This is a wonderful recipe that makes a really tasty tofu curry – just the thing if you’re looking for something a little different and enjoy the recipe ideas hunted down by Vegan Village – this one from the now-non-existent Salamander Restaurant, so let’s keep this recipe going! You can serve it to a group of people, or just chow down on it in between work and weekend Binguez sessions. You’ll need:

A teaspoon of turmeric
Two cloves
A pinch of cinnamon
Half a teaspoon of salt
Half a tablespoon of ground cumin
Half a tablespoon of ground coriander
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
Two centimetres of root ginger, peeled and finely chopped
A third of a block of creamed coconut, grated (OR you can also use 1/2 a can of coconut milk – it comes out creamier that way!)
Two tablespoons of cider vinegar
An eight-ounce block of firm tofu, cut into one-centimetre cubes
One level tablespoon of Dijon mustard
4 ripe tomatoes, skinned and chopped
One very thinly sliced large onion
One tablespoon of tomato purée (also known as Tomato Paste, if you’re in the USA)
Oil for frying

Okay, so let’s get to cooking:

First off, you’re going to want to fry the tofu in 1 tablespoon of oil in a shallow pan, keeping the heat reasonable but not too high, until the pieces are lightly browned on all sides. After that, they go into a bowl along with the mustard, salt and vinegar, and coated with that mix.

Preheat a saucepan over medium heat. Add a teaspoon of oil and cook the onions and ginger until you see the onions beginning to break down, then add the garlic and spices and cook for around five minutes.

The tofu then goes in, along with any excess marinade, along with the tomatoes, tomato purée and creamed coconut. Cover the pan and let that all simmer for about ten minutes, then remove the cloves you threw in, and serve either by itself or perhaps with some sticky rice (brown or white). Enjoy your tasty curry!

a rare image of me in work out gear

A big part of manifesting the life you want that not enough people talk about are the following things:

1. Following your intuition (which is a part of you connected to the universe in the first place).

2. Saying no to things that don’t make you happy and/or that your intuition is telling you to say no to. It can be difficult to tell the difference between your intuition saying no and your ego being afraid to step outside your comfort zone. I could write an entire book on this, but instead I’ll just say Andrea Hess has a great video about knowing the difference between your intuition and ego.

3. Maybe the most important thing: Sometimes you have to take action to feel good. That’s what Abraham Hicks mean when they say “reach for that good feeling emotion” (paraphrased, but you know what I mean). You have to reach! Reaching means actually doing something. Once you do that it’s like, bingo! The manifestations flow more easily.

A lot of people say to get what you want, you just have to choose to feel good and appreciate what you have. That IS totally 100% true, but if there is something in your life that you’re unhappy with and you CAN change it, do something! If you’re unhappy and you can’t necessarily change it (at least not right now), make changing that thing one of your goals, and try doing things that do make you happy to get back into the vortex in the meantime. Then you can manifest a better reality. If you’re not doing something that would make you happy because you’re afraid of failure, do whatever you have to do to gain more courage! Affirmations are a great place to start. Aside from your mood improving, depending on how you choose to take action, there can be other benefits as well. And it’s important to remember that a lot of the things that seem impossible to change, are not actually impossible to change.

For me, exercise is the easiest and fastest action I can do to feel good. If you read my lifestream, you know I recently got kicked out of my flat. It was actually one of the best things I’ve ever manifested – sort of like when you get fired from a job you knowingly hate? Like that. One of the problems I had at my old place was dealing with some negativity on the part of my housemates that got under my skin, bad. Despite my best efforts, I used to always get upset about things said to me and let it ruin my day. It would have a snowball effect, and the next thing I knew I’d be thinking about other things that made me unhappy – like my bank account balance, or how dinner didn’t come out that great, some song I was working on that wasn’t coming out exactly right, or whatever.

However, eventually I noticed that I felt a lot worse about things in general on the days when I didn’t get a chance to work out. If I got a workout in, especially AFTER something bad happened, I felt awesome regardless, and it was like nothing could bring down my mood. Now I never miss a work out in the morning – the sooner I exercise after I wake up, the better I’ll feel, and the better my day will go. Obviously, aside from those things, exercise increases my energy levels, improves my physical appearance, and boosts my confidence – and all these things have a massive impact on the rest of my life. So it’s like killing two birds with one stone (or chopping 2 blocks of tofu with one knife, to use a more ethical expression). If you don’t usually exercise – I recommend giving it a try.

