Ipsy: On the Wild Side (June 2013)

June 18, 2013 · 2 Comments

Ipsy is a monthly beauty subscription service. For $10/month, members get deluxe samples and full-sized products along with a tote bag to keep all the items in. Each month’s tote design depends on that month’s theme.

This month’s theme for Ipsy was On the Wild Side. The leopard print bag is pretty cute, although honestly they could’ve used any bag or theme this month and I would’ve been happy because I finally am the owner of a NYX cream blush! Plus, because I referred two people last month, I also got a shiny BaubleBar bracelet! Not including the bracelet, I am pleased with four out of the five products which isn’t bad considering the contents of this month’s bag was a surprise like always.

For previous Ipsy bags I’ve received, check out this tag.

Ipsy June 2013

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Recipe: Chicken Salsa Verde (Slow-Cooker)

June 17, 2013 · 6 Comments

Guys, making chicken salsa verde in the slow-cooker is SO easy, I don’t even know if it qualifies as a recipe. The best part is that it tastes like hours of work in the kitchen, when really it’s one of the simplest and easiest things I’ve ever made.

This is a pretty bare bones chicken salsa verde recipe, but the day I made this I was short on time in the kitchen and ingredients so that suited me just fine. I’ll be remaking this soon and dressing it up a bit, perhaps with some extra spices or plain Greek yogurt and beans. Still, it’s just as good without any dressing up! Although by the looks of it, it’s not a very appealing dish when it’s in the actual slow-cooker. However, when it’s in your mouth it is very, very delicious. I can promise you that.

Chicken Salsa Verde

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Link Love, Vol. 21

June 16, 2013 · 4 Comments

I’m firing up my oven today for the first time in my new apartment. Fingers crossed that it’s a reliable oven and doesn’t heat up unevenly or anything crazy like that! It’s strawberry season, so the plan is to make a strawberry rhubarb crisp. I made it last year with strawberries I picked myself and it was delicious. Sadly, I didn’t make it out to the strawberry fields this year, but that doesn’t mean that in-season strawberries are any less tasty.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to eat any of it until later this week (if there are even leftovers!) as I am starting a juice cleansing regimen today. Ha! But of course, more about that later. In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy the wonderful company of those who I am making the strawberry rhubarb crisp for in the first place. Words cannot express how grateful I am that I will be spending time today with some of my favorite boys, particularly as today is Father’s Day – a day that has always been hard for me. (Partly why I reminisced about Mother’s Day in yesterday’s post, I think.)

Fashion
Clem talks about her frustrations with women’s vanity sizing. Just yesterday I was talking with a guy friend who said, “Women shouldn’t be blamed for how long they spend shopping because half the time they spend is just trying to figure out what size they are.” PREACH!

Life
The Asian Pear wonders if she’s worrying too much about the past and future to the point where she’s not enjoying the present.

Read and weep, T-Swift. Here’s the lyrics of “22″ rewritten so they actually reflect the lives of 22 year olds and not high schoolers.

Mandy shares her thought process during a recent moment of silence in yoga class.

Nicole writes a beautifully touching letter to her 18 year old niece on her 28th birthday.

A recent revelation about a former friend of mine made Girl Meets Debt’s post about a former friend of hers hit a little close to home.

Travel
NZ Muse asks: what kind of traveler are you? (Personally, I “travel” more than I “vacation.”)

Filed Under: Online · Tagged:

The Best $20 I Ever Spent

June 15, 2013 · Leave a Comment

Inspired by the Dimespring post with this very topic, I thought back to what was the best $20 I ever spent.

Tough as thinking back on this and selecting a memory might be, I think the best $20 I ever spent was when I treated my mom to brunch on Mother’s Day the day after my college graduation.

It was a beautifully gorgeous day, with skies bluer than blue and not a cloud in sight. She had come all the way from Hong Kong to see me graduate and was my only family member present at my graduation, not including my “chosen” family of my best friend and G. I had just graduated magna cum laude and had several potential job offers in the works. And it was Mother’s Day; I wanted to treat her to something special on her day.

I took her to Open City, one of the best brunch locations in DC. In a city that is all about brunch, that says a lot! It was a wonderful brunch with delicious food and good conversation. There was also the knowledge that while I might have only been able to treat my mom sporadically before graduating college and landing a steady job, this post-graduation Mother’s Day brunch marked the turning point where the would change.

It’s such a positive memory and it was definitely money well spent. For that, that makes it the best $20 I ever spent.

Filed Under: Family & Friends, Life ·

Reading Blog Archives

June 13, 2013 · 11 Comments

Blogs are kind of like books in a sense that they tell stories. They are unlike books, though, in the way that they are ongoing and don’t have a definite end. Well, until the blogger chooses to stop blogging, but that ending is still different than that of a book as a book usually provides closure.

Blogs are also unlike books because whenever I discover a new blog, I’m smack in the middle of the ongoing “story.” Only once have I discovered a new blog and read all the way back to the very first post because I was riveted by the storytelling and writing involved (thanks, Tara.) I rarely, if ever, discover a blog that’s just begun, unless it’s by a friend who is restarting a blog or who I’ve known prior to the blog’s inception.

Perhaps it’s my innate curiosity or I’m inherently nosy, but from time to time I’ll go to my favorite blogs and click through the archives to read the first couple of posts. It’s partly to see if the blog has changed since then, but I also find it fascinating to see the ways that content or even writing style have shifted since then. I’m sure if you go back through my blog’s archives you’ll find that the content is drastically different – actually, I know this because I used to abide by a strict editorial calendar that involved Internet finds and movie reviews, both of which I haven’t written about in years.

I think the earliest archives of a blog can also provide a glimpse into the blogger’s character or personality as they tend to be less polished than the newer posts. After a while, most bloggers begin to develop a “blogging voice” and have a sense of what type of content to write about and what their readers would be most interested in. Consciously or not, this can affect the way a blog is written over time. But in the very beginning, all of that is stripped away to just the blogger and his or her words. That’s what I find the most fascinating about the earliest archives of any given blog, I think.

And now that I’ve presumably piqued your interest about what some of my earliest posts were about on Break the Sky, here’s a few:

Filed Under: Online ·
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