Love, Faith, Hope

Today was a beautiful, overcast day, and goodness knows we need the rain, but I was happy that it didn't rain while I went hiking on the Runyon Canyon Trails.  It was such an amazingly beautiful hike with the most gorgeous views of the city.

I really love the sun breaking through the clouds, shining over the city.  It's like a ray of hope breaking through :)  And after the crazy week I had, I feel like it's a sign that everything's going to get better.  Everything will eventually work out in the end!

So the trail itself wasn't too bad.  It's a curvy, sandy cemented trail that started out going down from where we started.  There wasn't a lot of parking available but I got lucky since it was early and I'm assuming a lot of folks are avoiding the trails due to the weather.  There was also a lot of adorable dogs and friendly families on the trail, which was nice to see.  

And the final message of this hike?  "Love, Faith, Hope"

 :)

Food Adventures: Kimbap!

Today is Kimbap day!  

Kimbap is one of my favorite quick and easy dishes to make and it's fun since you can pretty much pick and choose what you want to have in your rolls.  For today, I'm going simple and just adding a few of the most flavorful ingredients that I like.

Ingredients:

3 cups - kimchi

1/2 lb - marinated spicy pork

2 cucumbers

1 pack - 10 nori seaweed sheets

1/2 pack of 12oz picked radish

3 cups of cooked rice

So I know I gave numbers up there - you don't have to follow that to a tee.  I usually roll until I run out of meat and then with whatever's leftover, I make myself some kimchi fried rice.  Yum :9

From top left to right: kimchi, marinated spicy korean beef, cucumbers, nori seaweed sheets, sushi roller, picked radish

So first, you want to spread out the rice onto the nori.  Make sure you get the edges so that when you roll later, the end will stick.  My family doesn't really care for rice, so we spread it really thin, but you as much rice as you like.  After, you simply lay out your ingredients across the row.

Then you row!  What I do is I take the sushi roller and bring it over all the ingredients.  Then I kind of flex my fingers into a fist with the roller to tighten everything.  Then, lifting the sushi roller (but not the seaweed), I roll and roll and roll.  You don't want to roll the sushi roller with the kimbap.

Et voila!  Cut, serve, and enjoy! :)

With your leftovers ingredients, what I do is I make fried rice.  If you have a lot of kimchi left, kimchi fried rice is an easy and delicious option.  I usually fried the kimchi first, then add whatever else ingredients and then the rice and mix.  Adding a bit of korean chili paste sauce makes it even better.  So cheers!

Self-Acceptance

This week for one of my classes, my classmates and I did an exercise where, from a plethora of choices, we had to choose our eight most important things and eight things we just don't care about and it gave me a lot of thought.

Let me give you a bit more background.  This exercise is called the "Adult Values Cards" exercise.  You have three categories.  Things that are important to you, things that are not important to you, and things that are very important to you.  You also have a list of many values, such as intimacy, change, family, etc.  From that list, you need to quickly, and without too much thought, place each item under a category.  Then from your "not important" and "very important" piles, you need to determine your eight most important and least important things.  

What this exercise is what supposed to do is give you an idea of what your values really are and you can reflect on why you placed certain things in certain piles.  

I actually enjoyed the activity a lot and I was a bit surprised (and honestly, a bit worried about some things I wanted to put into "not important" - but that's not what I'm here to talk about) about what I chose to put where.  When I was done, I only had five items in each pile.  I don't really remember what was in each pile, but the one I was most surprised about was that I had "self-acceptance" under my "very important" pile.  Everything else in that pile made sense to me - I had things like family and hope - but self-acceptance made me think of my past and my present and my future.  In other words, it really made me reflect. 

I'm not going to go into minute details about my past, but I've always had problems socializing and relating with other people and I always had issues with myself for it.  As I grew older, I kind of realized that everything I was doing, I was trying to please someone or get them to like me and everything I was doing was backfiring.  In fact, I'm still doing it.  Notice that above, I said I was worried about things I wanted to put into my "not important" piles.  I couldn't make myself do it because I was afraid of what my classmates would think about me when they saw something like "justice" under "not important".  Even now, I'm resisting the urge to explain myself.  In fact, because I only had 5 items in each pile, I went back to look through the piles again and I found myself putting things into very important that I really didn't find that important for the same reasons.  Immediately after the exercise, I regretted not going with what I really wanted to do because I let someone else determine my actions.

Doing this exercise, I realized I needed to accept myself.  I think I always knew that I needed to like myself before others could like me, but it was never a thought that I took into action.

So what am I going to do?  These are going to be my goals:
1.  I am going to be kind to myself.  If something happens, I will thinking about it rationally before blaming myself.
2.  I am going to stop caring about how others think of me.  I don't mind I'm going to start farting in elevators or anything, but I'm going to try saying what I want without thinking too much about the other person thinks about me.  This will be kind of tough, going into the professional world, but I'll figure this one out.