In a similar vein, sometimes you have to stop being so gosh damn lazy if you want to feel good. You are denying the world your greatness when you do this. The world NEEDS to know how awesome you are, so cut it out. Recognise what you’re doing (or not doing) that makes you feel bad and stop! I think Abraham has a metaphor for that – don’t put your hands on the stove if you know it’s going to burn you?

For example: It might seem like a good idea to blow off my work out in the morning, when I’m feeling tired or lazy, but I know my day is going to be worse because of it. So when those thoughts of not exercising cross my mind, I just gotta dismiss them.

To use a different example: if I spend an entire day reblogging cat GIFs on tumblr instead of doing something productive, I know I’m going to be sad about it later when I haven’t worked on something else I genuinely wanted to do (like write this post). Yeah, those (non-)activities are easier than actually doing something, and might make me feel good for a little bit, but if I feel bad after the fact, it doesn’t matter!

If you get lazy and procrastinate on taking inspired action, a lot of the time it’s because you’re afraid – usually of failure, but sometimes of change or even success. Find the best way for you to release your fear. I think saying affirmations works the best. So look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself you’re good enough!

Meditation is another great way to do this. If you need a guided meditation, Louise Hay’s Morning and Evening Meditations are the absolute best.

Is there something you’re unhappy about in your life that you know you can change?

If there’s something in your life that makes you unhappy, but seems impossible to change right now, what can you do to feel good now?

Are you avoiding doing things that will make you happy? What can you tell yourself to help you gain courage?

Love and light xx

Make Overload by adorpheus

This is a song that I wrote which samples “Make Over” by Christina Aguilera. You can download it for free!!! Just click the little down arrow in the widget above.

Love and light -

I first heard Marina and the Diamonds (without realising it) when I heard her song Hollywood on the radio in the screenprinting room while I was still at university (since, I’ll be honest, the only time I listen to the radio is when it’s forced on me, such as in an academic setting). I didn’t really hear her until over a year later though when I was on a plane ride home from the USA. I was listening to random artists on Virgin Atlantic’s media player thing when her song Shampain came up on shuffle. I loved it instantly. I spent the rest of the flight home listening to The Family Jewels on repeat. The entire album is amazing, there’s not a single bad track on it, but Shampain was a really stand out track for me. I listened to it over and over again.

I originally wasn’t planning to go to her concert because it was the same day as Hyper Japan but my excitement over the possibility of seeing her live got the best of me and I ended up buying a ticket anyways. …Plus who knows when I’ll get the chance to see her again, given the amount of work I have to do this year.

One thing I did notice about this gig is that there was much more diversity in the crowd than at most of the shows I go to. Normally I feel like I’m surrounded by tweens whenever I go to a concert – but at this show there were adults, teenagers, middle aged people and up, which I think is awesome and shows how wide an audience Marina attracts.

She came on wearing this gorgeous vintage (?) dress with lace gloves and petticoat. Not sure if she was wearing a wig or if that was her real hair, but I admit I love the blonde on her! A lot of people freaked (in a bad way) when she switched from brunette hair to blonde but I love it. She opened with an acoustic version of Radioactive, one of the singles from her upcoming sophomore release, Electra Heart. She followed up that with Are You Satisfied? and then The Outsider. The next song she sang was I Am Not A Robot, which was amazing! Normally that song isn’t my favourite, but the way she sang it live was outstanding, and the disco ball in the venue lit up during the chorus! I tried to get a video of it, but it didn’t really come out good. Lame.

The next songs she played were more from her new album, one called Homewrecker and the other called Living Dead. I liked these songs a lot more than “Radioactive”, hearing them made me feel excited for Electra Heart.

Her band took a break for a little while and Marina played Numb and Obsessions with just her piano and a back up singer. The next two songs she performed, “Primadonna” and “Starring Role” were also from Electra Heart.

The crowd started to get really rowdy as soon as she went into the much loved song from The Family Jewels, Oh No! Oh No! is probably my favourite from The Family Jewels besides Shampain.

