Happy New Year 2012

I’m excited for the new year to begin! 2011 was a great year and I’m sure 2012 will be even better! Every day is a blessing and I’m grateful for everything life has brought me. 2012 is the year of the Dragon, and will be a year of great achievements for Lone and I.

As I do at the end of every year, let’s reflect on what the past year has brought me…

• I am grateful for all the new experiences I’m enjoying here in Calgary.
• I am grateful especially for all the wonderful people I’ve met and the great friends I’ve made.
• I am grateful for the people I’ve met from my knitting group and for the great tips I’ve gotten from them about crafting.
• I am grateful for my teachers at my school who I have the utmost respect for; they have been absolutely wonderful to me, helping me in both personal and academic matters. I have learnt so much from them.
• I am grateful for the personal friends I’ve made, people who have been there for me and who’ve been so helpful and kind, and also fun and friendly!
• I am grateful for our first Canadian Christmas, which we celebrated with a family that welcomed us so openly into their home and their hearts.
• I am grateful for the people who’ve enabled Lone and I to continue to succeed here in Calgary, people who value his skills and appreciate his time.
• I am grateful for the library, without which I would not have been able to survive…kind of. I am grateful for the knowledge and the resources that the library provides.
• I am grateful for my family who continues to love and support me in following my dreams and my path.
• I am grateful for my health and for the knowledge I am gaining in learning how to take responsibility for my own health.
• I am grateful for the spiritual people I’ve met and the inspiration I get from them to develop my own spirituality.
• I am grateful to my angels and my spirit guides for always guiding me on my path and helping me achieve the greatest good for myself and my family.
• I am grateful to the Universe for always giving me all that I ask for and more. I am grateful for all that I have.
• I am grateful for a wonderful husband who loves me and who supports me in everything I do. I am grateful that he cares about my happiness and that he makes it his mission in life to make me happy.
• I am grateful for who I am and who I am going to be.

I have so much to be grateful for in 2011, but I know 2012 will be even better, and every day, every month and every year, will only get better and better.

Here’s to a Happy New Year!!

Merry Christmas!

It’s Christmas eve and I’m excited to celebrate my first Canadian Christmas! I’m looking forward to experiencing the joy and the beauty of being with good friends and being nourished by good food.

It hasn’t been snowing these last couple of days, but it’s still white outside, and hopefully we’ll have some snow on Christmas. This winter has been a very nice one and we’ve been enjoying the weather, but still, there’s nothing like snow on Christmas to make the magical even more magical.

It’s getting closer towards the end of the year and the start of another new year, and as with most people, we find ourselves reflecting upon the year we had. This year has been wonderful! We’ve made many new friends – amazing ones! – and learned many new things about ourselves and this beautiful place we find ourselves in. Although it’s mostly been a time of transition and learning, it’s helped us build a foundation that we can rely on for further growth and progress.

Now that a new year is arriving, we’re entering yet another new phase in our lives, and it’s time for us to step up! Here’s to a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year!

Puppy on Piano!

I just had to share this picture! It’s so cute!

Child Drowning Prevention

I stumbled upon this website on how to prevent children from drowning and I just had to share:

Child Drowning Prevention

I thought it was brilliant and I think every parent should know about this, especially if you also own a pool. The video on the website is the same as the video I posted, but they explain more on their video and they have a lot more information on the website.

My sister-in-law didn’t have this information, but she had already taught my niece to swim before she was two years old. My niece loves the water and is absolutely fearless. She’s two and a half years old now, and she’s not allowed near the water without adult supervision, of course, but knowing that she can swim if she ever needs to, gives us peace of mind.

Loving the Rose Quartz

When I was in my late teens, I was going through a tough time with feeling insecure and having a low self-esteem.

I hung out with the wrong crowd, had terribly self-destructive behavior, and was basically hating myself so much that I woke up everyday wishing I was dead.

Not a good way to live.

When I finally got myself out of the situation I was in, I realized that while I no longer wanted to die, I was a long way from healing and loving myself again.

I remembered reading about Rose Quartz being used for self-love and emotional healing, and I thought, hey, I need that. Rose Quartz is generally associated with love, gentleness, releasing stress, and the Heart Chakra. There are people who use it to attract love, spread compassion and kindness, and even for help in healing physical problems of the heart.

I believed that gemstones do store some energy, to an extent, but I didn’t believe enough to think that a rock was so powerful as to be able to magically turn me into a strong and self-confident teenager overnight after the months of emotional beating I had. Let’s face it, I wanted it mostly because it was a pretty piece of jewellery, and retail therapy has been proven to work!

