I heart the 90s

I’m a sucker for all things 90s. Late 90s specifically, since I was only 3 when the 90s actually started.

This may or may not have been my very first CD:

The late 90s was also when my music obsession started:

Matthew Good Band (when they were a band)

Our Lady Peace (when they were good)

And Wet ‘n Wild was prestigious nail polish:

I think I had all these colors!
(picture from http://www.rebeccalikesnails.com)

But if you’d like even more reminders of how awesome the 90s were (should that be sarcasm?) you should definitely read Buzzfeed’s article on The Typical Day of a Teenage Girl in the Late 90s. Gap perfume was so cool, and I definitely used those Herbal Essences bottles. I was devastated  (not sarcasm) when they re-branded and changed their formulas.

Edit: They’re baaaack!

Herbal Essences is reintroducing their old Smooth & Shine Collections. No joke, I want to go to the drug store and just smell them.

All Dressed Up

I have a really, really hard time trying to find background images for my phone and my computer desktop.

Needless to say I get pretty excited when I find someone offering images that match my aesthetic.

Hello new iPhone background:

From designlovefest.com

Design Love Fest has a great series called Dress Your Tech which features gorgeous downloadable backgrounds. See all the posts here:

www.designlovefest.com/category/downloads/

It was so hard to choose just one for my desktop! But I saved plenty for later

Shake It Up

I feel a little bad for neglecting this little blog but I’ve spent the last two weeks making my way through the Vampire Academy series so I have a pretty legitimate excuse. Right? I’m at book 5 now and it’s killing me to read it. Not because of it’s awesomeness, unfortunately. Book three was amazing and it’s all gone down hill from there, but I’m determined to finish the series. I’m slowly making my way through but have to break every now and then to refrain from getting too angry. So disappointing, the series had so much potential.

I’ve continued my nail polish obsession and bought $50 worth of nail polish last night. Unfortunately, that only amounted to 2 bottles (!!!).

Let’s not look too closely at how incredibly ugly (dry) my cuticles are. Yikes!

I’m going to try and do more cosmetic-y posts with photos. Mostly in the hopes it will give me some experience in using my hand-me-down DSLR. I did just buy $216.55 worth of cosmetics so I should have a lot to blog about!

And guys, for the first time ever, I’m on top of a a trend:

I mean, I didn’t learn about YOLO until the end of last year when I saw Buzzfeed’s The Year YOLO Ruined Everything (haha)

Vampire Academy – lame name, good book

Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This came as a shock to me, but I loved, loved Vampire Academy. I was expecting very little and had actually started the first chapter of this book years ago but it didn’t hold any interest to me at the time. But maybe because of my recent interest obsession with YA novels, it was much more enjoyable this time around.

I was warned to stick with it because it started off a little slow but that wasn’t the case at all (I am perhaps the only person who thought this). I enjoyed Rose so much that just reading about her was enough to keep me going. She’s my kind of character. Strong. Resourceful. Funny. Sarcastic. Sexy. She’s not afraid to just go for it. A lot of YA books seem to taboo activities like sex, drugs, etc, but it was refreshing that Rose, while maybe didn’t partake in all those actives, certainly didn’t look down on people for doing them.

And I loved that while there was a romantic element to the book, it didn’t take over the whole story. Rose’s every thought wasn’t “Dmitri.” I actually wish there was more on her everyday training with Dmitri, I think that’s where the attraction came from and we didn’t necessarily see a lot of that in the book. I wanted them to get to know each other a little better and watch their attraction (more than just the physical part) grow a little more. I also loved friendship between Rose and Lissa and thought the idea of their bond was really interesting.

I could have done with a few less “I-what?”s – and a lot less hyphens – but overall the writing was easy to read through. There were a couple of spelling/grammatical mistakes but I’m not sure if that was because I was reading the ebook copy.

I’ve got book two on standby and am super excited to jump back into the series.

View all my reviews

Well… that was a huge (and awesome) time suck

Why yes, I did spend Monday evening watching all the Honest Trailers. So funny!

And for anyone who has an hour to kill… here’s the playlist with all of them.

It’s snowing outside… so it’s a good day for some covers

Music covers that is.

It’s just me in the office today which means that I can pump up the jams (as loudly as my built in laptop speakers will let me). And to share the love, here’s three excellent cover songs.

 

Alex Clare – Hold you (Gyptian cover)

 

Lady Danville – Kids (MGMT cover)

 

Barr Brothers – Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Cryin’ (Blind Willie Johnson cover)

Pushed to My Limit

Pushing the Limits by Katie McGarry
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I read this book a few weeks ago and I still haven’t been able to put together what I want to say about it, other than I really did not like this book.

I think my biggest problem was the execution. The first person POV traded off between Echo and Noah, but there’s 50 chapters in 350 pages and the transition between POVs was really choppy. For example when Noah calls her out on why she would want to try to be normal, I wanted the next chapter to be Echo explaining why she’s trying to so hard (to the reader, not to Noah), but it cuts to something else instead. And despite being in these characters heads, you never really get a feel for any sort of emotion other than being obsessed with the other person. Both characters have gone through some pretty terrible events and I especially wanted Echo to be more torn up about it, or at least feel like she’s fighting to move on. Most of the book was spent describing what was happening, not reacting to it.

The book got a little repetitive in its descriptions, Isaiah had tattooed arms, Noah had hair, Echo was a siren who smelled like cinnamon buns, etc, etc (though, if I smelled cinnamon buns all the time I’d just be hungry, not turned on. I mean, can anyone walk by a Cinnabon and not think “yum”!?)

And then there were the small things… What teenage boy person narrating says “the laughter between the two of us echoed into the night”? In another scene, someone asks, “Are you any good at xbox?” I felt like maybe a few more details could have been added/changed to make it more believable. For example, “Are you good at Halo?” because I can play Lego Star Wars no problem, but in Halo I run around shooting at the sky. Later, Echo goes into the room Noah shares and the laundry is folded neatly into baskets. Huh? What “deadbeat” teenager folds their laundry neatly after it comes out of the dryer? Hell, I usually pick clean clothes out of the dryer until I need to use it again, and then I pick clean clothes out of the laundry basket until it’s empty.

I liked how Noah’s story ultimately ended up but I thought that the foster mom’s reasoning to keep his brothers away from him was a little off (view spoiler)[Originally she was worried Noah would hurt them, but then she was worried that by letting Noah have access to them, he would take the boys away from her when he turned 18. But I would think that if they showed Noah how great the boys were doing, he'd ultimately want them to stay with the foster parents because they could offer so much more than him at his fast food job. No? (hide spoiler)]. And I thought after all the lead up between Echo and her mom, it would have been more climactic (view spoiler)[and maybe the mom should have been more apologetic about TRYING TO KILL HER OWN DAUGHTER! (hide spoiler)]

Sigh. 1/5 stars.

View all my reviews