Witchcraft And More Anime

Sorry I missed yesterday... that's probably going to keep happening, but... oh well...

Today I started Meats and Sauces; we fabricated chickens and I found out that I'm surprisingly good at it - I was the second one to finish and the first guy who did it had been doing it for years whereas this was my first time.  I was pleasantly surprised.  We also made stock... other than that class was pretty boring though... It makes sense because it's the first day and most of class was lectures... so... yeah...

I'm supposed to talk about my practice today... I am merely dabbling so far; I've tried a few spells here and there, but mostly I just do meditations and tarot readings and the like... I am excited for Halloween this year because it will be my first time celebrating Samhain - the pagan new year basically. I'll tell you about what I'm doing for that when I actually do it. Unfortunately I don't really have anything else to say right now... Maybe I'll talk about some stuff that I've done for previous holidays later.

I watched some more anime yesterday - I didn't really watch any news stuff today because my little sister wanted to watch Parasyte with me (I had to cover her eyes a bunch because it has a few inappropriate scenes... but she insists on watching it with me...)

Anyway, yesterday I watched Trinity Seven, which I don't plan on continuing.  Too ecchi.  And why is it a common theme in ecchi anime that there are scenes with girls who need to use the restroom? Do guys really think that's attractive...?  Really, it's just creepy to me...

I started to watch Fate/Stay Night, but when I realized that it is related to Fate/Zero I stopped due to the fact that I have yet to watch the later so it probably wouldn't have made much sence to me (although apparently the game Fate/Stay Night came out before the books Fate/Zero despite that Fate/Zero is the prequel... anyway...).

After that I watched Akasyki no Yona which is super shoujo and stuff, but I'm going to keep watching it.  It's interesting so far so I'll see where it goes...

Next was Denki-Gai which I discontinued for the same reasons that I stopped watching Trinity Seven; I am not into ecchi...

Then there was Orenchu no Furo Jijo which I suspected that I would like form the beginning - since it might as well be a yaoi.  It's about a boy who saves a merman and now the merman is living in his bathtub...  It got really awkward when I went to watch the third episode today and they kind of toed the yaoi boundary - my younger brother was in the room...  Anyway, it's cute so far so I plan on continuing.

Last was When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace.  It's totally a harem anime, but I don't really mind at least it's not like Trinity Seven... It's not really ecchi and the male protagonist is kind of a sweet guy despite how eccentric he can be.  So, I'll probably continue it for now...

Not much else to say... I still have 10 anime to watch before I've gone through all the anime for this season... I'll hopefully watch some more tomorrow...

Tomorrow my topic will be... Metaphysical: Tarot.  So... I'll talk about tarot... maybe I'll do an interesting reading... I have been trying to get in touch with my spirit guides more... We'll see...

Until tomorrow my lovelies!
Blessed be!

Sigh... So I Have To Talk About Myself Now...

As promised... Myself...  Is it okay if I cheat?  You say it is?  Why, thank you!

I'm just going to give a vague rambling of a few things about myself and then I'm going to move on to things I actually am interested in talking about...

So... A few things that you guys probably don't even care to know about Cali:
Favorite color: Purple - if you can't tell by my blog theme...
Favorite... voice actor (might as well since I'm an Otaku...): Daisuke Ono - Japanese and Crispin Freemen - English
Favorite anime: Currently Free! - I just recently realized that it's replaced Tiger & Bunny...
OTP: Haru/Makoto - from Free! also just realized that they bumped out Barnaby and Kotetsu...
Favorite... book...: I... have no idea... I really like Dan Brown's stuff... I love light novels, I'm currently reading The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya part 1 which is the second to last book in the series and then after that I plan on starting No. 6 again... and then - if I can FIND it somewhere - I plan on reading the Durarara light novels because I NEED to know what happens.
Favorite... artist: DaVinci...
Favorite musical artist: ROOKiEZ is PUNK'D - Japanese and Vertical Horizon - English although Mariana's Trench is quickly gaining some headway... also I really like UVERworld, Neon Trees, Kalafina, the Vocaloids, Imagine Dragons, Cartel, and... Relient K... yeah I think that's enough...
Favorite mangaka: Hinako Takanaga - yaoi mangaka of course...
Favorite american TV shows: Supernatural, Cupcake Wars, Law and Order: SVU... I think that's basically all I watch... usually if I have the TV on it's on Food Network...
Favorite thing that I've ever baked: I made this really cool layered pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving last year; I was really proud of it - last year was also the first time that I was asked to provide the desert for the big family dinner that we have every year so I was honored (although it makes sense that I was asked... I mean I am going to school for that kind of stuff...)
Favorite food: Sushi - like a typical otaku... and also like a typical otaku I really LOVE takoyaki - octopus (I apologize to you my precious spirit animal, it's just... so... delicisious...) dumplings.
Favorite animal: Sheep! (also my number one spirit animal!)