So I bought one, and it looked like this:

Beautiful, isn’t it? Mine was a pendant that I wore on a gold chain everyday.

Surprisingly, within a couple of weeks, it had begun to work. Since then, I have never underestimated the power of stones again. I bought it with the intent of healing myself emotionally and to help me love myself again, I was not looking for love from anyone else. However, that was what I got, at least initially.

I’m not sure how to say this next thing without sounding vain and egotistical, but I swear this is the truth; no less than seven guys started going after me. I wasn’t attracted to any of them, and I wouldn’t say that they “loved” me exactly (the Rose Quartz is meant for love, not lust or infatuation, after all), so it’s not like the Roze Quartz was a magic love potion or anything.

However, I did start feeling more strong and confident. I was starting to love myself again, accept myself for who I was, cut myself some slack for making mistakes, and was ready to help myself back up again after my bad falls.

It might have been because I was starting to regain my confidence that attracted those guys to me, or maybe it was those guys going after me that helped me regain my confidence. The chicken and egg question. Either way, I have no doubt that the Rose Quartz played a huge role in my emotional healing. Sometimes, when you experience things like these, you just know, you know?

I still have a lot to learn about stones, and even the Rose Quartz itself, but one lesson I never forget about stones is how powerful they actually are.

Bizarre Food Facts

I’m reading Ripley’s Believe or Not! Encyclopedia of the Bizarre, and I found some really interesting facts about food that I just had to share. Please note that I can’t attest to the accuracy of these information, I’m quoting directly from the book.

But true or not, they are certainly fascinating, especially since I study natural health and am naturally intrigued with bizarre facts about food. These particularly caught my interest because they relate directly or indirectly to certain things I’m learning about food in my natural health education: 

• In a village near Accra, Ghana, five thousand tons of rock are mined every year, then crushed and mixed with water and turned into edible dough.
• A teaspoonful of sugar can be dissolved in a glass full of water to the brim without spilling a drop.
• The first American settlers used lobsters to fertilize their gardens, and fed them only to widows, orphans, and servants.
• Salt added to a grapefruit will make it sweet.
• The left ham is more tender than the right ham because pigs use only their right leg to scratch themselves.
• Meat was often sold door-to-door in the United States in the 1890s, in unrefrigerated wagons.
• Garlic belongs to the lily family.
• The apple is a member of the rose family.
• Apricot pits are more valuable than apricots.
• There are about five hundred different types of bananas!
• A lemon is a berry, not a fruit!
• The Romans used lemons as mothballs.
• The more sardines packed in a can, the greater the profit to the packer – the oil is more costly than the fish.
• There is no such fish as a sardine. The fish may be pilchards, herring, or anchovies.
• The whites of eggs and the deadly venom of a rattlesnake contains the same chemical constituents, in the same proportion.
• A dull knife can slice cheese thinner than a sharp knife can.
• If you use milk in your tea you are drinking leather. Milk contains fibrin and albumen. Tea contains tannin. The mixing of the two make a turbid liquid – the turbidity thus caused is tannate of fibrin, or leather.
• It takes all the beans from twelve coffee trees to make two cups of coffee!
• Coffee is a fruit juice!

Well, there are a whole lot more bizarre facts to be found in the book, not just about food but about every other subject matter there is! I’m having a great time reading it, and am simply amazed at some of the stuff in there!

My First Knitted Cowl

I’ve crocheted more than I knitted but I haven’t actually made anything for myself. Almost every single project I’ve ever crafted were gifts for friends and family and I just ended up never having the time to make something for myself.

Part of it is because I’m too ambitious, I guess. I only started really learning more about knitting (other than knit and purl) early this year, and instead of making simple things like scarves, I decided that my first project would be a sweater.

I took four months to finish it, and for a first sweater it looks really good! I have to say that I’m really proud of myself, but unfortunately it’s a little too big for me.

It probably wouldn’t have been a problem for me to frog it and just redo the whole thing again, but that’s four months of work gone! That’s a whole lot of wasted time!

So I decided that while I pondered what to do about the sweater, I’ll stick to simple and quick projects for the next couple of months. The days are getting colder and I needed something warm for my neck, so I knitted a cowl.

I simply love the color and I’ve loved wearing it these last couple of days!

I got this free pattern from Ravelry, and I love it so much that I’ll probably make a few more cowls in this pattern with different types of yarn and colors.