The next song she played was an unreleased song – that, to my surprise, I hadn’t heard before… Normally I’m good at keeping track of B-sides and unreleased tracks by artists that I love. Marina told us that this song, called “Jealousy“, didn’t make the cut for The Family Jewels OR Electra Heart so it’ll never be released officially. If this song is unreleased cuz her label doesn’t want it to be released, her record label has got to be the biggest bunch of fucking idiots EVER, because this song is awesome. It’s easily better than some of the tracks that did make the cut for both albums, and could be a hit if released as a single. Seriously WTF?! Here’s a place where you can download the song if you want, since it’s never going to be released, I guess downloading it isn’t taking any money from Marina.

She closed the “first act” with the also very popular Mowgli’s Road.

For the encore, she played “Fear and Loathing” (which is going to be on Electra Heart) before closing with her biggest hit ever and the first song I heard of hers, Hollywood.

The show was great and of course she performed beautifully… I’m grateful I got to see her. But I admit I was crushed she didn’t play Shampain. Normally I wouldn’t get that sad about it… But Shampain was the first Marina song I loved, and it’s a song that gave me life when I was in total darkness, so I was really looking forward to hearing it live.

Oh I was also sad about being too poor to buy any merch, cuz I wanted that electra heard necklace. Hopefully there will be a next time.

I love Marina and I have faith that this year will be the year she steals the heart of whole world! I dream of a day when I could play music with her, or at least meet her and tell her how much her music means to me.

love and light xxxx.

I was going to make a “yearly goals” post last month, but I changed my mind because nobody really gives a frak about reading my goals on my blog (including me because I review my goals literally every week)… And if for some reason you are curious, I post about them regularly on my lifestream. My only resolution for the year is to express myself more – especially here on my blog. Which for me means more sharing, more writing, and more music!

So instead I’m going to share my favourite things (mostly personal development related) of 2011. Most bloggers have some kind of weekly post where they talk about all the cool things they’ve found on the web. I’ve considered doing that in the past, but I don’t often come across anything post worthy. And I don’t want to just post cool things like everyone else does, I wanna post things that are actually gonna help y’all.

These ten resources (some of them websites/blogs, books, etc) were absolutely crucial to bringing me closer to my health and personal goals for the past year. If you’re serious about changing your life or living the best life you can, I encourage you to look at this list and learn more about the sites that stand out to you! I’m crazy about this kind of stuff so of course I just devoured everything here, but feel free to visit the sources you like and ignore the ones that don’t speak to you.

In no particular order.

1. Chalene Johnson’s 30 Day Challenge

Chalene Johnson is a fitness expert, lifestyle coach, and entrepreneur. I stumbled upon Chalene’s 30 Day Challenge randomly near the last half of 2011. I seriously wish I could remember who’s blog I got the link from because I’m forever grateful to them for introducing me to Chalene! She’s become my #1 inspiration and idol. Her 30 Day Challenge is a free course that helps you get organized and enable you to achieve your goals. The concepts were so new to me that I admit I really struggled with it the first time I did it all the way through, but I learned so much extremely valuable information. Around a month after I did the free version of the course, Chalene released a book called Push, which is sort of like a premium version of the 30 Day Challenge. It’s a little more in depth and includes a lot of fitness help as well. Of course I jumped on the chance to get it, and I’m so so so grateful I did, because I did so much better on the course the second time through.

I used to be the kind of person who would scribble a to-do list on a piece of paper at the beginning of the day, lose track of the paper, lose track of time doing something that I didn’t actually care about that much (or that someone else wanted me to do), and then at the end of the day I’d be mad at myself for having accomplished barely any of what I wanted. The productivity and goal setting skills I learned in the course and in Chalene’s book Push have put a stop to that completely. They are valuable tools that I’ve incorporated into my daily routine, I’m amazed every day at the goals I’m able to accomplish more and more.

And the fitness advice in Push was exactly the kind of no-nonsense advice I’ve been looking for. Before I read the book, my weight loss was super slow and I could never figure out whether what I was doing was really working or not. Now I know exactly what I’m doing and the results have been awesome! I’ll have to make a post about it at some point.

2. Goddess Leonie / Goddess Guidebook.com

I found Leonie from one of her guest posts on ProBlogger, and I’m super happy I did! Her blog posts have been something I look forward to in google reader every day. I love the free meditation mp3 she offers for signing up to her email list, I have it on my iPod, and it’s one I use whenever I want to do a short meditation.

