christmas just so I could model them off on here!

My favorite posts of 2015:

• OOTD: Something New
• Guest Post | Carolee Part 2
• Coloring Easter Eggs
• Diversity In The Blogging World
• Here Kitty Kitty!
• Beware Of Human
• Mixtape: 2009-2015
• A Place I’d Never Set Foot In Again
• Good Man
• Being The Older Sister
• Christmas In July
• First Time Hosting A Blog Chat
• Better Than The Original
• Pearl Harbor
• For The Love Of Velvet Posters
• An Early Birthday Celebration
• Three New Nail Polishes
• A Little Blogger Confession
• Six Years Ago…
• Being Single Isn’t So Bad
• The Act Of The Disappearing Song
• What Can I Do?
• ‘Tis Not A Naked Tree
• To The Ones Who Mock Us

How did your year go? What were some of your good and bad moments? Do you have any advice to help me look forward to the new year and how to keep that motivation? 

Music | Best Of 2015

Hey guys!

It’s Tuesday, which is normally one of my music days of the week! 2015 was full of a lot of music for me. I always feel like I consume a lot of music but I definitely feel it all more starting like the 26th of December. I start to really think about the songs and artists I’ve listened to in the year. After getting out of the rock scene and transitioning into my mini pop phase I tend to go into after every five years is up. I’m not kidding, it happens everytime I get out of a genre. I was hooked to One Direction for seven months before the end of January came and then I found my next phase: EDM.

In my previous music related posts, I’ve explained that I’ve always been into dance music. I liked trance growing up and then dubstep after Blondie suggested I listened to Skrillex in 2011. Now I’ve been really committed to learning more genres in the electric dance world like moombahton and trap music, but it seems like I’ll be going at this a slow pace as those are the only two that I’ve really enjoyed lately. I still don’t like a lot of house music, it’s too boring for me! I started off my year listening to Dillon Francis, Alesso, Krewella, Yellow Claw, Jack Ü (which gave way to Diplo), Major Lazer, and Flosstradamus. In all honestly, there was more but this is all I could think of at the moment.

What’s really funny is that I thought I’d only listen to EDM for only a short time, maybe a few months as I was only listening to find a song that was basically fading from my memory. That came back to bite me in the butt, as I couldn’t tear myself away from anything Diplo – I didn’t know he produced Madonna’s album when I first heard it. It was already on my radar before that started so lay off me! When I first heard “Living For Love” I was actually listening to Prince’s single “This Could B Us” and because I am my mother’s daughter I ended up liking both of them at the same time.  I didn’t think I’d ever fall in love with a Madonna album as much as I have with “Rebel Heart” and I’m still trying to convert my mom but she has decided to take this time to listen to more rock music as I’m not as interested with it right now.

Whenever I get into a different music scene, I tend to want to everything and almost anything in that scene. I mean, the skull obsession I have is definitely from listening to too much heavy metal on full blast! However, I’m not into the crazy lifestyle of ravers. I’d rather go rock concerts any day and I find this shocking because I love a lot of bass but I don’t ever want to go to an EDM festival. The ones I’ve managed to find on YouTube is good enough for me! My neck and hips have been hurting me like they would if I sat in my chair with a bunch of crazies, at least this way I don’t have to worry about running over anybody’s feet in the process!

I tried to count all of the albums and EPs that I’ve listened to this year and I think it was like 32 altogether! After I got down counting them I thought to myself and went “no wonder my brain feels like it’s about to explode!” I listened to more EPs than I had thought I would. When they switched days of new releases to Friday, I’ve had to be a little bit more patient as I really liked it better when everything came out on a Tuesday. It was the day after Monday (we all hate Mondays!) and it just made me happy to be able to have new music to hear all week long. Now that it switched to Friday, I saw the positive in the fact that Friday’s are considered “paydays” but I don’t like the wait clearly.

