New Winged Friends ♡

 Friends, this week I learned it's never too early to become the "crazy" pigeon lady. 

me in 50 years if global warming allows it

My university's campus is HUGE, and in it roams all different kinds of animals, the most notorious being cats, grackles, and rock pigeons.

Last week's Friday, however, was a special kind of day. There's a deli at the Uni Plaza that I rarely visit, but I was craving their sandwiches, for some reason. On my way there before class, I found this little guy–or girl, I think–loafing on the steps.

As I carefully walked down the steps, it didn't move at all, making me wonder if something was wrong. There weren't any physical signs of injury so I decided to walk into the deli for my sandwich. 20 minutes later, I walked out to find it under the bench across the deli's entrance.

I decided to approach it this time, thinking something was actually wrong. I happened to carry a bag of dry rice with me, so I gently tossed it in front of the pigeon.

And she immediately ate it. 

Okay, so maybe she was just lounging and minding her own business. Because she quickly got comfortable getting close to me and eating from my hand, and words can't describe the joy I felt in that moment. It turns out she has a case of string foot, and my heart broke because I can't help her. It seems too late.

I left that Friday hoping to see her again when I came back on Monday. People can be so cruel to pigeons, and since she was inside the plaza, I was worried they were gonna try to get rid of her.

I didn't see her that Monday, but I ended up making a BUNCH of new friends. It all started with me feeding these brown loafing pigeons outside the plaza, and then all their friends decided to join in on the dry jasmine rice feast.

Before I continue, you need to know that as an exhausted college student, I dread waking up. No, I'm not depressed. The action alone of opening my eyes to another day at 5:00am because I need to take the morning bus so I can make it on time for my morning class is dreadful. Especially when it's the most boring lecture class ever. HOWEVER– things have changed. Throughout the rest of the week, I woke up so excited (without snoozing my alarm, okay?!), because I had some pigeons to feed. 

I was so eager; it's so nice to have something to look forward to at seven in the god forsaken morning. I fed them religiously until Friday, and I hoped they started to recognize me as I did them. 

There's one with a case of avian pox. He's so adorable, and I try to feed him seperately because he can only see through one eye. Therefore he's too slow to notice the food, and the others waste no time to eat it all. It seems his warts have taken over the side of his face, making him lose an eye. 

There are some signs inside the plaza asking the consumers from the other businesses to not feed the birds. So I hoped me doing it outside wasn't a problem. Yes, they ended up pooping everywhere, but they were fed, and the rain always washes it away, anyway. 

On Friday I saw the one with the stringfoot again! I forgot to take a picture, but it seems now we're on lap-sitting basis? Either way, I was so happy to see she's doing okay, and her feathers are so soft! 

I hear them often being called 'rats with wings,' but I see highly intelligent creatures who are just trying to survive after being domesticated then abandoned. 

They deserve to eat, too. And I can always wash my hands.

What I've been... Hobbymaxxing

 Hi friends! ♡ It has been such a long time, I know. When uni isn't drowning me with assigned readings and papers/exams to turn in, you can be 100% sure I'm hyperfocusing on a hobby to keep myself sane. 

Anywhoosies, I'm very happy to tell you the past month has been productive! As you already knew, I picked up knitting and sewing, but this time I'd like to add drawing and watercolor painting to the list. People from my generation are calling it hobbymaxxing. At first, I was like "wtf is that," but it really makes sense: hobbymaxxing refers to the practice of maximizing one's engagement in hobbies to improve mental health, productivity, and personal fulfillment (definition courtesy by Google's insufferable AI Overview). 

In my case, I decided to dedicate time to ALL of my hobbies throughout the week, depending on my energy. For example, lately I've been carrying around a totebag (that I made btw 🤭) with my yarn and knitting needles. But more on that later!

I wanted to preface this post by telling you what inspired me to write for you today:

A few weeks ago, I was waiting for my italian class to begin, so in the meantime I was chatting with my classmate. She's always seen me carry around my books and this day she told me, "I don't know how you read so much without getting bored. I could never, I prefer movies and series." 

I simply laughed it off, because it's something I often get from my family members. I respected her opinion, even if she was denying herself the pleasure of understanding why books are so much better than movies. 

Then she brings up TikTok. Mind you, I have deleted the app AND my account a few months back. 

"I also love watching TikTok, but you said you don't have it, right?" She asks. I tell her no and she proceeds to ask me: "What do you do with your life, then?"

Her question made me blink.

Obviously she didn't mean it in a bad way, but I was shocked to learn that there are people with no hobbies. Doomscrolling doesn't count.

