Weekly Haul (111)

Kyle and I went to Second and Charles to sell some stuff, and I ended up buying a couple of books. I also got some more books for Christmas from my coworkers!

Someone Else to Love by Susan Polis Shutz

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey

Poems That Make Grown Men Cry by Anthony Holden & Ben Holden

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

The Five-Minute Journal by Intelligent Change

Crush by Svetlana Chmakova

Yona of the Dawn vol. 16 by Mizuho Kusanagi

101 Corporate Haiku by William Warriner

New Anime and Movies This Winter That I'm Excited For!

I'm so excited for Mob Psycho 100 II! Gonna wait until the season's over so I can binge it like how I did the first season! Lol there's a lot of anime I'm excited for this season, but there's not many movies I'm interested in. I still need to watch the second How to Train Your Dragon movie, too...

Anime:

• The Rising of the Shield Hero
• Mob Psycho 100 II
• The Promised Neverland
• Dororo
• Boogiepop wa Warawanai
• My Roommate is a Cat

Movies:

• Isn't It Romantic (Feb 15)
• How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (Feb 22)
• Captain Marvel (Mar 8)
• Us (Mar 15)

Game Nights, Work Events, Graduation, Ugly Christmas Sweaters, Movie Night, Christmas Parties, New Years Eve

December was pretty busy due to the holidays.

We hosted game night at our place on December 1st, the first Saturday of the month. We invited a bunch of friends over to drink and play video games. We played some of Kyle's new Switch games, and of course, we had to play Quip Lash as well. I don't know how, but for some reason, Shelle and I started calling butter as burter, so I used that as my name while playing the game, which was hilarious.

The next Saturday, we had Smash Bro's Saturday at Alec's place since the game came out that week. We spent hours playing. It was really funny because I suck at video games, but after a while I would button smash correctly and kill enough other players to be the last three or four standing during every round, so everyone thought that I had the random luck of maybe beating one of the harder characters in order to acquire it. Luckily, David defeated the character before it had to pass on to me to try lol.

The next week was Archana's Master's graduation on Friday. Because she was taking the day off for graduation, her teammates threw her a surprise graduation party on Wednesday. We even passed around a folder that held a card inside it for us to sign, which had a list of people to pass it to after we signed it.

We were all hanging out inside of the floor's conference room while Sheraun, Archana's manager, messaged her to come see her and talk about a product, so she was completely surprised when she opened the door and heard "SURPISE!" from all of us. She literally paused for a while and had to say "I was expecting to talk about AMS, so I'm not sure what's happening" lol. Laura had even bought coconut cake for her, which was really tasty and is Archana's favorite food anyway lol.

The next day, we (the interns on our floor) had lunch with Thys, who is the president of our division. It sounded sounded really intimidating because he's an important person and was technically on vacation, so he was taking time out of his busy life to get lunch with us and learn about what we've been working on since we started.

Then the actual day we had lunch, we found out that CJ, his personal assistant, and Zach, our friend, were also going to lunch with us because Thys insisted on it lol. He didn't want to have lunch with just us interns lmao. But all in all, it was really good. He likes talking and gave good advice, and he was really funny, so it was nice.

The next night was our company holiday party. My manager told our team that we could work from home that day so we wouldn't have to drive back and forth from work to the event, which was nice. I made plans to carpool with Archana since her apartment was 20 minutes away from the venue. Apparently Lavit was coming with us, and he took forever to get ready, so we basically arrived when it was halfway over and only got to see people for an hour and a half.

It was nice seeing everyone all dressed up, but I didn't want to because it was cold and I was lazy lol. I wore a nice shirt and tights instead lol. I think Anita and I were the only women who didn't wear pants that night. What confused me was the fact that this was the only year where it was semi-formal. Every other year was casual! Why couldn't it be casual again?!

But the food was good, and they had unlimited drinks at the bar. Lol Jack and I were the only ones in our group who got white wine instead of red. The food were all appetizer sized, which made it easy to try lots of different stations. And the dessert station was really pretty; I wish I took a picture lol.

All in all, it was a good night. A lot of people were making plans to go to a bar nearby for the after party, but Archana and I were peopled out and didn't want to stay out too late since we still had work the next day. Surprisingly, there wasn't a lot of people at work that day lol.

That day, Dom and I left work early to go to Archana's graduation. Since it was a Master's ceremony, it was pretty small and quick. I kept joking about how come Mercer didn't offer snacks and refreshments before the ceremony lol.

Lol Archana was quick to find us in the crowd. We kept waving like crazy at her and stuff throughout the whole time. We technically weren't supposed to clap or whistle while they were announcing all of the students names, but people kept on doing it anyway, so Dom and I decided to do it for Archana as well. Afterwards, we went to Ponce City Market to get drinks at the bar. Then I saw the ramen place and wanted ramen, so Archana said we could eat here and get drinks too. She's so nice lol.