My favorite EPs were:

“Holy Water” by Laurel
“Mine” by Phoebe Ryan
“Francesco Yates” by Francesco Yates
“This Mixtape Is Fire” by Dillon Francis
“Up In Flames” by Ruelle.

As far as favorite albums go:

“Run” by Alison Wonderland
“Skrillex and Diplo Presents Jack Ü” by Jack Ü
“Into The Sun” by Bassnectar
“Peace Is The Mission” by Major Lazer
“Take It Like A Man” by Butcher Babies
“Revival” by Selena Gomez
“Club Life Vol. 4” by Tiesto
“Chapter One” by Ella Henderson
“General Admission” by Machine Gun Kelly
“Get Weird” by Little Mix
“Malviolence” by New Years Day
“Stereotypes” by Black Violin

I did a lot of different reviews this year that I’ve been very proud of lately! If you would like to read any of those, they have their own page on here! Just click “Reviews” under the “Music” tab at top! I’m hoping to continue to do more of those in 2016 and I’m slowly getting arrangements to do my annual summer travels for helping you to discover new music that you may not have heard before. I have a two pages of my daily planner of countries and artists/bands to focus on! I’m actually excited about it! Of course, those will start up in May 2016!

What did you listen to in 2015? What genre were you just stuck on? What album was your favorite?

Christmas Day 2015

This was our family Christmas picture. It usually has a few more people in it, but we had some members of the family not feeling very well so they couldn’t come down, but we understood and know they’ll eventually come down soon anyways. My cousin Kristi managed to come down though!

She and I were the early birds Christmas morning despite the two hour drive between us. We were both awake at 4:30am and we were texting each other talking about the fact we were both very exhausted! My sleep has been jacked up since the Wednesday before my dentist appointment. I thought Christmas would be the one day I’d actually sleep in. Nope! Poor Kristi set her alarm for 4:30PM instead of AM and still managed to get up beforehand, what was funny though my mom did the same thing! She set hers for 6:30PM instead of AM. I have to say we like 5am and get an hour of “play time” before we get ready before going over to my nana’s. This time we just scrambled to get over there. We have a race to see who gets to nana’s house first, even if there’s snow and ice on the roads – we race. We actually lost to my sister and Brandon.

I’ll be honest there was a lot of things that bothered me this Christmas. Now that my sister doesn’t live at the house, my parents have lost their Christmas spirit. Neither one didn’t want to put up our big tree because they knew she wouldn’t be there that morning and on top of that, I think they wanted me to unwrap their presents they got me at nana’s so that both of us were in the same house. Thankfully my mom asked me what I wanted to and no offense to my sister but I’m not changing MY tradition just because she’s not there. Now that I got that off my chest, my mom separated my presents from both houses and I opened four and I got a white and baby blue striped hoodie, black and tan Aztec leggings, my first full on Marvel shirt with Cap America, Thor, Hulk and Iron Man on it. I wore it over to my nana’s! And lastly, which freaked me out a bit, my mom had gotten me a Batman shirt. I’ll explain in a bit of the significance of it in a bit!

Whenever we got over at nana’s, we decided to unwrap our presents from each other. It was a bit difficult to watch everybody unwrapping their presents, I wanted to spend my time taking pictures of everybody tossing paper around and getting excited but when you sit on the floor and can’t lift your feet up too far before falling over backwards, I had my mom take over for me. I got a gray and white buttoned up shirt, solid black shirt, red and white striped leggings, plus my Christmas-y printed leggings that I’ll wear year long I don’t care! Now about that Batman shirt, my sister’s boyfriend is a BIG Batman fan. He likes superheros in general, but Bruce Wayne is his favorite! Somehow my mom got all three of us different Batman shirts. He got one, I got one, Blondie got one and she hates whenever we talk about superheros!