How else would a person keep themselves sane without hobbies? I can't wrap my mind around it. So here's what I've been up to!

Watercoloring and Drawing

This has been my most recent hobby. Back in 2020, I was a fashion design major, so for my illustration classes I had to invest in watercolors to begin. But after I switched in 2021, my supplies have been long forgotten in a big plastic bin in my mom's "stuff room." 

I might have still wanted to independently learn watercoloring beyond fashion illustrations. I remember when I was an avid Skillshare user and ran into Anne Butera's courses. Plural because the first course I took was her blogging course (which is the reason I'm here today!) before I decided to try watercoloring again. But I was really burnt out, so I did her maple seeds excercise (that ended up kinda looking like testicles) and moved onto something else.

But here I am, 5 years later, giving it another chance.

I've always been convinced that I'm not the most creative person. But I learned that creativity is something you look for, not the other way around. I was also scared of being terrible at it, until the 80-year-old version of me I've made up in my head told me, "girl, who cares?!" 

So I dusted off my watercolor palettes and tried. I felt myself healing a little bit as I allowed myself to make mistakes and just... have really bad attempts. Here are some that I liked how they turned out:

Knitting

We finally have a franket update!

I have been making some slow but steady progress, and it's thanks to me carrying a totebag with my yarn and needles so I can knit on the go.

My favorite part about this is that since I take public transport, it has sparked conversation between old ladies who asked me about what I was working on. They always made my day because this would often lead to them telling me about how much they used to knit when they were my age and so and so. I am never beating the "old soul" allegations from my mother by the way I'm most comfortable talking to elders.

Here's how my practice blanket is going!

I feel like the mismatched colors make it more wabi sabi :)

Coloring

Whenever I don’t have the energy to draw or watercolor but I still want to do something “artsy,” I reach for the Crayola coloring book I’ve had since 2020. I’ve seen the ones trending on social media with the alcohol markers but I think I’m sticking to my crayons for now. 

The coloring book usually comes out when I’m too stressed and also want to wind down with an audiobook.

Sewing

When I got back to sewing, I’ve completely forgotten how 75% of sewing was figuring out what is wrong with my machine LOL. Despite a few hiccups, I’m very proud of the practice I’ve gotten. 

To practice making a totebag, I decided to cut up an ugly NEON hello-kitty-patterned sweater from my closet. I love hello kitty but I hated this sweater, so I figured it was perfect for this practice.

I still hate the print, so I'm not cure I'll ever actually use it 😭.

I wanted to replicate a nightgown my greatgrandmother made for my grandmother when she was pregnant with my mom (wow that's a long sentence). Since I couldn't afford to get new fabric at that time, I chose some bedsheets I never used, haha. 

And this is the actual totebag I made when I was able to buy some new fabric! It turned out bigger than expected, but it fits my big watercolor paper pad, so that's good! ♡ 

Video Games

I don’t think I’ve talked about it here but I also love playing video games. I’m currently going through my quarterly Stardew Valley phase, thanks to my penpal (hi Kaja! 🤭💗) whom I share a farm with! 

This is not my farm but this is an example of the game <3

This game is so cozy and relaxing. Perfect during my mid-semester chaos!

So that's all I've been up to! What have you been up to lately?

I have a looooooong reading list to catch up on so if I haven't commented on your blog post(s) yet, I'll be there soon! 😂

I hope life is treating you well, my friends. The current state of the world is terrifying, and what helps me is reminding myself that we have each other.

And these silly hobbies to keep us sane while the world is on fire.

Love like a crow: happy Valentine's Day!

I hope you're able to spend time with your friends and loved ones. I, on the other hand, will be yearning for my lovely boyfriend through FaceTime until we're able to see each other again in some months. Long distance ain't for the weak but he's so worth it. Once we finally have a Valentine's Day date for the first time, you will not hear the end of it LOL. 

In the mean time, I like to look at pictures of crows and think this is us:

Since crows, ravens, and grackles have been my latest favorite birds, I'd like to include more wholesome pictures. I don't know why but although they're generally known as mischevious and for holding grudges, they're so intelligent and sociable. To me they're so mysterious and loyal to each other, it's so adorable and romantic.

This was a very random post, but I wanted to write something even though I find myself without any words to share lately. I have picked up sewing as well, though, so I might give you an update on what I've been up to later.

