Week 12/52 : Touch
Self portrait for last week.
My 4-year old ipod shuffle died last month, so Ckloy gave me a new ipod Touch last weekend … and it’s taken over my life! I know it’s supposed to be an mp3 player but I use it mainly to play games and read ebooks. I hardly let go of it and I have to charge it at least once a day because I keep playing around with it so much.
Anyway, this shot was inspired by the game Draw Something. I’ve been playing that a lot and I love it! It’s funny what some people come up with XD
(Do you guys have any game recommendations for me? My favorites at the moment are Cut the Rope, Temple Run and Draw Something, but I’m looking for new ones to download.)
Little Tokyo (Japanese Village Plaza)
My thesis revisions have been keeping me busy these past few weeks, but I finally have some free time now to blog and sort through vacation pictures again. These were taken a while ago (three months to be exact), but better late than never right? XD
My last vacation-related entry was about the last day of our little Vegas-Arizona tour. It was fun but quite tiring, so after that my parents just wanted to spend the next couple of days resting at my aunt’s house. It’s a good thing that Kurt had his last final exam the same day that we got back, and he decided to temporarily move in to my aunt’s house while we were there as well, which meant that Ezra and I had someone who was willing to drive us around. We gave him a couple of days to relax and get some energy back from all the studying and deadlines he had to face during his Hell Week before we started requesting places that we wanted to visit. First on our list was Little Tokyo (AKA J-Town) in Los Angeles. Our relatives have taken us there a couple of times before during our past visits, and they introduced us to the the yummiest mochi ice cream, which is something that Ezra and I miss terribly back home.
We’re here!
The trees were so pretty, all decked out in Christmas lights
We didn’t want to buy the ice cream immediately because it would melt, so we looked around first before dropping by the grocery store. We passed our time looking at the shops, eating snacks and peeking inside the restaurants (in a non-creepy way) to see the different foods they serve.
Wishing tree~
(EZRA) 11/52 : The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses
Ezra’s portrait last week. We were both in dippy-modes XD She was having a hard time coming up with an idea for her SP, but she found these pretty roses that my mom bought and decided to use them.
This past week has been extremely busy for both of us. We’re both planning on graduating this April, so we’ve been running around trying to take care of some last minute requirements. I’m almost done, I just need a few more signatures from some professors then I can hand in my final manuscript, but she still has a lot to do. She just had her thesis defense earlier this week and her examiners gave her a ton of revisions, so she’s been panicking about that. And she also has to study for her comprehensive exam. She’s really nervous because she’s only allowed to take it twice, and failing would mean that she wouldn’t get her degree, regardless of how well she did in her subjects these past two years. But we have faith in her, so we’re all just praying that she would pass and not have to retake it.
(I’m so glad that I don’t have to take a compre exam~ I barely passed some of my MS subjects, I have no idea what I would do if I had to study for them again.)
Week 11/52 : A tailored suit is to women what lingerie is to men
I read that quote on Tumblr or 9gag a few weeks ago and I totally have to agree 
I have such a weakness for suits.
Anyway, this was obviously inspired by my nail art last week. Isn’t it adorable? It’s not at neat as I would like, but I still think they make my nails look so classy. Like a sir! XD (If you’re interested, I posted a mini tutorial here on my blog a few days ago.)
I was originally planning on naming this photo “Hey, I’m Mr. Simple” because the suits remind me of Super Junior, but I realized that most people probably wouldn’t be able to make the connection, so I chose something else.
Nail Art tutorial : Tuxedo Nails
Nail art last week 
Saw this design on tumblr a few weeks ago and and decided to give it a try.
First I painted my nails using white nail polish:
Then added little bows using black nail polish and a nail striper:
A bit messy, but it’s the best I can do with my shaky hands. You can paint the bows by making a small “x” then filling them in.
Week 10/52 : Living between truth and lies
My bangs have gotten a bit longer since my sister cut them. They’re still a bit too short for my liking, but it’s getting there. After two weeks, I’ve gotten used to seeing myself with full bangs, and it’s not as bad as I initially imagined. In fact, I’m enjoying my new look a lot.
My friend Amie saw me with my bangs for the first time the other day, and her initial reaction was that it made me look like a little kid! With my tiny frame, I’m already often mistaken for a high school student, and apparently my new hair cut doesn’t do much to fix that. But looking young isn’t such a bad thing right? So for this week’s photo, I planned on taking a picture where I would be portrayed as a little kid – pigtails and all – but as you can see, it didn’t really turn out that way. I do have the pigtails and the fringe, but other than that, I suppose there’s nothing “child-like” about me in this picture. (I think I should have chosen a more innocent looking outfit XD) But I still like it so I decided to go ahead and upload it anyway.