Alright... I think that's enough for now...

So I said I was going to quickly talk about what my families been doing for our movie nights again.  On Wednesday we watched Casper and I made meringues shaped like ghosts and then a Shepard's pie with mash potato ghost on top.  We haven't done anything else since then due to the fact that Thursday afternoon my mom, Sean, and Skye left for Disney Land for the weekend and won't be back until late tomorrow night.  Meaning we probably won't be watching anymore movies until Monday, but I'll be sure to let you know about those.

Today I decided to start a few new anime series.  Crunchyroll recently started the fall season line up and so I decided to be adventurous and give every new series a try - they're all only 2-4 episodes in so far so it's not that big a deal.  I've only gotten through four of them so far (because I decided that I had to catch up on RWBY first and i was pretty behind on that...).

I watched I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying first and... yeah I don't plan on continuing that one... it was just too weird and I didn't like a lot of the perverted jokes/references they made... not my thing...

I then watched Parasyte -the maxim- which I didn't think I was going to like, but it actually seems really interesting.  It's really weird and kind of creepy and gross sometimes, but it's really intriguing so as of now I think I'm going to keep watching it.

Next up was Bonjour(insert music-note-that-I-can't-seem-to-insert-properly here)Sweet Love Patisserie.  Just a series of five minute episodes about a girl attending a super expensive, high-class confectionery school on scholarship. It promises to be one of those cheesy, sappy reverse harem anime, but since the episodes are so short and it has a baking theme I plan on continuing it. It looks kind of cute too...

Last I watched Your Lie in April.  A music anime, which I tend to enjoy.  It's about a piano prodigy who became unable to play after his mother passed away, but than when he meets an eccentric violinist she helps inspire him again.  Pretty cute so I'll probably keep it up.  And just yesterday I was going on about how I don't really like heterosexual romance series usually... oh well...

Like I said, that's all I got to today so... yeah; I plan on watching more tomorrow though so I'll let you know what I decide to keep watching and what I drop.  As for what else I'll talk about tomorrow, I drew "Metaphysical: My Practice" for my topic, so I'll be talking about Paganism and witchcraft tomorrow... Should be a fun time!

Until then
Blessed be!

Chocolate Techniques and Toradora

Hey! Sorry I missed the last two days; I was being lazy...  Anyway, today I started my Chocolate Techniques class.  The chef for that class is so funny; I think I'm going to have a really good time.  She's really enthusiastic and cute (as in behavior wise - I'm not attracted to her...) and I'm really looking forward to the next eight weeks.  We made brownies - sounds super difficult, right?  We have six teams in class and each team was told to make the same exact brownie recipe, but we all had a different coco powder.  It was really interested to see that just changing that tiny little thing many a pretty big difference in, not only taste, but the color and textures of the brownies too.  We also made a bunch of different ganache, but that wasn't very exciting.

Alright, so last time I drew from my list of topics and ended up drawing anime, so since I didn't post the day after like I was supposed to I figured I'd just talk about that today.  Today's anime is Toradora - since I just finished it last night...