I hope you've had a great day! ♡

What I've been reading ♡

I don't think I've given a reading update since my rant about romance losing the plot, so here it is: January was a terrible reading month LMAO. But it's okay, because I take pride in saying that I was able to DNF books without feeling guilty. I simply reminded myself they're not gonna self-destruct after I DNF them, and that I can always give them another chance if I wasn't simply in the mood. 

But that is all in the past, because I'm excited about the books I'm already reading and the ones I can't wait to get into.

What I'm currently reading:

 Queen of Shadows by Sarah J. Maas

After my frustration with the romances I read in January (and My Year of Rest and Relaxation), I decided to dive back into Sarah J. Maas's Throne of Glass series. This one always brings me back from an impending reading slump so here I am, staring Queen of Shadows (book #4 within the series). 

Also, I wanted to share this picture because that cookie you see there is a guava cookie. Yeah, you read that right.

My favorite indie romance bookstore is run by two sisters whose hands are blessed by God; they just make the best chewy and moist cookies almost the size of my hand! My favorite is their guava one and I just know they hate to see me coming because they know I'm only there for the cookies. Now that I think about it, I've only bought one book from them ever since they opened in December.

Mile High by Liz Tomforde

Listen... I know what I said about reading too many romances. But I think this one is pulling me out from the romance slump. While I do not find lust romantic at all, it's the plot and humor that pull me into the story. 

Since the beginning I already know Zanders is a player (literally and relationship-wise), so it saved me the disappointment of lust being disguised as love. And also, I find him kind of hilarious. Characters having their own flaws and insecurities is something I appreciate in this current state of the romance "industry," if I should call it that. 

I think knowing that this is supposed to be "spicy" beforehand, allowed me to just sit back, relax, and enjoy without the expectation of a life-changing love story.

Inhale Exhale by Nicole MacPherson (HI NICOLEEE AAAHH!! <3)

The first person I've ever followed when I got into blogging has released her first novel!! I bought it for my kindle as soon as she let us know it was available for purchase. Even though so far I've only read one chapter, something has already resonated with me when learning about Livvy, the protagonist's daughter. I can't wait to keep going and see other fellow bloggers talk about it! ♡ 

Nicole if you're reading this, congratulations once again! I love reading your words.

Another book I want to get into:

Burn Bright by Krista & Becca Ritchie

This is the first book I would be reading by these co-authors. I decided to buy it after reading the first
chapter in the bookstore (something I've developed the habit of doing lately), and the writing style was pretty smooth. The punk, "not like other girls" FMC is something I can ignore... I think. I found it cringy but in an endearing way. So I hope I feel the same way as I continue through the story.

You're probably wondering, girl, why in the world are you reading three books at the same time?

BECAUSE IT KEEPS ME SANE! 😭

Okay but for real, I like having different genres to jump back into if I'm not feeling the sports romance, for example. I have to also read John Milton's Paradise Lost for one of my literature classes and my professor doesn't make the discussing experience in class any more enjoyable. Which is a shame, this is a really interesting book and I wish I had another professor who wouldn't go so fast and yap for 80 minutes straight, 30 of those spent talking about his time in law school. 

It's always during stressful times that I read more than ever. And to think the semester is only starting... *sigh* I just need to remind myself how much I want to be a librarian, so I can push through the time I have left.

What about you? What are you reading?

Back to knitting!

 One of my goals this year was to return to my abandoned hobbies, one of them being knitting.

I started around 2022 after feeling heavily inspired by Marzia, whose husband (Pewdiepie) I used to watch religiously on Youtube. Marzia has been a huge inspiration when it comes to fashion and creativity since almost forever; although I’m not the most creative person (yet), everything she did and how she did it always resonated with me. 

I’ve always been curious about trying other hobbies other than sewing, so when I saw Marzia learning how to knit, I took it as my sign to learn as well. Her sweaters always looked so cute!

I was just beginning to learn how to do squares with a garter stitch when Marzia posted about her own sweater pattern from her Maì Accents account. Of course, me being me, I instantly bought it. I mean, look at how cute it is!

Obviously, this was too advanced for me. But I wanted to have it beforehand, and I’m glad I bought it before she closed her store. 

When I opened my old big box where I store my yarn, I found four squares knitted together. I think I was trying to make my first blanket, so I decided to continue it for practice. It’s really wonky (and disastrous), but I love it; I decided to call it my Frankenstein blanket, or Franket for short. It has the face of a child only a mother could love.

As I kept working on the next squares for my Franket, I couldn’t help but think about other projects I wanted to do. For example, book sleeves or… a book thong. 

