be with the ones who can make you laugh just simply because laughing is one of the best pick-me-up out there

Back to the Start

Do you know what I haven't been doing in this blog for a while (other than neglecting it lol)?

Write about all the random things in my life.

The reason why I started a blog way back when I was in high school (5 years ago wtf I feel so old) was to keep a virtual diary and I just like to write about random stuffs that's been going on in my ordinary life.

If you see the blog posts that I wrote in the early years of this blog (especially ones in my old blog), you'll see that most of them are random posts with no purpose or beneficial value whatsoever. Sure, they weren't interesting to read for other people, but at least I love reading them from time to time just to reminisce.

Then, I started to write reviews, and I see those posts are the ones that get more hits, not that I have a lot of hits now, but from those few hits, review posts are the popular ones, and what people are actually interested to read. Even though getting hits is not my main goal, I thought to myself, "Well, if people like my reviews more, then I'll write more reviews". I'm not saying that I've been diligently writing review (let's face it, my last review post was months ago), but I decrease the frequency of me writing random things that I just feel I wanna write about.

I became more concern about the picture's quality in my blog. I tried to make my pictures as nice to look at as I possibly can. I'm not gonna lie, when someone comment that he/she likes the pictures in my blog, I'm over the moon. With that being said, decent pictures = more effort = more time consuming, which is one of the main factor why my blogging has been crazily decreasing over the years. I'm just not committed enough to this blog that I'm willing to spent hours a week just to post up a review. First and foremost, I have classes to go to and thesis to write. Second of all, I'm more committed to my youtube channel than this blog.

My youtube channel is a sort of creative outlet for me to share my interest in nail art and all things beauty and maybe to share a tip of two about the aforementioned subjects. In other hand, my blog was an outlet for me to rant and keep memories about my life, about what I'm going through, and simply, just anything about my day. Thus, when this blog started to turn from lifestyle blog into more beauty/nailart-ish blog (I added the "isn" because I'm nowhere posting enough posts about those things regularly for this blog to be in those category), I just kinda lost interest in it.

Beauty reviews/posts were never something I want to do on a regular basis, in between posts maybe, and frankly, the random things are the ones that I look forward to look back to in the future.

I don't know what's the point of this post haha, but as for the trigger, I was looking at the blogs that I followed and I saw iamyoursuperwoman. A singaporean blog that I followed long long time ago and probably one of the blog that intrigued me to start blogging. I do remember it was the first blog that I read and I was enjoying it and I ended up reading all of her entries. It was a simple lifestyle blog and she just wrote whatever going on in her day, but it was a fun read for me and I thought that this blogging about your day thing seems kinda fun.

She has closed down her blog for a while now. At a risk of sounding really creepy, I tried to look online that maybe she changed her domain or something, you know, stalker style, but found none. I find her deviant art that has been abandoned long time ago, but I can't even find her twitter and instagram (I remember I saw her twitter and instagram sometime back) now.

Anyway, I was feeling a bit sad about it, but I remember how much I enjoyed reading her blog and it reminded me of the reason I started to blog. So long story short, I'm probably going to post random stuffs again (with beauty post from time to time), they might not be helpful whatsoever for others, but they will serve as what I started this blog for, a "virtual diary". One I look forward to reminiscing about years later.

xoxo,

Lily

Monthly Montages - July

Man, my posts lately have been nothing but monthly montages. Not going to blame you if you're bored. I mean, I myself will be if all there's to read are a string of monthly montages. Still, I'm going to do the July's monthly montages as a digital diary :)

• Went to Jember in early July. Look at how freaking adorable my cousin is. His face is so innocent, act like have no sin one haha. Also remind me a lot of Shoalin kids with that super chinese face and bald look lol
• Also went to my grandpa's farm and picked some over ripened eggplant. That's my brother showcasing our loot :p
• Saw this on 9gag and laughing my ass off
• Hakata Ikkousha, my fav ramen, finally open in Jogja!! Too bad the one there is halal only, so no pork ramen. The chicken broth is still super awesome though, just no as rich.

• My first time voting for presidential election :D
• Pesto pasta from Nanny's Pavillon Jogja. I remembered it to be mediocre when Sam ordered it in Nanny's Pavillon Flavor Bliss, but this one really good!
• Successfully made my first molten lava cake! Used EntertainingWithBeth's recipe. Her recipes that I've tried really are fool-proof.
• Made "Bakwan Jagung" (corn fritter?)! My favorite "gorengan" (fritter?). I like ones with lots of corn and more on the thinner and crispier side. The one I made is cheat one though, out of a box haha (I used Mamasuka), but they were still so freaking delicious. The best bakwan jagung I've ever tried!

• Got these unique earcuff from Berrybenka. Haven't had a chance to use it though.
• Met up with my middle schools friends. It's been around 4 years I think since I have met them, so happy to be reunited!
• Breakfast in bed for my mom's birthday :D
• Made funnel cake using Laura Vitale's recipe. It's good. It was my firs time eating funnel cake and it tasted like crispy powder sugar donut!

