Blogmas 2016: week 1

 

Happy December, everyone! ❄️

I am still amazed by the fact it is the last month of the year already. However, I am very glad Christmas is here, as it is my favourite festive season, so far. This year, I have less spare time than last December, and although I can´t make a daily post, I don´t want to stop enjoying Blogmas. So my solution is to post at least once a week this month, with a little sum-up of the main events, and holiday activities. 

These were some of the highlights of our first Christmas week. I hope you enjoy the reading!

Tales of the Peculiar

Autumn arrived in the beginning of October, and since then it´s been awfully cold.

In my world that means only one thing: it is time to fill my already stuffed tea cupboard, take the soft blankets out of the wardrobe and curl up with a good book. I love books all year long, but somehow the cold months are my favourites for endless reading sessions. 

Consequently, this might be the period when I buy the most of my paper editions (the rest of the year I tend to download on my ebook, but when Winter comes I prefer the company of a good old paper specimen), as I take advantage from all the seasonal releases. One of the titles on my last book haul was Tales of the Peculiar by Ranssom Riggs.

Budapest in October

Hello everyone! 

 

As you probably know if you´re following me via Twitter or Instagram, I am not dead.

However, it´s been a couple, of crazy months during which The Gentle One and I managed to move to another city, find a brand new apartment and job positions, all in a row.  Those periods are quite usual in our lives, due to our professional choices and careers, and although they can be very exciting, they can also drag all the energy out of us. In my case, that usually means a drastic reduction of my spare time, and most consequently, less time for blogging. But fortunately, I am starting to get used to my new routine, so blogging can be finally back for good! 

Now, in October we had a short city break in Hungary, as my husband had some professional affairs to attend in there.  

 

Bellu

This week it´s been so hot we hardly managed to leave the house. However, as weekend approached, temperature started slowly descending. We know Summer is definitely not over yet, so we decided to take this opportunity window and make the best of it. On Saturday afternoon we headed to Bellu Park, a nineteenth century cemetery famous due to its upstanding mourning art.

 

 

My top five vamp lip products.

 

In the last year or so I´ve been falling into the habit of shopping less, but better quality makeup.  So now and then when I make a purchase, I try to give a chance to both medium and high-end brands in an attempt to make my own opinion. I´ve always felt a bit intimidated by the huge quantity of makeup reviews out there (am I the only one who wants to hide in a corner and cry when you receive all those contradictory reviews on blogs/youtube and so on?), and I would happily cut my right hand rather than just sitting there for HOURS trying to figure out what internet gurú is right, because well, most probably they all have a point as long as a product does not work the same for everybody. 

Queen you shall be

For a time, I did really well on my purpose of stopping impulse buying.   

And then my little sister came to visit us and next thing I remember is leaving the house to get some cake (gluttony runs in the family, you can be sure), and coming back with aforementioned cake, and an elfic/Tyrell-style tiara. YES, a bloody tiara. Because... well, because I stumbled upon it at a random high street store, it was on sale, and it was stunningly beautiful, and... you never know if you´ll be invited to have tea with the queen, right? Right...? And yes, in case you were wondering, I have absolutely no justification for it, other than the very reasonable discount price and its alleged beauty. 

 

Cities in dust

There is something undeniably ghostly about cities in Summer. They always acquire a certain desolated look, due to the vast space left empty by people absence. However, that´s am scenario I love, as my vivid imagination tends to portray a post-apocalyptic landscape (the image of a metropolis after vampire consumption, or maybe once the zombie plague is over. The tons of lovely movie scenes you could set in here...)

Summer reads

At the beginning of the week I tried to organize my spare time a little bit, as I had no chance at all recently. I thought  sorting out my Summer reads could be a nice start, as this task seems to have lived in my to-do list like FOREVER. So last Monday I patiently sat on the bedroom, and started separating the unfinished books in a group that I called the "pile of shame"  almost immediately (as a philologist and a general bookworm it is quite rare to leave any unfinished stories to me. However, most of them happened to be short stories compendiums, which I tend not to read in strict chapter order. As a result, there´s always some story forgotten and left behind).  

 

Life update.

Lately, life has been kind of a whirlpool. 

In the scarce past two months events happened with an awesome quickness, leaving me with hardly any energy to do anything else than mechanic survival activities: feeding, sleeping, breathing. Other than that, time was a luxury I couldn´t afford. But all things come to an end (even the worst ones, for as popular wisdom reminds us, there´s always sunshine after the storm). So here I am again, ready for some changes, a new adventure, and a little life update to share.

Is that you, June?

This was supposed to be the first (summery) June week, a long-time awaited period of warm sunny days I expected to be full with pleasant walks, picnics and some delightful swimming. But of course June had its own plans.If you thought this post was about all of those beautiful things, I am sorry to disappoint you – please, feel free to blame that son of a biscuit.