What really inspired me to put her on this list is when I got her 2012 Goddess Calendar/Planner. Although my (crappy) printer mangled the first 20 pages or so, I’m in love with the colourful art and inspirational tools inside. I thought I had the year planned out already, but doing the workbook gave me so many more ideas on how to make this year the best ever. I love the calendar pages the most. At the beginning of each month, I put one on my vision board along with the goals I have for the month.

Leonie recently released a book called 73 Lessons Every Goddess Must Know, which I got a copy of for Christmas but haven’t read yet! I have a whole bunch of books I’m working my way through at the moment, haha, but I will update as soon as I get to Leonie’s to let you guys know how it is!

I hope someday I can join her Goddess Circle too.

3. Living in the Light (and other books by Shakti Gawain).

Shakti’s books should be required reading for anyone into spirituality or the law of attraction. I don’t really have much to say other than you need to get them immediately, especially if you’ve been using other personal development tools like vision boards and visualization with minimal results. And if you’re new to this stuff, her books are a way better primer than “The Secret”. Why the hell aren’t her books more well known? Generally, I think most personal development material isn’t easy to understand without significant practice and introspection (even basic advice like “follow your bliss” and all that), and a lot of books give you the basic idea of how to live life deliberately but fall short of giving enough detail. I didn’t feel that way about Shakti’s books at all.

I was given Living in the Light as a gift, and as soon as I finished it I bought Creative Visualization and The Creative Visualization Workbook, since I had heard such great things about them. When I read Living in the Light it was like I had finally found the spirituality book I was looking for after lifetimes of digging through fluff. I’m in the middle of Creative Visualization now and it’s crazy what I’ve already managed to manifest with the skills I’ve gained.

4. My Fitness Pal

One of the things Chalene mentions in her book PUSH is that it’s essential to count calories if you want to lose weight. To clarify, you have to count the calories you burn (via exercise) and the calories you intake (via food). This is something that I had tried to do in the past but found way way too cumbersome to keep up. But with MyFitnessPal, doing this way way easier! A lot of the recipes from the cookbooks I use (like Appetite for Reduction,Veganomicon, etc) are in the food database already, but even when something I’m making isn’t in there, I just enter the ingredients manually and it calculates the calories for you. There’s also a MyFitnessPal phone app which works even on my crappy old Blackberry and comes in super handy.

MyFitnessPal has totally changed the way I eat, and has accelerated my weight loss maybe a zillion percent. I was eating way too much before and I didn’t even know it! Now that I keep track of what I eat I feel like my body’s adjusted and I can feel more intuitively whether or not I’m eating too much. And although it can be time consuming, knowing for sure that what I’m doing is going to work saves me a lot of time in the long run because I’m no longer making diet mistakes and unknowingly preventing myself from losing weight.

As for counting the calories you burn, Chalene recommends the Fitbit or bodybugg (for my UK brethren, the UK version of the bodybugg is called the Ki Fit). Those gadgets are probably amazing but until I can afford that fancy shit, I got a cheap knock off calorie counting watch (this one, if you care). While the accuracy of the watch I have is probably nowhere near as good as the “real” calorie counting devices, it is extremely helpful to get an idea of how many calories I’m burning during the workout.

5. Sandi Krakowski / ARealChange.com

I found Sandi’s blog from Chalene Johnson’s Twitter. Although not all of her business tips apply to me, I did her free blog training and it gave me so many great ideas for my blogs. I think what I like the most about Sandi though is her passion for inspiring people to pursue their dreams and stop procrastinating. Whenever I’m feeling run down I go and read one of her blogs and it never fails to give me a boost. If you’re looking for marketing tips for your business, look know further than the treasure trove of knowledge Sandi provides on her website.

I also have a copy of her book Read Their Mind, but like Leonie’s book, I haven’t got a chance to read it yet! If it’s anything like her blog, though, I’m sure it’ll be awesome.

