Self-Improvement

I always wondered how some people's knitting blogs got popular. Especially if you knit a sweater or a blanket or something else that's time consuming, I don't see how you can keep up with updated content in your blog to keep readers interested. I mean, besides knitting, blogging has become one of my favorite hobbies so I try really hard to always have some sort of update. My updates aren't really all that interesting though. Just tidbits about myself, some thoughts and some shots of my work in progress.

Well, I looked at other people's knitting blogs and they'd chat about knitting events or yarn or do giveaways. If its a more casual knit blog (like mine), once in a while they mention their other hobbies. Some like to bake, do arts and crafts, photography, etc. I thought about how I can apply that to my blog to give a better experience to my 5-7 constant readers (love you guys.. some I know, some I don't know!). I'm no yarn expert and or professional enough to start my own tutorials or create my own design, so I began thinking of a hobby that I could feature as my secondary focus!

So I began thinking. Well, I love playing videogames!


Playing Diablo 3.. good times

But .. my target audience (knitters) probably aren't interested. Most other knitter's blogs have their secondary focus on something artsy. So, I crossed that off my list. How about my dogs?

My derp dog tries to force my husky to play

Well, I think posting random pictures of them here and there are enough. Honestly, they just eat, sleep and play all day.. rinse wash, repeat. Like I said before, probably not so interesting to anybody else but me. Watching movies? Nah, I think it'd suck all the fun out of it if I felt like I had to review it at the end. I also wouldn't make a very good critic. I usually only rate my movies a 'I hated it', 'meh', and 'I loved it!' with the majority of movies falling under 'meh'.

So I thought really hard, and thought of something interesting! It's a bit odd, but something I like to do. I like to look up relationship building things on the internet, or magazines or whatever, and try them out with my reluctant boyfriend to see if it works. For example, we've tried staring into each others' eyes for 4 min a day (we reduced it to 30sec after the first day), giving each other great big hugs that last 30sec to get some oxytocin flowing, telling each other three positive things about one another, telling each other what the other should improve on (apparently, I need a new wardrobe, and he needs to quit parting his hair down the middle), asking each other a series of personal questions .. etc.

In an effort to build cooperation, we even did a paint by the numbers horse project together

In case you're wondering at this point, I'm not going to start blogging about testing relationship building tactics. I don't think I'd be comfortable revealing too much about me and my boyfriend on the internet. However, recently, we've been trying a 'try something new with your partner each week' tactic. At first we went on lots of dates to new places and tried new restaurants, but today after trying our new thing, I thought we could make it a weekly thing (and maybe blog about it too?)! We tried blending our own smoothies from scratch without any recipes .. just using our gut instincts. It was so much fun and strangely adventurous that I thought I might start a new category on my blog called 'Blend it'! To be honest, I'm not sure if I'll actually do it because my boyfriend is leaving on a business trip for 4 whole months and I also tend to move on quickly from idea to idea (so this may be your first and last time hearing about this), but I might as well tell you of our smoothie making disaster today.

Well, it started with a simple idea. None of us has made smoothies before, so this will be our something new for the week. Turns out, we don't really have a blender, but we did have a magic bullet, so we used that instead. Both of us love strawberry smoothies usually when we go out for drinks, so we decided to make that. We had a bag of frozen strawberries in the freezer, so we threw in a handful of those, threw in another handful of ice, added a bit of water, and some scoops of ice-cream (no exact measurements for anything, so you can set your expectations to a low) and started to blend. Well .. we tried blending anyway. Turns out, we should've thawed out the strawberries first as they were hard as a rock. And we should've also added more water. So every couple of seconds, we had to keep shaking the thing to keep it moving because those little tiny magic bullet blades kept getting stuck. After about 10 minutes of this shake and blend, we had something that resembled a strawberry smoothie. Well let me tell you, it was disgusting, and the most sour drink I've ever tasted. Maybe there were too much strawberries and not enough other stuff? I have no idea. My boyfriend took one sip and gave up. I tried to stay strong and finish the thing so as not to be wasteful, but my boyfriend noticed my suffering and just decided to pour all of it out. You wouldn't have been able to guess it was going to be gross just by looking at it though.

So, that's the story of us screwing up something as simple as a strawberry smoothie. On a positive note, it did give us lots of laughs and a good story to tell. If I decide to continue this trend, next week, I want to try a smoothie with broccoli .. I heard its actually good!