• Ice creams from Mary Anne's. 
• Also from Mary Anne's. I don't remember the flavors of these though. I think I had Banana Nutella, Nutella Cheesecake, Baileys, and the other one I forgot.
• Finally tried spam musubi!!! Have been wanting to try it for years, but couldn't find it anywhere. This one is from a Hawaiian Resto in Central Park (don't remember the name). It was good, but the spam is too thin though, like almost crispy thin :(
• First meal I cooked at the new place. Instant ramyeon haha. Look at that perfectly poached egg though!

• Sam trying out the jacket I got him for his birthday <3
• Finally went to see the fault in our starts. Thank God it's still on after about a month since its premier. I refused to watch the movie before I read the book, so finally read it when I got back from Jogja and finished it in 3 or 4 days I think. That's fast for me, I usually took weeks to finish a book because I pace it out slowly.
• FOTD for Sam's birthday dinner :)
• First breakfast I made at the new place. Beautiful, fluffy scrambled eggs, toast, and cheese sausage. Yum!

And that's a wrap! take care, xoxo

Clearing Out My Nail Polish Stash

A couple days ago was a lazying day for me since I finished and uploaded a new video on Youtube (It's a Beach Photo Collage DIY. Click  HERE to watch) and haven't recorded a new video to edit, so really, nothing to do. Plus, it's still Eid Mubarak holiday (today is the last day).  And just fyi, I'm also still on my summer break from school until mid september :D Too bad I have to work on my thesis so I still have to go to uni a couple times a week T___T.

Anyhoo, enough with the rambling. Basically since I have nothing to do for the rest of the day I decided to organize and clear out my nail polish stash! Something that I've been wanting to do but kept postponing it for the sake of my laziness lol. But seriously though, the thought of having to go through all the nail polishes, checking if it's still usable, and reviving the ones that still can survive with few drops of nail polish thinner just intimidate me. Again, with the babbler. Before I start blabbering again let's just start with the photos, shall we?

This is after I sorted out all my nail polishes by brand. It's no surprise though that Etude House is the dominating brand since that's my go to nail polish as of now (It's quite affordable, the quality is good, and has a really wide range of nice colors).

The second dominating ones are The Face Shop and Oriflame. I actually find The Face Shop nail polishes to be okay only (the cheapest range one) and much prefer Skin Food, but TFS is cheaper at that time when I went gaga over a sight of nail polish (I still am now, just on a much lower dosage).

As for Oriflame, I can say that it's an old favorite. Not because it has super awesome quality or anything like that (the quality is pretty decent), but because it's my first nail polish brand that I collect when I started getting into nail art. If you read my nail art related posts on my old blog HERE, you'll see that I used a lot of Oriflame products. My mom used to buy me some every month, so Oriflame nail polishes will alway have a soft spot in my heart *ciaaahh bahasanya*.

Also, I'm quite impressed that I have quite a number of Essence nail polishes, considering I got them only on 2 shopping trips (last year and this year) and comparing to, let say, my Revlon, where I more often frequenting the counter. I guess Essence just has a lot of nail polishes that caught my eyes (believe me, I've restraint myself from getting more on each of those 2 trips). You can get Essence now in Guardian Indonesia, but the price is rather ridiculous, so I myself not gonna even bother.

I think the next growing nail polish stash will be the Maybelline Color Show that just launched a couple months ago since they're affordable (I got them @Rp 23,000.00 each) and you know, new stuffs just always caught my attention. Speaking of new, Sephora is finally open in Plaza Indonesia!!! Ahhh, I can't wait to go there. I've been waiting forever for Sephora to open its door in Indonesia :)

This is the unusable stash that I'm gonna be throwing out. More than 50% of those are the super cheap, unbranded, and Pokari nail polishes though, so I don't feel really guilty about throwing them out (They are all already super sticky and unrevivable and some I've used up).

The other half are Etude House, TFS, Revlon, Oriflame, etc and almost all of them I have used up and the remaining I've used more than half before it became unusable.

I was planning to store them again according to brand, but after a second thought, it didn't make sense to store them like that since it's not gonna be any easier for me the next time I browse through them, so I finally decided to store them according to color.

It just makes it all visible to me. For example, I can know all my options when I want to search a red nail polish, because frankly, I really don't remember all the red (or any color for that matter) shades that I own and more often than not, some of them were forgotten since they got buried deep at the back. #nailpolishaddictproblem

So, yeah, I separate the reds, pinks, oranges/yellows, purples, nudes/browns, blues/greens, glitters, metallics, whites, blacks, topcoats/basecoats/treatments.

I jumbled up some (like blue and green) for the sake of space and sometimes for color like bluish mint, I don't know if I should put it together with blue or green lol.

I used folded aluminium foil to separate each color, because..well, no reason really, it was just what I can find at that moment hehe. The good thing though, aluminium foil is pliable, so it makes the separation space much more flexible than if I had used something like wood plank. The bad thing is, well, it's not really good to look at. At least it works, no?

So this is how I store my nail polishes as of now, just on one of those 4-tier drawer. I know this is not the best way to store a nail polish because it's all jumbled up like that and it's better to store nail polishes up right. Heck, this kind of organization isn't even pretty to look at. But, this is all I can do for right now since I have limited space. I have thought of a nice way to store nail polishes, but that required much more space, so maybe in the future :)

take care,

xoxo Lily