I can't really think of a third goal, but I think those two are plenty enough for now and will be hard enough for me to accomplish.  I'm going to give myself this semester to work on these goals and will report back at the end of December or early January.

Cheers friends and wish me luck!  

Let it snow!

Dear goodness, guys, it's practically 100 degrees outside.  I think I may be literally melting considering how much sweat has been pouring out of me, haha.  Aside from that wonderful image I've just imprinted into your brains, the heat made me think cold thoughts and cold thoughts of course lead me to think of Frozen.  Sooo... I wanted to share with you all one of my artworks that I made a year or two back.

I really miss drawing and sketching and hope to be doing more of it this semester but the school year has barely started and i'm already up to my neck in swimming.  No worries!  I still plan to sketch and share my thoughts with you all.  For now, let's stay cool in this heat :)

Frozen thoughts, friends!

Beri

"Are we on top of the Earth?"

Have you ever flown in a plane?  Earlier this week, I hopped on a plane heading to L.A. and as we took off, the sky and water kind of melded into one image and it was simply gorgeous.  You could see ships, but since everything was one big grey canvas, it looked like the ships were floating in the sky.  I don't really do the image justice with my little drawing here, but I hope it helps you to imagine what it looked like.  

My favorite part of the trip was when the kid seated in front of me asked "Are we on top of the Earth?"  I kind of paused for a second because I never thought about flying that way, but  I realized that, "We are, kid!  We are!"  Not like astronauts or anything, but it's still pretty awesome.  I just love how kids think and how their most innocent statements or questions make you look at the world in a different way.  Every time I fly now will be a new experience to me.  Cheers to new experiences!

<3 Beri

A Wedding Kind of Summer

It's wedding season, everyone!  I just attended the second wedding of my summer and so far, so good.  Both times, I attended as the maid-of-honor, and if you're thinking, "that's crazy" right now, you got that right.  Now that I'm done with the crazy, I just wanted to share a few random tips I picked up.


Wedding Tip #1:  Pockets are your friends.
Seriously, folks.  Pockets are wonderful because you can't always be tucking your cell phone into your bosom for safekeeping.  During the second wedding I attended this summer, I decided to wear a skirt under my dress.  And that skirt had... POCKETS!  Granted, it was a bit awkward to lift up my really long skirt during the wedding, but I felt safer with my phone on me all the time (yes, I am addicted to my phone), and I could check it whenever I was sitting or in the dressing rooms waiting for the ceremony or reception to start.

Okay, so wearing a skirt or shorts under your dress for pockets may not be your thing, but if you can, convince your bride to get you a dress that has pockets.  Another option is, if you need to get your dress altered, try asking your tailor or seamstress if they would consider adding pockets for you.

Wedding Tip #2:  Just smile.
One very important thing I realized during the weddings this summer is that the guests never realize if something is going wrong unless people are running around screaming "FIRE".  If you just smile and act like you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, no one will know the difference except the people who knows what's supposed to happen - and really, no one ever really knows what's supposed to happen unless you have a wedding planner (and even they may not know what's going on - just saying).

Wedding Tip #3:  Mistakes make good stories
I saw a quote on a shirt that said "bad choices make good stories" and boy is that true - but no one is really purposely going around making bad choices during weddings, so I tweaked the quote a bit.  When I was at the wedding this past weekend, I was talking to the photographer about a particularly beautiful photo she had taken for the bride and groom and she told me about the hilarious back story that accompanied the photo.  One thing she said that stayed with me was that people will look at that photo and think it's beautiful, but the bride and groom will think back and laugh because they will remember the backstory that came with taking that picture.

Anyways, that's not what this tip is about.  What I'm trying to say is that if you do make a mistake, it's fine.  If you have a wonderful bride or groom, they'll look back and smile and laugh - you'll make their wedding more memorable!  Anyone who stays mad at you for falling into their cake, or tripping down the aisle, or getting too drunk for life is probably not worth it as a friend anyways.  That said, enjoy yourself and relax!

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Well, that's all I wanted to share!  I'm sure it's not exactly the tips you were expecting to see, but with all the wedding tip posts out there, I didn't want to bore you with the same things said over and over.

Until next time!

<3 Beri

Hello World.

Hello world!

There's so much to say but I want to keep this short and simple today.  You can call me Beri and I am an artist as well as an occupational therapy student.  This blog is an outlet for my creative workings and also a way for me to just share the random things I find cool.

For today, no art, but I just finished the most intensive, most crazy, but most fun eight weeks of my occupational student life!  I've had moments where I've gone absolutely nuts and moments where I wanted to cry, but I met some of the most awesome people and I've never met so many nice, warm-hearted people in one place before, but that's what's occupational therapy is all about.  Another day, I will share with you what occupational therapy is all about.  :)

Well world, it was nice meeting you!

Beri