I’m working on a headband now, for the cold days that I need to tie up my hair but want my ears to be covered. It’s actually almost done, I just need to sew a button on it and weave in the ends. Pictures soon!

Feels Like Home

I’ve been lamenting the fact that Lone and I have been living in Calgary for more than a year now but we haven’t had one single photo of us or our family to decorate our home. We’re renting right now and I’ve always had long term homes, so there are times that I feel hesitant to put too many holes in the walls because these home we’re living in now is only temporary.

Truth is, we’re not very good housekeepers anyway (though I’m working on that), and more often than not the house is a mess. So who are we ever going to invite over anyway? No guests, no need for decorations!

But you know, I feel better when the house is clean, and I feel better when I see our pictures on the wall. So yesterday we hung up a really simple picture hanger that cost about $12.99 from Ikea.

Sorry for the bad lighting, I’ll take another one soon and hope it comes out well.

I love it! And the place feels more like a home already.

This is only one small part of the house, but I’ll be gradually making changes and posting more pictures up as I go.

Good Writing vs Bad Writing

Most of the time I love the courses I’m taking. In fact, I love them all. There’s only one course that I’m really not liking right now; the Anatomy and Physiology course.

It’s not the subject matter because I am interested in the body and how it works. I find it very fascinating, and when I was young I used to read all sorts of encyclopedias and books about weird body facts and all that.

The reason I don’t like this particular course is because the writer of the course material wrote it in such a way to make it more complicated, confusing, and difficult to understand than it really is. When I read the course, I spend a lot of time re-reading the sentences to try to make sense of it, but when I borrowed one of the textbooks on Anatomy and Physiology from the library, I enjoy reading it so much that I feel like I want to read the whole book from cover to cover.

Unfortunately, the textbook is huge, and I’ve only got a limited amount of time to finish the course.

Bottom line is, it is so important to be able to write in a way that people understand what you’re saying, and enjoy reading the things you write.

I’m just going to have to slog through the rest of the course materials. =(

Extreme Measures

I was supposed to be working on my Anatomy and Physiology course today, but the text was so dry and confusing that I decided I was going to take a break from it. I typed “Anatomy” on Stumbleupon, hoping to find some interesting sites that would help me more than the text I was reading, and I stumbled upon this very interesting article about a man who was forced to operate on himself to take out his appendix.

One of my teachers have actually mentioned something about learning how to do this for himself. He’s an adventurer and frequently goes hiking and camping in the wilderness on his own. Although he’s never had to operate on himself, he knew that if he got appendicitis when he was alone in the woods and far from any help, he would die if he couldn’t operate on himself.

So he studied anatomy and herbs, figuring that he’d use what he could find in the woods, and he did some meditation stuff to help him learn to control his heart rate and body functions so that he’d be able to operate on himself if he ever needed to, and that was what started him on the journey of becoming a herbalist.

I myself am interested in herbs and natural health, but I am not an adventurer like him, and I would be too afraid of the many other ways I could die in the wilderness, forget about appendicitis! I would probably never venture into the wilderness on my own, ever, and never to a place that’s so isolated that I couldn’t get to help in an hour or so.

Yes, I’m a wimp, and that’s why I have the utmost respect for people like my teacher and the man in the article who actually did have to operate on himself. All I can hope for myself, is to learn as much as I can about herbs and natural health so that I can help people, and myself, without having to resort to invasive surgery.

11 Books

In the last two weeks, I finished 11 books! Whoa!! I have a lot of reading time on my hands, don’t I?

In all fairness, a lot of them were YA books, and a lot faster to read than, say, classics. But since I’m definitely not going to give each book a detailed review on its own, I thought I’d just say a little bit about the ones I liked and the things that stood out to me.

The books (click on the images to go to the Amazon page):

Ok, so Damn You, Autocorrect! was just a fun and fast read, mostly all the jokes taken from the website of the same name.

Sometimes It Happens and May: Daughters of the Sea were so-so. As were The Poison Diaries and You Against Me. However, I did learn something very interesting from The Poison Diaries.

I’m studying herbology, and I’m interested in plants and their medicinal properties in general. The Poison Dairies mainly focuses on using deadly plants like the belladonna and other really scary plants. I don’t study these plants in my courses, but one thing the book *and* my courses do mention, is that every plant can be a medicine, and every plant can be a poison; it is all a matter of dosage.

