Hunger Games: Catching Chocolate

Look at this incredibly awesome promo thing I got (well, my boyfriend got) for Hunger Games: Catching Fire!!! On the outside, it looks like a book. On the inside? Delicious, delicious chocolates! Super fancy chocolates, in fact, each one correlated to each of the 12 Districts in Panem.

Mmm, I volunteer... as yummy chocolate!!

Streetpassing Randoms on the Nintendo DS

The Nintendo 3DS has this feature called StreetPass, where whenever you pass by another person who is also carrying their DS with them, it kind of connects you. In Animal Crossing, it will add the person to your Happy Home Showcase and you can go take a tour of their house. It does something in the Pokemon game too, but I’m not sure what yet. Whenever I go to a convention or anything, I usually end up Streetpassing a ton of people.

Anyway, I was checking my Streetpass the other day and noticed I had one new person. I wondered where I picked him up at, since I hadn’t really been anyplace special recently Each person is allowed a little personalized greeting thing, and this dude’s had his LiveJournal username. From there, I found his Twitter page, where he mentioned he had gone to the same Galaxy Quest screening at the Arclight that I’d also been to. I was just struck by how odd and amazing this little feature is. I’m thinking about adding my Twitter or blog name to my greeting, so other people can find me and learn more about me whenever they pass by me randomly.

Target Trip Haul

I went to Target for the sole purpose of buying a new pillow - last time I went I got one that was really great, the perfect cuddling pillow. As usual, I ended up buying a million things, not one of them a pillow.

Now that’s it’s Christmas time (now defined as any time between September and New Year’s), they have a huge assortment of ornaments. Ever since I discovered how cute they all are, I’ve been buying one or two every time I go. Last time, I got this really cute Iron Man, and this trip, I bought this balloon animal ornament (it’s actually made of glass or something.) I got another super cute ornament that I can’t show, because it’s a gift for my boyfriend! But it’s really cute and I was so excited to find it. 

I also got a big tub of CeraVe, because I read on the SkincareAddiction subreddit on Reddit that it’s like a miracle for your skin. I wasn’t sure Target actually sold it, so I was happy to find it there instead of having to order it on Amazon. Also, I bought this nice container for q-tips. I wish I’d bought another one for cotton balls, but hopefully they’ll have another one next time I go.








So that was my uber exciting trip to Target! Now I have to go back again soon, and hope they have pillows back in stock.

Diamond Candles

I love a grab bag or mystery item or what have you. I’m like, “I get to buy something and I don’t know what it will be?? SOLD.” Also I like sparkly things, plus candles (and also fire), and Diamond Candles kind of combines ALL those things, so it’s sort of perfect. Basically, it's a candle that has a ring buried inside it, and you have to wait impatiently until the wax has burned down to the location of the ring (protected in foil in a little plastic bag), or at least close enough to it that you can dig it out.

I’ve gotten 5 candles in the past, and they’ve all had amazing scents, plus I’ve gotten these pretty rings:

Not pictured: Thumb.

They had a special sale going for their seasonal Candy Corn scent. I love candy corns, so I bought one. When I didn’t get it before Halloween (which means it’s no longer candy corn season) I was okay with it (because candy corn season lives on all year in our hearts, if you truly believe). But then it was almost 2 weeks later, and the tracking said it still hasn’t shipped yet, so at that point I was a bit concerned. I posted a message on their Facebook page, and got an incredibly prompt reply asking for my order number. After sending it to them, probably not even 10 minutes, later, I got a refund. I was a little miffed, because I just wanted my candle, not my money back, but then I immediately got an email explaining the situation: the candles got sold out but were accidentally still listed for sale on the website, and they weren’t available anymore since they were seasonal. To make up for the mistake, they gave me a code for 50% off another candle!! That’s some pretty amazing customer service. Had they not responded so quickly, or not given that unexpected discount, I honestly probably might have written them off and not ordered any candles from them anymore. But they’ve definitely retained my business.