6. Andrea Hess / Empowered Soul

I’ve been following Empowered Soul for a while. Recently Andrea added a free video training called “The Spiritual Path to Six Figures” which I thought was awesome! She frequently sends out free meditations and guides to people who are signed up to her mailing list (which I love!), but the video series is definitely the best free tool she’s released yet. Watching it has helped me identify a ton of stuff I’ve been doing wrong professionally, which is great because now I can fix those things. What I love most about Andrea’s blog and video series is her emphasis on taking inspired action – I feel like most people ignore doing this because it’s outside of their comfort zone, but if you want to see changes, you need to take action.

7. Chocolate Covered Katie

Chocolate Covered Katie is a vegan dessert blog dedicated to healthier alternatives to traditionally unhealthy desserts. Hers is probably my favourite food blog ever. Unlike most food blogs (even vegan ones), Katie usually includes gluten- and sugar-free versions of all her recipes, and usually lists the caloric content as well. Since I started reading her blog I eat chocolate practically every day without feeling like garbage or cheating on my diet.

There are way too many amazing recipes for me to list here but I’ll say that the Cake Batter Doughnuts (pictured above!!) might be the greatest thing I’ve ever made, but I also love her Brownie Batter Dip, and Fudge Babies. There’s nothing else to say about this blog, it’s amazing and the recipes speak for themselves.

8. Jillian Michaels Workout DVDs

When I moved from Bath to London I had to leave my gym membership there too. Unable to find a gym near where I moved, I decided to try working out at home with DVDs as an alternative. I started with the 30 Day Shred. I don’t know why I didn’t start doing this sooner. Working out is sooo much easier when you can get it out of the way early in the day at home and don’t have to drive to the gym! But what I like the best is how much more intense her workouts are than what I was doing at the gym before.

My favourite of hers is Banish Fat, Boost Metabolism, which is what I do (almost) every day. When I want a shorter workout I go back to 30 Day Shred, or if I want a less intense workout on a rest day I might do Yoga Meltdown. I also have Killer Buns & Thighs and No More Trouble Zones, which I use less often but are still great!

9. Chrome Nanny / Leechblock

In Chalene’s book Push, she mentions that you have to identify the time wasting and procrastination activities that prevent you from achieving your goals and cut back on them. I have a lot to say about this topic, but until then, I’ll just say that if this is something you have trouble with, browser plugins like Leechblock (for Firefox) and Nanny for Chrome can be really helpful. You enter the sites that you want to avoid into the plugins and set the time of the day you want them to be blocked (for example, from 9 to 5 if that’s your work day, or whatever time frame applies to you). If you try to go to those sites you won’t be able to access them and a “get back to work” message will be displayed instead.

I hate (hate!) when I go to a social networking site or similar to just do one thing and end up getting carried away wasting 15-60 minutes there. I originally installed this plugin for the sole purpose of blocking facebook, but using the plugin has helped me identify other sites I don’t want to waste time on. Facebook is one of those sites that I never actually want to go to but end up on all the time anyways either from clicking other people’s links or going there to “check my messages”. Personally, I use Chrome and I have a list of 16 sites that I block between the hours of 11 pm and 1 am every day of the week. I love it because I no longer have to think or worry about ending up on one of these sites, and I am able to focus so much more on the important stuff.

10. Do As One

Meditation is a great way to get inspiration flowing when you want to (rather than waiting for it to hit you). I meditate every day and Do As One makes that so easy. No lame music, no distracting talking, just breathing. You can also add background noise (like running water or whatever) if you want. What I like best though is that you can time your meditations and a bell will ring when time’s up. They also have an iPhone app which I can only assume is as great as the website.

It’s up to you.

These resources will give you a big boost, but ultimately you need to put the work in if you want to make all your dreams come true. No one can do it for you!

Love and light,

It’s no secret that I wear colour contact lenses to change my eye colour. My real eyes are brown but I’m usually seen with blue or grey eyes. Over the years I’ve tried probably every brand imaginable. Circle lenses have become really popular lately so I wanted to give them a try. I had heard the nudy grey lenses were really good, and I was looking for new grey lenses anyways, so awhile back I picked some up.

I was hoping for something that would make my eyes really pop – and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money. Oh – and they had to be prescription! I can barely see at all without my glasses so plano lenses were not an option (there’s a ton of sites out there that only sell plano lenses, and they couldn’t annoy me more). So I got the Nudy Grey Circle Lenses from LensCircle.com where they are quite cheap considering they last about a year.