I've been meaning to watch this anime for years now and so finally about a week ago I started it, watched eight episode and then watched the rest (17) yesterday.  I thought it was really cute; I'm not usually the biggest fan of heterosexual romance anime (or anything really... only because if I'm going to watch somethings that's strictly romance I'd rather it be a pairing that appeals to me ((although that doesn't really explain why I'm so into Yaoi...))), but it had the two components that I typically need in order to enjoy this genera; comedy - has to be super funny and this succeeded - and characters that are easy to slash (put in Yaoi/Yuri pairings with each other) so that I can secretly ship them instead of the "canon" pairing in the series.  And seeing as this series had several potential Yuri pairings and a pretty easy-to-ship Yaoi pairing too, it worked out pretty well.  Although I'll admit that I kind of liked the relationship between Ryuji and Taiga... even though I do slightly prefer the idea of Minori with Taiga instead... I liked all of the characters in this series... If I had to pick a least it would probably be Ami... but I didn't hate he either... My favorite character was Ryuji, cause apparently I'm a sucker for main characters... also I loved his whole looks-really-tough-and-intimidating-but-is-really-a-nice-sweet-guy thing.  I think Taiga and Minori were tied for second favorite; I really liked both of them.  Kitamora... I had a little trouble with him, only because I watched it in English (yeah, sue me; I have a reading disability and it just makes things easier - also I believe that dubbing has gotten a lot better in the last couple of years and actually enjoy it so :p. Yeah, I love subbed stuff as much as the next otaku, but I hate how cranky people get when it comes to dubbed stuff...) and he's voice by Johnny Yong Bosch, which I guess I just didn't think fit him very well so I couldn't take him seriously - not that I necessarily think that he's a character your supposed to take seriously...  Yeah... I think that's enough about that...

I'll go over the stuff my families been doing tomorrow only because this is getting long and I have other stuff I have to do...

My topic for tomorrow is "myself..." oh... yay....  We'll see what I come up with to talk about for that...

See you tomorrow.

Let's Talk About Rocks

I finally drew from that list that I made!  Yay!  I drew "Metaphysical: Gems," so I'm going to talk about gems...

I carry six gems with me on a regular basis; they are:
In my right pocket - black tourmaline, citrine, and carnelian
In my left pocket - rose quartz, rhodonite, and blue kyanite

Black tourmaline is basically the master of all protectors, but I use it more for it's grounding abilities.  I carry citrine for energy - which goddess knows I need.  Carnelian is great for confidence - something else that I desperately need... Rose quartz is good for self-love, something that I need more of.  Rhodonite helps to understand yourself better and can help keep depression at bay.  Blue kyanite is usually associated with the throat chakra - communication, but it is also good for attracting romantic love - which is why I carry it...

I don't really want to go into anything further yet - it'll give me more to talk about if/when I draw this topic again.  Next time I'll probably pick one of the gems I carry and talk about my experiences with them - and other gems I've carried, but don't keep with me regularly.

Oh, I've also been meaning to talk about the fun stuff my family has been doing for the last couple of day.  We're doing this thing where each night of October we watch a Halloween-esque movie - or a couple - and make dinner/some treats that are themed to the movie.

The first night we did it, we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas and made "Wormswart" soup in "brain" bowls - which was split-pea soup in bread bowls, "Bone-Daddy" bread sticks - bread sticks shaped like bones, "Pumpkin King" parfaits - pumpkin mousse layered with whipped cream and pecan granola, and two drinks, for the adults "Deadly Nightshades" - vodka, blueberry/cranberry juice, and ginger ale, and for the kids "Oggy Boggies" - apple/white cranberry juice, sprite, and some gummy worms.

The second day we had a whole day worth we had a Mummy movie marathon - and then we watched Bedazzled at the end.  For lunch that day we had Mummies - pigs in a blanket, but you cut the dough into thinner strips so it looks like wrappings, pita chips and hummus, and olives - Egyptian themed.  Then for dinner we had Chinese food - because the third movie is set in China.  Our drink was a "Malabou sunset" inspired by the "sensitive guy" scene in Bedazzled.

Third night was The Addams Family.  I made homemade Girl Scout cookies - Samoa's - and we had lemon-aid - inspired by the  lemon-aid stand scene. For dinner we had spinach and mushroom crepes - inspired by the fact that Mortisha and Gomez speak French to each other.

Last night we watched a couple Halloween Pixar shorts and made "Ogre" floats - sprite and lime sherbert - or "Mud" floats - rootbeer floats.  Most of the shorts were Shrek related hence the drinks.

Today we watched The Haunted Mansion and I made "fritters" - fried choux pastry rolled in cinnamon-suger, jumbalia, corn bread muffins, and mint julips.