The next Friday was basically the last Friday of the year for half of the people on my team since we were all going on vacation until New Years. As such, we decided to throw a pizza party since Anita, Jack, and I were craving pizza one day and decided to try Blaze Pizza out since someone left a stack of coupons for the place in the break room for the past few weeks. Unfortunately, the coupons expired by the time we went lol. Then it evolved into an ugly Christmas sweater pizza party because we decided to be festive. Only a few of us actually wore them tho... Lol it was still fun though.

After work, Archana and I went to the mall to buy her some make up since she wanted to get a foundation that actually matched her skin tone and a blush since she's never worn any before. I also had to buy a shirt for Henry's Christmas present, so it worked out.

Afterwards, we all met up at Dom's place for movie night. We made a quick trip to Trader Joe's for snacks and ingredients for mulled wine. Archana found out that it was the Winter Solstice, and apparently it's tradition to drink mulled wine during this time. Then Archana and I made the executive decision to watch The Haunting of Hill House lol. Sonali and Dom hate horror, but Dom was like "gotta get over the fear by doing it" so we overruled Sonali lol.

It was hilarious because Sonali kept on grabbing Archana whenever it got scary, and Dom, who was sitting perpendicular to the tv, kept on avoiding the screen whenever something scary happened. Archana just kept on putting her hand up to the tv to avoid seeing the scary scenes lmao. We had to watch an episode of Friends to help Sonali calm down lol. Then we started watching it again while Dom was showering since she didn't want to continue it. We left off on episode six, and I keep on forgetting to finish watching it since. It's either that or I don't have time to marathon all four episodes at night like I want to.

After that was a week of Christmas events lol. We hosted Christmas for Kyle's mom's side of the family. Then we celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve with my family before David and I went to his uncle's Christmas party later that night. The next day, we had Korean BBQ and video games on Christmas with Willy and Janice and some of their friends. A few days later, David and I had dinner with Mikey as a Christmas present to him. Finally, that Saturday night, I went to David's work's holiday party. I met most of his coworkers and learned that they're all kind of crazy funny lol.

In between all of this, David's family was fostering a pitbull puppy called Thanos for Christian, so I got to play with the cutest puppy since Hercules came around last year lol. He was adorable and soft and cuddly; he just wanted to nap all day. Then we found out that he was a dick to other dogs lol.

Shelle and Kyle went on a cruise, so I didn't see them until it was New Year's Eve, and we had a bunch of people coming up to celebrate with us. David and Alec came up, and so did some of Shelle and Kyle's friends did too. We ate snacks and drank and played with fireworks lol.

All in all, it was a very busy month. I was super peopled out by the end of it. That's probably why it took so long to write this post lol.

Weekly Haul (110)

So I didn't realize that I already included some of these books in my last haul, but I already uploaded the pic and am too lazy to retake it since I already put up the manga lol.

Anyway, Amazon had a $5 coupon if you spent $20 on books on their site last month, so I decided to buy this box set. My friend told me about The Four Agreements months ago when I told him I wanted to work on my empathy, and I thought getting the box set was the best deal since it covers a lot of different interesting topics.

Basically, that and the manga (which was also on sale) was my Christmas present to myself along with a bunch of clothes I bought during Black Friday lol.

The Four Agreements Toltec Wisdom Collection by Don Miguel Ruiz

Yona of the Dawn vol. 1-15 by Mizuho Kusanagi

Emotions Explained by Buff Dudes by Andrew Tsyaston

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

Speak: The Graphic Novel by Laurie Halse Anderson & Emily Caroll

Books I Want to Read This Month

I didn't read any books last month, but I've been feeling the urge to read since I got so many books for Christmas. Let's hope this feeling lasts the entire month lol.

1. Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls In a Dungeon? vol. 10 by Fujino Omori & Suzuhito Yasuda
2. Seraph of the End vol. 1 by Takaya Kagami & Yamato Yamamoto
3. Dengeki Daisy vol. 1 by Kyousuke Motomi
4. Kenka Bancho Otome vol. 1 by Chie Shimada
5. Yona of the Dawn vol. 1 by Mizuho Kusanagi
6. Emotions Explained with Buff Dudes by Andrew Tsyaston
7. The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui
8. In Real Life by Cory Doctorow & Jen Wang
9. The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur
10. Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
11. On Love by Alain de Botton
12. The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman
13. The Foxhole Court by Nora Sakavic
14. The Consumption of Magic by T.J. Klune
15. Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan

December in Retrospect

Happy New Year! I hope this year is better than last year!

December was a pretty busy month. I didn't read anything other than fanfics, but I did watch a lot of awesome shows and movies. A lot of anime ended last week, so I'll be binging those completed seasons soon! :)

I watched:

• GATE Season 1 (2016)
• Vir Das: Losing It (2018)
• Attack It, Lightning! (2017)
• Jingai-san no Yome (2018)
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
• Dakaretai Otoko Ichii ni Odosarete Imasu. (2018)
• Tight Rope (2012)
• Irresistible Love (2016)
• HIStory 2: Boundary Crossing (2018)