It Started with a Journal

얘들아, 안녕!

I'm back with another oppa outing! (BTW you can also read all about our outings with Minhyuk and Hyunsik.)

But first, I have a couple of non-insane things to talk about.

One is that I'm looking more forward to the GOT7 concert. I don't even know if I have mentioned that I am going. Well, I am. In LA in July, and I'm going to see jade_okelani and eat tons of KBBQ at the same time. K from my Korean class really wanted to go, and I used it as an excuse to go down to LA, but she's super in to GOT7 and I basically only knew and cared about Jackson. Well now I can say I also care about JB! Yay! It's all because adelagia and I started watching Dream Knight on Netflix (also on DramaFever), which was one of those web drama vehicles for a boy band (in this case, GOT7). I totally ship JB with the female lead (she's the second female lead from Fight My Way), and he reminds me of BTOB's Hyunsik soooooooooooo much. He's not as cute as HS, but close enough! They could be brothers! In fact, they both happen to have the last name Im, so in my headcanon they totally have a shared father. LOL

Two is that a couple of years ago (at least), both jade_okelani and I bought a gel nail home manicure kit from Woot!, but both of us were reticent for whatever reason about actually using it. I finally busted it out together, and gave myself my first at-home gel manicure. It went really well; I don't know why I was intimidated by it. The part where you cure your nails under the LED light, though, isn't very pleasant; for like the first 5 seconds it kind of feels super hot, like your nail is burning (doesn't sound good, does it lol), but then it goes away. Anyway, I think my other fear about doing gel nails at home was that it would make me want to spend a bunch of money on gel polishes... and indeed, that has happened. >< Sigh. However, I have also found out that you can turn your regular polishes into gel polishes, so I'm going to give that a try (you can do it with a specially formulated polish-to-gel product, or you can just mix regular polish with a gel top coat. Since the latter is far less costly, I'm trying that route first). I have a LOT of regular polish so being able to still use them would be great. I do, however, need to buy yet another nail polish organizer. >.>

Three is that one of the things I'm looking forward to the most during my trip to LA is this fancy tea we're going to have at The Langham Huntington. When we booked, their regular tea cost $50/pp and their Sunday Chocolate Tea cost $60/pp. We had booked for a Sat, but there's some kind of reception happening at the same time, so they had to cancel all their other bookings. To make up for it, they offered to give us 20% off and to honor the prices from when we originally booked (since then it's gone up to $62/pp for the regular tea and $75/pp for the Sunday Chocolate Tea!! What in the world). So we ended up deciding to go on a Sunday instead, so we'll get to try the Sunday Chocolate Tea, at the same price we would have paid for our original regular tea booking, so it all worked out.

ANYWAY... now on to Sungjae oppa's first outing! Actually now that I'm typing this out, I realize we should have saved Sungjae for outing #6!!!!!!! Damn it. ( Outing #5 but should have been #6... )

It's over. :( Watched the finale of Oh My Ghostess last night, and now there’s no moooooooooore. Waaaaaah. (I’ve gone ahead and ordered the DVD set from Amazon, if only to make a bunch of gifs. There’s a dearth of them on Tumblr, weird considering how popular the show was.) It’s always hard to read/watch something you love and know it’s about to end… harder still when you’ve seen two such awesome shows in a row. I mean, what are the chances I can make it three?

Then again, I did manage to watch a bunch of great movies in a row, so I suppose there’s that. Also, I always meant to go back to finish Master’s Sun, so I suppose I can do that. I can’t remember now why I stopped watching that one. I think it might be because I was actually watching that in real time and it got to a point where I wasn’t enjoying it that much, so I just stopped following it. That’s the danger of watching stuff in real time, because when a drama loses a step or has a slow episode, it’s much harder to get over the hump. If you have more episodes in front of you, you can just keep going and another ep might capture your interest again. Master’s Sun also suffers from the fact that I’m not really into the male lead. I don’t even remember Seo In-guk in it, and he’s apparently the second male lead. He had an amusing cameo in the OMG finale, so that might be what’s sparking my interest in watching it again.

It’s possible that more than anything, I’m going to miss the antics of everyone who worked in the Sun Restaurant kitchen. Those guys were the best!

( Spoilers! )

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In beauty stuff news, I’ve purchased an Air Repair kit. I just wanted the moisturizer, but apparently they really only do travel-sized things, and the kit had the full-size moisturizer plus a bunch of other stuff for only $10 more or something. I know it’s a little ironic that the first thing that I actually bought after trying a sample from the beauty boxes was something that I initially pooh-poohed, but I just love that moisturizer. I still don’t understand how it can feel so thick yet go on so light, and it smells like lemon verbena.

I finished Signal! It was excellent. Of course, I was expecting it to be, so anything less would have been a disappointment. ;) I now have a little crush on Lee Je-hoon. I'm going to try that period drama he's in, Secret Door, which he received a number of acting accolades for. Actually, now that I'm looking, apparently he's won a bunch of acting awards in general, so I'll probably check out some of his other stuff, too.

( Random thoughts )

Since I now have a DramaFever subscription, I've started watching other shows in my queue. I started Oh My Ghostess, which has really high ratings on DF, and my Korean co-worker and akscully both rec it as well. I was hooked within the first 30 min!! It's AWESOME. Signal was so emotionally intense; this show is like eating a big, delicious slice of cake. I love the lead actress (I first saw her in a movie to or from Atlanta, called , about a budding journalist. I wasn't sure what I thought about the lead actor from his picture, but in live action, I like him. In terms of the ghost stuff, it's really minimal, though there are a couple of really minor parts that might be alarming to those who are sensitive to such things. :)) Ahem.

I watched two episodes last night, and I CANNOT WAIT to watch more. It's soooooo fun/good.

( Here's the premise and further thoughts. )

Now that I'm using DF more often, I'm also seeing the benefits of Amazon Fire vs Chromecast. Amazon Fire is WAY better for this purpose. Amazon has a DF app and a remote control, so that's all I need to watch. With Chromecast, I have to have my phone or iPad in order to fire up the app from there, which means I have to have one of them with me when watching. But there doesn't seem to be any way to fast forward or rewind or do any of those functions, which is frustrating. And then sometimes, doing the casting goes awry, and it either only casts audio with no picture, or the subtitles don't show up, or whatever. There are none of those issues using Amazon Fire and the native DF app.