However, I grew a little frustrated after noticing that all these cute Pinterest tutorials are for crocheting. I know I could benefit from learning both but I don’t want to until I master knitting a little more. Am I delusional for hoping these could be done by knitting? Maybe.

I’m aware that knitting and crocheting make different textures but I’m insanely curious. If a cute kindle envelope is one big [maybe tighter] square away, I’m gonna try!

Friends, you have been in the blogging community longer than I have, so if you have any blog recommendations from any fellow knitters, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could share them!

The Analog Life Project: My Flip Phone Dilemma (Part 1)

 I may be only 23 years old, but I remember life before smartphones, convenient streaming services and social media as we know it today. For some reason when I was 4, I would always get excited to get home because I enjoyed watching my mom chat with her friends on MSN. It's not that I wanted to read her messages (I couldn't read much anyway), but I was obsessed with the animations, especially the water balloon boy.

If my mom had to leave the computer, I would just stare at it in case anybody nudged her. I would also yell, "Mom they're knocking!" 

 

Although MSN and MySpace were already thriving when I was 5, and when I was old enough to have social media these weren't a thing anymore, the reason I bring up this anecdote is because I miss when the internet was a place to visit. I miss feeling excited to get home to play FarmVille with my grandma (my mom had to make me a Facebook account that said I was born in 1980 so I could play and leave my grandma's farm alone), who we also lived with at the time. My mom also said she remembers being eager to get home from our cruise vacations to check her Facebook and post all her digicam pictures.

8-year-old me and my mom posing in front of Royal Caribbean's
Adventure of the Seas. 2010.

That's what I miss.

It's not impossible to go back to that, but now that I NEED my smartphone for college, money transfers, public transportation updates and Uber in case of emergency, I find myself in a little predicament. In Puerto Rico, WhatsApp is the main form of communication, but jeez how much I despise it. It's impossible to not get overstimulated with all those group chats, so of course one of my many fantasies is chucking my iPhone across the Pacific Ocean. I guess Do Not Disturb will do for now. 

For the month of July in 2024, I wanted to try a $20 Walmart Family flip phone. I can guarantee that at this point my friends were sick of me wishing society made the collective decision to go back to dumb phones. But I didn't care, and got the flip phone.

And blinged it.

My precious TCL Flip 2 (✿◠‿◠)

Getting this phone implied having two phone lines, but I saved my friends and family the hassle of saving the new number by setting up call forwarding from my iPhone. Sadly, it isn't the same for texts so if they really needed to text me, they had to use the flip phone's number. By then, college hadn't started yet so I felt comfortable leaving the house with just my flip phone. 

And, honestly, I loved it.

Some may have been frustrated with my obsession with going more "analog" and trying to live offline as much as possible, but it was a great experiment. I'm already a nostalgic person, so by default I often think of how things used to work back when I was a kid. 

A few days ago, Anne Butera talked about The Analog Life Project by Lori Roberts from Little Truths Studio, and it reminded me so much of the No-Phone Summer [challenge] I did in Summer 2024. I was spending the whole summer at my dad's in Florida (and a week at my boyfriend's in Texas). So, after such an overwhelming spring semester, I took this long trip as the opportunity to disappear.

I focused on decentralizing my phone, so I dusted off my digicam, my kindle, and my iPod. I only accessed social media on my dad's laptop, so it's not that I disappeared entirely. I couldn't, because it's how I could check on my online friends and see what my long distance family members were up to on Facebook. I also started reading magazines on Libby and subscribed to Cosmopolitan.

My challenge consisted of pretending it was the early 2000s, but I focused more on owning my music and my DVD's. I also went back to crosswords, fill-ins, and word-seeks. I bought the first Murdle volume I saw at Barnes & Noble during my trip, and it's honestly so fun.

So, what is this Analog Life Project?

Lori Roberts calls her project "an exploration of living more deliberately offline through making, noticing, writing, and human connection," and it's something that I could relate to when I think back to my summer challenge. Life finally slowed down, my eye strain was nonexistent, and I had more energy to interact with people around me (bonus: my shyness somehow vanished sometimes?).

I wanted to talk about this project because I think I read about it at the right time. I've been considering bringing back my offline routine but now that my uni classes started, I can't be completely offline. God, I fantasize about never having to open Outlook in my life ever again. So, this time I need to come up with a new offline routine, which I will [hopefully] get into in my next post. 

About my flip phone

I really don't know what to do yet.

It's been on my drawer since 2024 and I haven't reactivated the plan since then. I really miss using it but I think I should just keep it for time off and vacations. We'll see.

Are you doing anything to stay offline?