Kristi hadn’t arrived yet at this point and I felt bad that we didn’t wait on her. I felt as though she would have enjoyed being an Elf like every year, but she did enjoy her gift from me though! She got a bunch of socks! The girl is just as bad as me, she likes her socks! My papaw mostly got shirts and sweatpants, that’s his usual. He technically can’t have any more singing animals because he’s running out of room on his piano! Poor guy! My nana got her normal big Calendar that she doesn’t ask her anymore because it’s just in routine now, but Brandon didn’t know what it was at first and we told him, “this is your first Christmas you’ll get used to it next year.”

After we got done unwrapping presents, my nana and I sat out in the living room talking to Kristi who at that point was very happy to be sitting down on the couch stretching out her legs. I think we sat out there talking for like an hour or so before the food was done. My dad made a small breakfast of ham that was soaked with a full can of RC because nana didn’t have any brown sugar! It was a good substitute though! He also made scrambled eggs,  plus our little pressies and sugar cookies as our sweets! My nana and I have a holiday DIY project, it’s our last one of the year and this time I came up with the idea and she ended up doing the work! It was a play on the British crackers, but they were essentially big candies. We had toilet paper rolls wrapped in candy cane tissue paper and inside was dark chocolate kisses and the whole thing was wrapped with parchment paper and a red tie of yarn. They were cute, but since the bad weather came two days before, I couldn’t help her out. I was bummed about that!

Kristi came over to the house for a bit, she and mom had talked about her taking home one of our kittens. She wanted her to take Tavy because he’s our little baby now. My mom hates the fact that he’s outside at night, because he’s so small. She always went home with Midget first, but then Grumpy (who doesn’t like people as much) jumped into her lap and let her pet him, it was quite shocking to my mom and I! Even our little Oscar was acting strange! He didn’t want to go around her or us at that point. The rest liked her though, but then our littlest gray and white kitten Ozzy got around her and he doesn’t like a lot of people either, but like Grumpy before him just crashed into her lap and didn’t try to fight whenever she went to put him in the car. He liked exploring her car and fall asleep in the seat on her way home. She said he’s adapting very well, which is very comforting for us!

After I came home, I decided to take pictures of majority of the gifts I had received and I have to say, it’s not smart to do that when you haven’t gotten a lot of sleep in about a week. I got too aggravated with them and once I was done, I decided to take a nap. I was asleep for four hours. I was feeling all sorts of things inside and thought I needed to express myself, so I unleashed it on my Facebook. My mom had told me that all I was feeling was part of growing up. Whenever I deny myself from feeling certain things it just comes bursting out of me all at once and apparently this was the ending result. I thought I’d never go back to sleep that night and boy was I wrong! I went to bed at 10pm and didn’t get up again until my mom came in before she left for work around 5am, still went back to sleep and got back up again at 10am!

 

“I don’t know if it’s the fact I haven’t had any decent sleep in a week but this Christmas has been different. It’s not the fact we had a couple family members missing from our usual gathering; it’s just there are a lot of other people out in this world who didn’t get to enjoy today. From a family friend who was away from her kids on probably one of her favorite holidays to the troops away from their families and then on top of all that, we have countries massacring each other left and right. It’s not right and It just makes me feel all down and considering how happy I started out this morning. I still hope everybody had a good Christmas with their family and friends though no matter what how you celebrated it!”

Yeah, that’s a bit of how my Christmas went this year. Now here are the rest of the pictures for you guys! What was your favorite gift that you got?

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Christmas Cookies

Hey guys!

Well, Christmas is over and it’s always sad, at least I thought it was sad that everytime you pump ourselves up for something and once it comes, it goes away as it never came at all.

My week leading up to Christmas wasn’t as exciting as I had expected it to be. There was a lot of bad energy around my family and a close family friend that it kind of brought everything to a halt. What was even more puzzling was that we were under a tornado watch on Wednesday. For us, having thunderstorms in November isn’t that bad, but this was odd even for us to hear thunder clashes outside the windows! I live in the Midwest and our “winter” is starting out like early autumn-like weather, having 55-60 degree temperatures and then on top of that the storms. What the crap?!?! However I don’t want to complain too much because I know how it’ll be from January to April!