I'll keep you posted on the fun things we do each day for that too.  I think we plan on watching Casper tomorrow.  I'm also going to draw my topic for tomorrow now or else I run the chance of forgetting to do it tomorrow so, my theme for tomorrow is... Anime, that'll be SUPER hard - notice my sarcasm (the hard part will be picking the anime).

Talk to you tomorrow.
Have fun everyone!

CCC Final and Demons

So, I still haven't drawn from that list - and I haven't posted for the last couple of days... but, oh well; I'm not going to beat myself up over it.  I should hopefully be drawing from the list tomorrow because I don't have anything interesting planned - but I'm not making any promises.

I had my Cookies, Candies, and Confections final today.  We made mignardises - a plate that consists of a collection of cookies and candies served at the end of a meal free of charge (served at super expensive restaurants where you most likely spent $200 or more per person... yikes!).  I made raspberry macaroons with a chocolate mousse filling, raspberry pate de fruit, creme caramels, coconut marshmallows, and cinnamon-hazelnut truffles.

I had a lot of trouble in class today... First when I piped the marshmallows I forgot to spray the pan... fortunately my teacher caught me in time and I was able to re-pipe them - although they had started to set so they came out kind of lumpy the second time, but we covered them in coconut and they looked pretty nice.  Then I had to barrow tempered chocolate from another team because mine was behind and we weren't able to get to it...  Our team was also supposed to make marzipan candy and coconut sushi, but we were so behind that we didn't get to it either... yeah... I was pretty stressed...

Anyway... enough about class...  I finally, officially caught up with Supernatural meaning I'll be watching the new episode tomorrow with all the other fans who have dedicated years of their lives to the series... where as I have only been watching for a few mere months... My favorite character is Charlie (d- definitely not because I may have a teensy-weensy crush on her... no... n- not at all...); if I had to pick from the more regular characters though, it would be Dean (WHY DEAN?! WHY?!) because he has adorable moments (the episodes where he gets "ghost sickness" and when he "mind-melds" with that dog are some of my favorites), yet is a "tough-guy" character, which just makes his adorable moments even more adorable.

Well, not much else today, super tired from class... Going to be early.  I should be on tomorrow.

See you then.
Happy October!

There Was No Supernatural Today... :(

So, don't you love it when you plan on having a marathon of a show all day and then the dentist appointment you had that morning ends up taking 7 1/2 hours and all your plans are dashed?  Oh, me too!

So, yeah... today I got to spend seven and a half hours at the dentist.  Fun stuff... I had to get a root canal... super fun, but my dentist was super nice - I've never had that kind of work done in my mouth before and I was really nervous.

Anyway... so I'll be talking about Supernatural tomorrow and not drawing from that list... again... But Thursday I hopefully... might... draw from that list... or I may talk about Supernatural more because I'll be watching the first episode of the tenth season then...

Well, I'm done; I'm super tired from my dentist appointment ordeal so... yeah...

Night, night everyone.

Plated Dessert Project

Today we finished our plated dessert projects in Cookies, Candies, and Confections.  I made a chocolate financier with vanilla Chantilly, a coconut tuille, and a raspberry caramel sauce.  Which is a fancy/complicated way of saying I made a chocolate, cake-like cookies with whipped cream, a crunchy, coconut cookie, and raspberry caramel.  I had a lot of trouble with this project today; apparently - and I wasn't told this until the end of the day - the tuille I made was a really fragile one.  I originally was trying to shape it into a bowl so I could put my financier inside it, but after four different batches and five plan changes I ended up cutting out little crescents instead.  I think my dessert came out really well though - despite all my difficulties.

Yeah, it looks like I won't be drawing from the list I made tomorrow either...  Season 9 of Supernatural is finally being put up on Netflix and I will be marathon-ing it; so, I'll probably post about that tomorrow...

I promise I'll draw from my list on Wednesday
You can hold me to that.
(Whoever you are)

Apologies And Religion Talk

Sorry I didn't post yesterday - I took a lazy day, meaning that, unlike most days where I do everything else I plan to do and just forget/get too tired to blog, yesterday I just lazed around the house and did nothing... I am not ashamed!  Okay, maybe I am a little...  Anyway this means that I missed my weekly recap, but there weren't going to be any pictures or anything yet so it wasn't going to be very exciting anyway.