P.S. I ordered a candy cane candle with my coupon code!

Whimsic Alley Holiday Craft Faire

On Saturday, I returned to Whimsic Alley for another craft faire (I think it's legally mandated to spell 'fair' with an 'e' in this circumstance). Even though they had just had a Halloween craft faire two weeks ago, the vendors were all completely different, so that was a nice change that made the visit worth it. 

The area where they hold the craft faires (and other events as well) is decorated to look like the Great Hall at Hogwarts - check out the 'floating' candles! It's a really cool effect.

There were some really great booths - there was one selling all kinds of necklaces with amazing charms - like golden snitches, Bag End doors, scissors, staplers, owls, etc; and of course one with really clever t-shirts; and another selling iPad cases. This was one of my favorite booths - Crafted Cuteness. These adorable girls were selling all kinds of amigurumis of Pokemons, My Little Ponies, and all kinds of other cute crocheted things.

I ended up buying a couple necklaces from Whimsical Forest - one had a charm of a miniature Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire book, and the other was a little bottle of blue liquid (which also glows in the dark!) labeled Expecto Patronum! She had a ton of similar charms - I was torn between this one and a bottle of Felix Felicis.








Here’s an example of part of the store, to show how it’s segmented into smaller stores.

I found Platform 9 3/4!! I considered running at the wall to see what would happen, but then decided against it.

Their Staff Only signs were so clever! Other ones said “Potions Chamber” and “Pit of Disaster - Don’t Even Think About Entering.”

Some Links for a Monday

Little Miss/Mr. meets Game of Thrones! My favorite is the Little Miss Stubborn!


The Real Actors Read series of YouTube videos is just THE BEST. This one in particular is one of my faves - “You owe us 25 minutes of vodka.” Seriously, they’re all great.

A rare look inside the Lisa Frank Headquarters. I would have killed to take a tour here when I was a kid. Heck, I’d still love to!!!

MP3 Cleaning

I have to confess I'm a bit of a digital hoarder. However, every once in a while, I get the urge to clean everything out and start fresh. About a year ago, I realized that my iTunes library was so cluttered with songs that I didn't even really like; so much so that I rarely even listened to music from it that wasn't in a playlist already. I decided to go through each and every song, keeping the ones I liked (a little over 3000), deleting the ones I didn’t (probably around 1000), rating them all (this is how I organize them; I don’t know, it works for me), fixing the title tracks so they’re all uniform (because I’m OCD like that), and adding in album covers. 

It took me seriously at least a whole year to do this, and I’m finally finally done. Of course, now everyone listens to steaming music on Spotify or Pandora or whatever. Oh well, this is how I prefer to listen to music, and it works for me.

It’s SO lovely now, when I listen to my iPod on shuffle, every song is a song that I can enjoy and I don’t have to keep forwarding to the next track in a futile effort to find a song I actually want to listen to. I had no idea I had so much junk in there!

Now maybe I should look into organizing all my pictures...

Nail Polishes Galore!

It’s not that I have TOO many nail polishes, it’s that I have too many to effectively keep in a shoebox or drawer and still be able to see what color any of them are since all you can see are the tops. That’s not very helpful, even if you have them in some kind of color order. I did some research on Amazon and found this nice clear rack that holds around 100 bottles. It’s made of a pretty thick plastic, and it ended up being a better quality than I thought it would be. It’s held to the wall with 4 nails, and I’m just really hoping that it doesn’t end up somehow falling off and breaking the wall and a bunch of bottles. It miraculously held every single one of my nail polises, though it won’t hold more than that, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do with future purchases. I have a lot of smaller bottles that I tried to smush together, so overall it looks a little more cluttered than I’d prefer, but what’re you gonna do. I really really love being able to see all my nail polishes at once.

Comikaze 2013!