Between our weather and family issues, my nana and I had to divide up doing our annual Christmas cookies in two days, they were supposed to be back-to-back but that didn’t happen! The week before I asked my blog friends what my nana and I could do about our sugar cookies. Last year, after we had baked them and everything, they got extreme hard and some of us had trouble chewing them. So thankfully I had some pretty good ladies giving us advice and instead of putting a timer on the oven we just kept an eye on them. However, the one time we go to do this of course, the dough doesn’t want to come out of the package for us. So we had roll them out in a ball and flatten, which at first made them look rustic and homemade and then they went into the oven and grew! Don’t believe me? Well, here ya go!

After we got like two packages cut and baked, my nana got pretty tired so we had to quit for the afternoon and I was okay with that. I came back on Christmas Eve and it was kind of weird in a way because I felt as though we were rushing! My mom had gotten us different food colors and sprinkles to decorate the cookies, I felt like a little kid. Since my nana decided to do our last DIY of the year by herself this was when my creative side decided to come out!

I’m the type of person who isn’t a big fan of frosting, and that goes with both cake and cookies! It’s just too much for me. My nana is the total opposite, she likes a lot of icing and she’ll literally pile it up on whatever she can, trust me! Sometimes she doesn’t even need cake or a cookie. You could clearly see a difference between each cookie on how much frosting was put on top of them! I also had to use my feet to work a spoon and butter knife to get the icing on top. Sometimes I just wish we didn’t have self-cautious people and I could just put my toes in it like finger paint (I did wash my feet before baking/decorating the cookies) it would be so much easier for me! I almost did it a couple of times I’m not going to lie! Once we had half of them finished and in the dish, I wanted a picture of them all stacked up together. Well, I guess my toes had frosting on the edges of them and I didn’t notice it quick enough and as I was taking the second picture the camera slipped right out of my toes into the pan making every cookie drop onto the floor… I almost started crying. I had to tell myself “it’s just spilled cookies. It’s just spilled cookies.” They were good though! We checked each one, don’t worry!

Thankfully by this time, my nana was finished eating her dinner because it was like 5:30pm, she took over the frosting part for me. I decided to do the sprinkles which to be perfectly honest is my favorite part. Now that you know I hate frosting, I like sprinkles more. It doesn’t bother me as much as the icing has in the past. I don’t know what’s wrong with me! Anyways, the star sprinkles were a big hit this year! We used the whole bottle. They were super cute! Once we were finished completely the lid was placed on top of the pan and we sat in our wheelchairs waiting for my mom to come pick me up.

Overall, it wasn’t that bad of an experience. This whole month went by too fast, so by the time we realized Christmas was here we couldn’t fit everything in at once! It wasn’t a bust though I mean we could have just said “screw it, buy some Oreos!” Just because there were a couple of slip ups doesn’t mean you should give up entirely. That’s why I decided to take over the sprinkles because I didn’t want to give up. My nana’s back was already giving her problems I needed to do something besides sit there and talk my head off, but as papaw was saying as a joke when we were sitting in the kitchen, “do you two have anything to say” because that’s all we ever do is talk our heads off. We can’t help it though!

Album Review: “Get Weird” by Little Mix

This has been a long time coming considering this album came out in early November. I know I suck! I really did want to do the review then but that whole month was not the best for me…

I’m a new Little Mix fan. You can blame it on LucyAndLydia from YouTube. They’re the ones that got me started on them. I’m definitely team Jade and Perrie! I think all four girls are gorgeous and have beautiful voices! I’ve been meaning to listen to their previous albums and over the summer I finally had the time to do it. I haven’t finished listening to all of their first album DNA but I did complete Salute. After listening to their recent release I have to say out of the three, this is best album yet! This album sounds more adult against the first two, they were more pop oriented and slightly kind of boring for me. This album has some depth and it’s just different in a good way!