But that’s not what I wanted to share about what I learned from The Poison Diaries. I’m also interested in botany and gardening, so finding out what kind of conditions and care plants need to be able to grow is really intriguing for me. So it seems that the belladonna seeds need to be soaked in cold water everyday, and the water changed everyday and thrown out somewhere safe (drinking the water would kill you), for at least two weeks, before they’d grow. Apparently, doing this simulates conditions of winter where the snow falls and melts and falls again and melts, soaking into the seeds in the ground.

Isn’t that just fascinating?

You Against Me has a good premise, but it just wasn’t very well-executed, in my humble opinion.

 
Unwind was a good read, another one of those dystopian YA novels, the first of a series. It’s about how children can be legally harvested for all the parts of their bodies, a process called unwinding. Until the age of 18 when they legally become an adult, their parents or guardians can sign them up to be Unwinds. It is a good standalone book, and I don’t plan to read the other books in the series, just because I have wayyyy too many other books I want to read.

Forgotten was great! Loved the idea, loved the story! What Happened To Goodbye wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either.

Lily Dale is a non-fiction about about the town with the same name. It’s a spiritualist community where everyone who lives there is a medium or a psychic or both. It was an interesting and informative book, but you don’t really get a resolution to the author’s personal questions.

No More Dirty Looks is about how many products for our skin, face, and hair have potentially dangerous chemicals in them and how we can go more natural. Personally, I’m not as anti-chemical as I am pro-natural. I feel that obsessing too much about the ingredients in your facial cream will cause as much distress, if not more, than just relaxing and letting a few of those chemicals slide. I definitely recommend going as natural as you can, not because you’re terrified of the chemicals, but because you want to have more beautiful skin from healthier, natural products.

There are lots of information in the book about where you can get natural and healthier products, which is great, but I was looking for information on going completely natural, as in making your own products or something along that vein. And the times they did mention about going completely natural, like with the no shampoo movement, they don’t give clear instructions about how we could do that too.

I’d still say that No More Dirty Looks is worth taking a look at, but I’ll be keeping my eye out for more information about going natural.

Last but not least, 20 Times a Lady, now made into the movie called What’s Your Number starring Anna Faris and Chris Evans, was just deliciously fun and sexy to read. I can’t wait to watch the movie!

So that’s pretty much it for now. Sorry to bore you with my bookworm-ness, but hey, reading’s fun for me!

I’m Home!

I didn’t bring my laptop with me on my trip to Malaysia, and I wouldn’t have had time to blog much anyway, with all the running around meeting friends, attending weddings, packing and sorting stuff to take back with me to Canada, and especially spending time with my nieces.

I’m home now though, and ready to blog again! I have much to share! =)

In the next week

A recurrent theme that I keep struggling with is disorganization. I'm not the most organized person in the world, though I do think that I could be good at it if I'd only try. Key word being "try".

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I'm struggling with laziness and procrastination. Most of the disorganization around me happens because I'm too lazy to organize, not because I can never get organized no matter how much I try. Thing is, I never really try.

Sure, I plan how to organize, I join sites like Flylady.com, and read books on how to organize, but they never work because I never work. It would be funny if it wasn't so frustrating and embarrassing for me. I do want to be organized, and I want to be motivated to be organized. I want to be motivated to move my ass and do something about the mess, instead of sitting on my butt thinking of more ways to procrastinate, like with blogging right now. =P

Anywayyyyy.....

We're moving in a couple of days and then five days after that I leave for Malaysia for three weeks. I truly, truly hope that we'll manage to do all the moving and packing with as little tears as possible!

I'm psyched to be going back to Malaysia to visit with my family and especially my three nieces. I haven't seen them in more than a year and they've turned two since then. They grow up so fast at this age, and it's so easy to miss out on so much.

I don't currently have a camera (gasp!), but I'll make sure that I acquire one when I go back, and I'll make sure to take plenty of pictures, of my nieces and my puppies, and especially of food so I can taunt Lone with all the deliciousness of it! =) I can't wait!

Minty Subconscious

Well, here I am with a new blog, and hopefully this one will last. I've had a dozen different blogs, and all for different things. I'm interested in too many things, and I thought it was a good idea to keep each blog specialized, but it became really hard to maintain them all, and I ended up getting overwhelmed and not blogging at all. I had a blog for my music, one for my writing, another for my passion for natural health, one for my yarn crafts, another for my spiritual journey, and etc.

I started thinking about how I could integrate blogging about all my interests in one place, and how I would present this blog. Minty Subconscious sounded like a great place to put them all together, so here it is, and here I am. 

So here's to a fresh start! And here's to a new exciting journey!