They shipped pretty quickly and came with a free extremely cute case, pictured above. They also came with an extremely cute leopard print bag but unfortunately I managed to misplace that before getting a chance to take a picture (sigh).

These are my eyes with the Nudy Grey Circle lenses. They make my eyes look bigger, but the color in them is a super subtle dark grey. I’m not sure if this is because of the lenses or because my eyes are super dark. I do like the way they look, but the lack of colour was a little disappointing to me.

Comparatively, the following pic is of me wearing Freshlook Colorblends lenses which are sort of regular colour lenses you can get anywhere. They are what I usually wear.

Overall, I’d love to try more of the other kinds of Circle Lenses in the future to see how they compare to the nudy grey lenses, and how much colour they give. But until then the most colour boost I’ll stick to my regular old Freshlook lenses.

Ok, I admit that when it comes to taking off my make up at the end of the night, I’m not as vigilant about it as I should be. So I prefer something that can get the job done without too much of a struggle, and of course I don’t want to use a product unless it’s cruelty free. At the same time, I have sensitive skin, so I try not to use stuff that’s too oily or harsh or I’m going to end up with a face crisis. Unable to find anything that fits all these requirements, for a while I’ve just been doing the best I can when washing my face at night.

Enter Philosophy Just Release Me Eye Makeup Remover. My BFF Lisa introduced me to this product after she had a make up situation where she literally had make up on her face that wouldn’t come off. A clerk at Sephora recommended it to her and she found it worked really well, but at the same time wasn’t as harsh as most make up removers. I was intrigued.

So when I was in need of a make up remover myself, I popped over to Sephora and had a look at the ingredients of just release me. As far as I could tell, there were no animal ingredients in it. Just to be sure (and because I still wasn’t sure whether or not it was tested on animals), I figured I’d do a little Googling, and I was pleasantly surprised to find the answer was on the company’s website (for once). Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know that companies that don’t specify their products cruelty free, or who are secretive about their ingredients and their animal testing status really grind my gears.

This is what the Philosophy website has to say regarding animal testing and ingredients:

does philosophy test on animals?

we absolutely do not conduct animal testing with philosophy products. we are fully committed to using alternatives to animal testing to ensure the safety of our products.

are any philosophy products derived from animals?

for your reference, our product development team has confirmed that the only philosophy products containing ingredients derived from animals are as follows: pure grace shower cream (contains hydrolyzed milk protein), amazing grace shampoo, bath & shower gel (contains hydrolyzed milk protein) and kiss me lip balms (contain lanolin). all other philosophy products contain ingredients that are of botanical or synthetic origin.

Having used the product for the past few months I can say that, though slightly awkward to apply, works really well and hasn’t irritated my skin a bit. Maybe I’m just a klutz though. At $20 a bottle, it’s slightly pricy, but a bottle lasts for quite a while.

So there you have it dudes and dudettes, my favourite cruelty free make up remover so far!

xoxoxoxo

At the end of last month I went to see Britney Spears live for the first time. If you know me in real life (or maybe just on last.fm) know, she is my musical idol, my inspiration, and most played in iTunes for sure. I love her so much not just because her music is amazing, but I admire her ability to continue to be successful despite her struggles with the media and in her personal life. I also feel she’s the only contemporary pop star (besides maybe Christina Aguilera?) who seems comfortable enough with herself to NOT cling desperately to stupid gimmicks in order to get people to listen to her music. HOWEVER, I’m totally late to the Britney party – I actually didn’t start listening to her music until last year! Despite my diverse taste in music, I always deliberately ignored her albums because of her portrayal by the media. So I never went to any of her previous tours. That shit ended the fateful day I heard this track. Why have I been missing out on this for like 10+ years?!?!

Luckily I saw the light early enough to get tickets to this tour.

What I wore that day

First off, here’s what I wore to the concert! My Beemo shirt from Threadless came in the mail a few days before the concert so I was eager to wear it, along with some other bright ass colours. The skirt is by Putumayo. Unfortunately, because I live in squalor (i.e. the shower is broken and no one can be arsed to fix the fucking thing) I couldn’t do my hair so I wore a wig. It’s actually my unstyled Naruto wig, but I pulled it into pigtails in order to make it look somewhat cute (it doesn’t).

But it was cold so I wore a jacket.