All right, so let’s start off with their first single that came out in late September, just in time to be put into the rest of the classic Halloween related tracks. “Black Magic” is still being played EVERYWHERE! In last Wednesday alone, it popped up on my TV about four times in one hour! This track is definitely pop worthy, I didn’t realize how “dirty” it was until after a month or so. Those titles seem so innocent until you hear the song about 100 times in two months before you find out how naughty it really is! However, it’s still a great song! I am slightly over it though. The second song is called “Love Me Like You” and this one used to drive me nuts! I keep wanting to put the word “do” at the end because of Ellie Goulding! Anyways, this one sort of reminds me of Grease when they say “sha-la-la” in the beginning. The whole song is very slow, pop-y, but has this old bluesy/jazz soul to it. I’m hoping more pop stations play it so they stop playing the other one all the time, that sounds so mean, but give the other singles a chance people!

The next one is called, “Weird People” and I feel like this one is like MY song since I am a very weird person! This is another track that has an old feeling to it, almost 80’s pop vibe! I like it! I love how in every song on this album sounds so different! The fourth song is “Secret Love Song” and I really love this introduction. It’s so slow, almost a capella like. I’m still learning everybody’s voice in the group but I really like how you can’t tell who’s who, they sound like one person which is what you’re hoping that happens in a group. This song features Jason Derulo and at first, I didn’t like it but now I do. It’s a nice balance in voices! There’s a second version of this track, which is basically the same song without Derulo. I actually like it better even though there’s nothing really different with it! Next one is another upbeat track called “Hair” and this one has a total different sound to it. It’s very poppy, but has some hip hop accents. I feel like this is a very honest breakup styled song! I wish you could hear the word that is bleeped out in the choruses!

This one was my favorite tracks when I first listened to it mid-November! It’s called “Grown” everything about this song is on point! I love the sassy lyrics so much! This beat alone is just awesome! The hums make the ending of the choruses that much better! All that bass just makes me so happy! The next one is “I Love You” it’s slower, but not one of my favorites. It kind of sucks sometimes when you go from two great, upbeat song then to a ballad. It’s a total buzzkill for me! The song’s not bad though! The one right after it is luckily back on the upbeat side. It’s “OMG” and I swear I’ve heard it somewhere recently, but I hope I’m not getting it confused when I listened to it the other day! How embarrassing would that be?! This is another song that has a 80’s pop sound to it, but it’s not bad. It’s actually pretty catchy during the choruses. I’ve recently found another favorite on the album, it’s called “Lightning” and it is so different! It’s very slow, ballad-like and then when the chorus starts it kind of climbs higher in tempo and then there’s the weird bass drop, with a child like voice saying “but I do” in the breaks. Whenever the verses resumes though, the tone is back to mellow and it’s a really nice balance especially with the changes. Also, I love the use of singers singing in Latin in the bridge. Like, that’s never in a pop song! It gave this song an added fierce presence to it.

The next batch of songs start with “A.D.I.D.A.S” and of course, I thought of the shoes! They’re definitely not talking about shoes though. This has a nice bass, bluesy beginning to it and I like that. I like the clear sound of the piano and beat together. It’s kind of mellow in sound and somehow talking about sex in this beat is pretty good! The eleventh track is called “Love Me Or Leave Me” and boy, do I love this one! It’s so gorgeous with just the vocals, piano, and violin. It’s the perfect ballad. Another favorite! The one after that is called “The End” and it has a Pentonix feel to it, because there’s no beat, just the “bum-bums” and snapping. The group is harmonizing throughout the whole song. This is so good, it’s another favorite track.

I know the album was released as a deluxe edition, but I’ve decided to end this review here. I hope you all understand. There are four bonus tracks. I have to say I was really impressed with this album. I was not expecting to like it so much! Maybe next week it’ll be featured on my favorite album of 2015? Wouldn’t that be nice?

Have you listened to “Get Weird” yet? If you have, which songs do you like the most?