Skin care

My skin has it's bad days, but it's not terrible.

My philosophy of good skin:
1. Work out - circulation and health body = great skin
2. Drink lots of water - hydration = great skin
3. Try to stick with the skin products that work for you than trying out so many different types of lotions, toners, serums...etc.  I actually prefer French brands over Japanese and Korean (whisper: I use Lancome for pretty much everything, including make up)
4. Don't use foundation.  honestly, I think a woman's natural skin and tone is the most beautiful--instead of just covering your whole face up with a totally different shade.  utilize concealer instead!
5. SPF
6. Good sleep (I found that 8 hours of sleep makes my skin feel more tight and glowing) AND sleeping at regular times.  Yes, sounds old lady-ish, but sleeping and waking up at consistent times helps so much.  My mom swears that sleeping through 10pm-2am is the best for the skin because of some kind of circadian rhythm and cell renewal times, but it's too tough for me to do that.
7. As soon as you get home, wipe off make up
8. Don't think about skin too much -- just develop a routine and don't focus too much on the blemishes or pimples.  I felt like my bad pimples never went away when I put too much attention to them.
9. Change pillow covers regularly (at least biweekly!)
10. No conditioners if you can.  I know everyone's hair temperaments are different, but ever since I stopped using conditioners (middle school), my hair was still fine and soft, and my skin had less breakouts.

I'm still on the fence with eye cream.  I read articles that your facial moisturizer does just as good enough job...

EXTRA.
My mom has skin like tofu.  She has the softest skin ever.  She told me to use body lotion, so I bought an avocado body lotion and the scent reminds me of Korea.  Let's see how long this will last.  (The other time, I bought a big bottle of Johnson and Johnson's baby lotion and that didn't last more than a week...maybe because the bottle didn't have a pump, so the convenience of using it was more cumbersome).  This new lotion has a pump.  I LOVE PUMPS!!!

thank God for candles

my husband lights them after he destroys the bathroom.

WOO.

A conversation at 9:34 PM

"Honey."

"Yeah, honey."

"Today is December 4th."

"Okay."

"And we already spent 369.23 dollars this month."

"...on what?"

"Mainly groceries."

"Oh."

"Just letting you know."

"Okay."

Goals so far for the next year

1. Finish Ramit Sethi's book and start investing
2. Visit an international country
3. Learn HTML - I talked with a friend from my high school is doing an amazing job with her web designs (all self taught).  I remember she was super smiley, super smart and wore bright colors that worked surprisingly well together.  Check out her some of her work: http://100daysoffonts.com/ . I want to see what I can do as well haha.  I wanted to know how she was doing aside from work, but she was tired from doing working in the studio that day and didn't want to bother her!
4. Finish children's book #1
5. Draw a picture everyday - even if its a sloppy doodle.
6. Be more financially savvy.
7. Work out more often.

TESTING OUT HTML

Posted by: Sandra Lee Juhn

My husband mutters to himself a lot. I find him talking to himself in the bathroom and he talks quite a lot in his sleep. The other day he was laughing in his dream, there was another occasion when he was talking about a love hotel. His favorite thing to do in the shower is sing Phantom of the opera
SING TO ME, MY ANGEL! It is because I lived by myself for 31 years. - the husband added.

body { font-family: Verdana; } article { width: 800px; } article header h1 { color: green; } article header p { background-color: red; color: white; } article figure { width: 600px; border: 3px solid black; padding: 5px; } article figure img { width: 100%; }

 DAMMIT. I SUCK.

confusion

i get scallions and shallots mixed up all the time.

Budgeting

My newfound hobby: Budgeting

At first I dreaded it.  There was just too much to account for, especially with two people with multiple bank accounts and credit cards.  But, since high school, I was so curious to know how and where my money went in, out or stayed.  I didn't want any mere estimates or generalizations -- I wanted to know where each penny was going, to the T.

These were my attempts in the past
- In high school, I carried around a notepad and tried writing down the spendings on a notebook and punch them into a calculator.  I even would carefully select and purchase a cute Korean money spending tracker notepad.  That seemed to help a bit, but all I can tell you was that the record keeping didn't last more than a month.
- In college, I used Minted.  But some of the spendings would be placed in the wrong categories causing me to spend more time editing and carefully looking through if things were categorized correctly.  That lasted longer, but not much--maybe two, three months?
- This past year, I tried YNTB, but it was just basically an excel sheet with a few fancy buttons.  It was an application that I definitely could have done myself with a computer excel sheet.  Thus, waste of subscription money.

So, I took it into my very own hands since this past January and started with the technological basics: the excel sheet.  It was just me, my laptop, excel, simple formulas and perusing of hundreds of bank statements.  It was difficult to face the numbers for a long while because we had to fly to California so often and Alex was the breadwinner on a resident salary (I was waiting for my optometric license to get in)--all I could tell you was that we were in the red for a long long time.  Once I got the grasp of how much we were making together and how much we were spending, I found myself writing furiously in notebooks and extrapolating figures during my work breaks, then updating it onto my laptop as soon as I came home.  I was checking out finance books from the library and reading about them online.  I'll admit, I was late in the growing-up game with this whole finance thing, but everything was finally making sense.  Also, I remember thinking to myself, 'Man, I used to be one of those kids who used to scoff at the boring adults reading through dense boring money books, and here I am, at 29 years old, hungrily going through personal finance articles.'

Now, I absolutely LOVE punching in the numbers, extrapolating, and determining out how much we spend on what, how much we can save, where we can save, what goes into taxes, how much is needed to buy a car, house and much much more! I would put in every single spending (name, date, category, cost) and color code them, pie chart and compare each month.  I even calculated how much I spend on skin care and make up every year (less than $700) and graphed the utility bills to see how much electricity or water bill goes up per season.

In the end, it led me and Alex to proudly pay off all the student loans last week!

Weeeee!  I can't wait for the new year :)