So, today I am going to talk about my practice.  I know that I said I was going to draw/use a random number generator to pick what I talk about each day, but I forgot to draw this morning and so I just decided that this was a good topic for today (I have to do my drawings in the morning because one of them is baking and if I draw that - on a day that isn't Monday or Friday - I have to plan to bake something sometime during the day).

My practice: I am a wannabe witch.  I don't consider myself to be one yet (I believe that you have to officially declare yourself as one in a private - or social - ritual), but I've been studying magic.  I am a pagan - not a Wiccan. I believe in multiple gods and goddesses as opposed to one goddess that takes on many different forms.  My patron goddess is Ma'at, the ancient Egyptian goddess of truth, and balance and my patron god is Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom - also scribe of the gods.  I don't just worship the Egyptian pantheon though, one example in particular is that I worship Gia as the goddess of the Earth (as opposed the Egyptian god Geb - mostly due to the fact that I believe the Earth is feminine and Geb being a god...).  I do mostly stick to the Egyptian deities though...

Alright, well... I think that's everything.  I may not draw tomorrow either and talk about what I do in class, but we'll see about that then...

Until next time
(I hope being a wannabe witch doesn't scare anyone away...)

Announcement

So I know that I talked about drawing from that list I made for what to talk about, but I'm not going to start that quite yet.  Instead I'm going to advertise for the LARP that my friend and I are trying to start up.  I'm going to be making a separate blog for it - linked to this account - and and email and all that good stuff so when I have that stuff up I'll post the links and things here.

So today my friend and I went to the park that we were thinking of using for the LARP and scouted out where it would be and how it would be set up.  I'm getting really excited.  We talked about world building and character stuff and everything.  We have a couple pending/hopeful members too, so it really looks like this is going to happen!

I'll probably be talking about that sometimes too, just a warning...

That's all I have to say about that.

Ideas For Going Forward

Alright, so I mentioned how I wanted to maybe start a weekly schedule of what I should talk about again and I have decided what I want to do.  I'm not going to do it the way that I usually do though.  I am going to try to make Saturdays the day that I have like a weekly wrap up/re-cap thing, where I talk about the week and post picture (I'll just be talking about the week until my computer is back up and I can post pictures again...).  For every other day I am going to have a list of things I could talk about each day and draw from (or use a random number generator) them and talk about that.

The list of things I'm considering are:
Anime
Fan Fiction
Original Works
Myself
Metaphysical: Tarot
Metaphysical: Gems
Metaphysical: Spirit animals/guides
Metaphysical: My practice
TV/Movies that aren't anime
Books
Crafts
Goals

I may pair this down or I may add more things, but we'll see. Anyway, I think that's it for today.

I'll see you tomorrow.

Tarot and Cleaning

First day I haven't had school on Wednesday since the beginning of the semester so instead of going to school I got to spending the day cleaning the kitchen! Yay! Yeah...  It's okay though... it needed to be done (now if only I can keep it clean this time...). Unfortunately I didn't really do anything else of interest today (not that cleaning the kitchen is actually interesting...). Oh well.

So, I'm sure you all know that I read tarot and usually I use my The Goddess Tarot to do my readings, but recently I've been trying to get more in-tune with my Osho Zen Tarot.  I bought that deck right a round the same time I bought my Goddess Tarot, but I haven't really used it since I bought it... The reason being is that it's a lot different from the decks that I'm more used to and because I bought it on ebay it didn't come with the instruction booklet that most decks usually have. So, for along time it sat on my bookshelf collecting dust because I was too afraid to use it.  Fortunately I have definitely grown as a reader and thanks to some encouraging from a friend I finally brought the deck out and started using it.  I'm really happy with the results; my friend says that she feels my readings have gotten a lot more in depth since I started using it.  I feel like it's helping me improve even further in tarot some I'm super glad that she finally convince me to start using it (it took a while, she really had to wear me down).

Well, I don't think I have anything else to talk about right now, so... Yeah... I should maybe think about making a more structured schedule for what I post about each day again so that I don't have any days where I'm just rambling about nothing... But... I never really follow those... I'll come up with something.

Well, there you go.
(Sorry I missed yesterday)