(I love how poofy my pigtails look in this shot. I initially planned on curling them, but I got lazy and just resulted to teasing and scrunching to get the proper volume.)
My title came from part of the lyrics of “See Who I Am” by Within Temptation. I’m currently in love with that song. I actually wanted to use the whole verse but it’s a bit long:
“We’ve been dreaming
But who can deny?
It’s the best way of living
Between the truth and the lies”
(EZRA) 10/52 : Don’t wanna grow up
Ezra with a giant odango bun She loves the hairstyle but she rarely does it because it takes too much effort due to her long hair. She says the bun makes her head feel too heavy, lol.
Anyway, its her birthday next month and she’s not too thrilled with the idea of adding another year to her age. (Neither am I, to be honest…) Ah, if only we can stay young forever~
Nail Art : Black and silver
It’s been a while since I last used nail art stickers. I thought I ran out, but I found some the other week and decided to play around with them again. For the dots and stripes, I used my new nail art pens from Sassy, which I absolutely love (I’ll make a separate post about them later).
Hope you like it!
Valentine cookies
I was backing up some pictures the other day when I found these and realized I haven’t blogged about my Valentines baking adventure with Ezra yet. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, we learned how to bake recently and we’ve been having fun experimenting with different recipes. We enjoyed making sugar cookies so much last time that we decided to bake some again for Valentines Day.
We made the cookie dough by following the same steps we did before, except this time Ezra convinced me to add some red food coloring in the spirit of the holiday:
I was a bit hesitant at first because I was expecting it to turn out ugly, but it looked alright. Interesting fact : it took forever for us to mix the dough because our electric beater stopped working a few days before this (it was old, my mom has had that beater since her high school days), so we were forced to mix everything by hand! It was really difficult, especially at first, we had to get Joy to help us out.
Then Ezra and I used the cookie cutters that Ckloy gave me to cut out little hearts:
This is what they looked like after I took them out of the oven:
Sooo cute right??
Ethel M Chocolate Factory and Cactus Garden
I can’t believe that it’s March already! And here I am still blogging about Day 3 of our Las Vegas/Arizona tour from last December! Ack~ Anyway this will be a short entry because the last day of our tour was pretty uneventful since we were just heading back to Los Angeles that day. But we did make a few stops along the day. The first was at the Ethel M chocolate factory in Nevada:
The company is owned by the same people who owns Mars Incorporated, which is known worldwide for chocolates such as Milky Way, Twix, Snickers, M&M’s and (of course) Mars bars.
To get inside the factory, we had to pass through the gift shop, which was filled with M&M’s merchandise:
We didn’t have anyone to guide us along the way and give us information, so we just peeked through the windows to see the chocolate factory and read the information written on the bulletin board:
The factory:
It must be so cool to work here, surrounded by chocolates all the time XD
The factory is divided into different sections, such as the caramel apple station, cooling tunnel and the cutting tables:
Week 9/52 : It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart
The other day I posted a mini review of the Hunger Games trilogy, so you probably have an idea on what my inspiration was for this shot
I just love the books so much! It took me four days to finish the set, but now I’m rereading the entire thing again. I finished the first book again the other day and gave it to Ckloy so he can get started on it. I told him he has to read the entire thing by March 23, because that’s when the movie will be out and there’s no way I’m going to miss it.
My title this week came from a quote in the third book. I’m not going to tell you which character said it because some people may consider even that tiny bit of info a spoiler. But I can tell you that he/she was one of my favorite characters in the story.
I don’t own an actual archery set in real life so these were Photoshopped in. I wanted the final picture to be colored, but I couldn’t get the lighting right during editing to I had to convert it to black and white to cover up some of my mistakes. The bow came from HERE and the quiver from HERE.
(EZRA) 9/52: Life is like a rainbow. You need both the sun and the rain to make its colors appear.
Ezra wanted a happier self portrait these week The dress she’s wearing is actually the same one I wore in one of my old self portraits from 2009. That was the year Ezra graduated college and I bought the dress to wear to her graduation party. We stored it in a box in my mom’s closet after the party and we only took it out again a few weeks ago. Ezra was excited to see it again so she decided to wear it for her self portrait this week.
The butterfly and clouds brushes are from redheadstock.deviantart.com
(EZRA) 8/52 : Fly on home
Ezra’s SP last week. I didn’t get around to editing it until the other day. And I didn’t really like how my first edit turned out so I made a few changes. I’m still not fully happy with it, but it’s much better compared to my first attempt. It’s very similar to her Week 4 self portrait (the one where she is summoning a dragon).
Anyway, this was inspired by the baby owl we found in our garden last week. I didn’t really get that many pictures of the actual owl so I had to use a stock image from deviantart for this
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