This was the third year for Stan Lee’s Comikaze, LA’s (pretty much) only pop culture convention. I’ve attended all three years, and it’s expanded immensely and improved upon itself every year.The first year, it was pretty small and a little esoteric - one random thing I recall is that there was a tattooing area set up, and if you got a tattoo of the Comikaze logo, you’d get free tickets for life (I wonder if anyone did, and if Comikaze honored the deal!). Last year, it was much much bigger, and as such, ran into a few problems, like huge unwieldy lines for registration, which angered a lot of attendees. They’ve really hit their stride this year, having done a remarkable job branding themselves throughout the year via their awesome social media presence.

One thing that differentiates them, not necessarily positively or negatively, from San Diego Comic Con, the granddaddy of all Cons, is their panel line-ups. SDCC attracts major studios and celebrities, eager to show you their upcoming films and TV shows, and this has become the calling card for the show (to the media, at least; plenty of other things do go on at SDCC). The panels at Comikaze seemed to mainly consist of fans/bloggers/commentators talking about stuff, which, don’t get me wrong, can be cool and super interesting. But it's not quite as attention grabbing or compelling.

A really cool aspect of Comikaze's panels, however, is that every year, they have these reunion panels, featuring casts of shows that were popular when I was kid. In the past, they've had the casts of All That, Wild & Crazy Kids, and Salute Your Shorts. This year featured the guys who played Pete and Pete in the Adventures of Pete & Pete, as well as the voice talents from Powerpuff Girls.

Further to that, they also tend more to the nostalgia factor. For example, they had a video game museum, showcasing vintage video games like this awesome Atari, and this original Nintendo system.

The exhibit floor was, to me, where Comikaze really shined. There were TONS of really unique vendors this year. When you attend as many conventions as I do, you tend to see a lot of the same booths over and over again (which is totally great for them, if they’re doing so well at each one that they can afford to keep doing this). I would say that a significant portion of the booths I saw were ones I’d never seen before. One in particular was selling wooden swords that they had handmade, some of which were from various movies and video games. I hope they sold a ton because they were super cool!

Another favorite was the booth with jewelry and other fun things in the shapes of assorted foods. I really thought it was called Pretty Pretty Jewelry, but now I can’t find anything by that name, so I guess I was wrong. I bought a really cute purple M&M ring from the very lovely girl who made all the things, and I’m sad that I can’t remember what it was called because I bet she has a great Etsy store or something.

Another thing I picked up was a Unicorn horn!! I’ve seen Unicorntopia at the last few conventions I’ve been to, but this is the first time I actually got one, and I proudly wore it for the rest of the day.

One of my goals was to get some of those sweet Pacific Rim figures. My mistake was in trying to , by the time we got to the end of the exhibit floor and went back to the beginning, the toy vendors had raised all their prices! I ended up having to pay more than I thought I would, but I guess at least I got to support small business instead of just buying them from Amazon. Gipsy Danger is now hanging out with Katniss Everdeen and Catwoman on my bookshelf.

I also wanted to pick up some more Funko Pops, but ended up getting a little overwhelmed and then just forgetting the whole thing. I came in with a couple I knew I wanted to get (namely, Glinda the Good Witch, the Sunflower from Plants vs. Zombies), but then I saw some that I didn’t even realize they made (Wicket the Ewok, Leia - both slave girl and princess editions, Maleficent, Wicked Witch) and then I just didn’t know what to do with myself. Oh well.

Oh, and did I mention I met Grover? Well, I did:

November Goals!

#1: Lose 5 pounds - This may be a bit ambitious since I’m not quite into the habit of working out with a regular frequency, and also because of Thanksgiving. But I'm going to try anyway!

#2: Blog at least 3x a week - I’m trying to get into the habit of blogging regularly. It’s worked here and there, but I need to make it stick. I want to develop some new features to write about as well.

#3: Finish 2 books - I don’t think this will be much of a problem since I’ll be traveling to Houston for Thanksgiving, which always gives me a lot of free time to get some reading done.

#4: Do something creative - Lately I’ve been trying to do one creative thing a month. Last month was the refrigerator magnets. This month, I want to try to make these supercute headbands with decorations on them, like ears and flowers and sequins.