I tried to take a pic of my make up, the colours of which were as eye burning as the rest of what I wore.

The Concert!

So! I purposely showed up late to the concert because I didn’t care about seeing any of the opening acts. Unfortunately this meant I didn’t get to stand that close to the stage, not to mention I managed to end up behind the tallest guy in the venue. So the photos I got were definitely not as impressive as the ones I took for Katy Perry.

She opened with the lead single from Femme Fatale, “Hold It Against Me”, but I didn’t get any pictures of it (because I suck). She followed that with “Up N Down” which is one of the bonus tracks from Femme Fatale. I was super excited when she sang this because it’s definitely my favourite track from her new album! The audience also went insane when she started performing it. I have no idea why it’s only a bonus track. In my opinion, it should be a single. It’s amazing, and easily better than “Hold It Against Me”! I think her record label is absolutely stupid for making it only a bonus track.

Britney gets ready to make a costume change

She followed that up with “3″, which is another song of hers that I love!!! Now, Wikipedia’s Set List says she played “Piece of Me” (from Blackout) next. I don’t remember this happening, but maybe I was temporarily dead during that time. But I’m pretty sure I would remember it because that’s one of my favourite songs ever. After that, though she definitely played “Big Fat Bass” and “How I Roll”. I got a short and blurry video clip of “How I roll”, which I took because I thought the images on the screen were really cute:

She invited a very lucky fan on stage with her while she did a super sexy dance and sang “Lace and Leather” (from Circus). Unfortunately that lucky fan was not me. After a short break to give the lucky fan a chance to get off stage, she came back on stage and, to my extreme excitement, did a remixed version of “If U Seek Amy” (possibly my favourite Britney track ever!)

Ok, this for me was the best part of the concert. After a quick change, she performed Gimme More. Now, I actually don’t like “Gimme More” that much, I think it’s one of Britney’s weaker songs actually. Looking back on Blackout (one of the greatest pop albums ever, maybe the greatest ever), I don’t think Gimme More was deserving of being the lead single. But seeing her perform it live kinda changed my mind about the song. She did a remix version and it was in-freaking-sane!

The costumes, the set pieces, the dancing, everything about this performance was amazing. She had an Egyptian theme set complete with the crazy bird thing you see above, it was seriously inspiring.

She followed that up with “(Drop Dead) Beautiful” (another amazing track from Femme Fatale), and “Boys”. Then she got suspended from the ceiling on a swing for “Don’t Let Me Be the Last to Know”.

This was awesome! After that, she performed a remix of “Baby One More Time” mixed with Rihanna’s “S&M”. The crowd went crazy during this.

After that, she played “Trouble for Me”, “I’m a Slave 4 U”, and invited lots of fans on stage for “I Wanna Go” (not me ). She closed with “Womanizer”.

For the Encore, she started with “Toxic”. I’m not sure what kinda crazy remix they had going on in the live version of the song, but it was like ten times better than the album version of “Toxic” (if that’s possible). I’d say this was probably the second most amazing part of the concert, after “Gimme More”. The whole performance was incredible. The outfit she wore (above) was also amazing! I’m pretty sure I cried.

This is the moment I was waiting for!!! She closed out the encore with “Till The World Ends” and she got these angel wings and fireworks went off. As soon as I saw the angel wings on stage I started losing my shit and took 1 zillion pictures. Luckily this one came out pretty good!

Oh and real quick: she sang live!!! I feel like I shouldn’t have to bring this up, but several people asked me if she lipped the whole time and no she didn’t! Unlike what the Daily Mail (no, I will not link to their shitty review), et al are reporting, the concert was amazing and she absolutely did not “bomb”. All those wanna be newspapers can suck it, as far as I’m concerned. If you haven’t heard that she can sing check this masterpiece out:

Until next time—

When I’m in the USA, I practically live at Whole Foods. I had never been to any of the ones in Britain because they’re all in central London and I live in East London, so going there all the time isn’t exactly practical. But recently I went on an expedition there and what fun it was! We went to the one near Picadilly Circus.

Normal people do not get as excited about health food stores as I do. I look forward to going to them. I spend WAY too much time walking around just doing… nothing in them, looking at stuff I guess. When I am standing in a well maintained health food store, I feel an excitement bordering on exhilaration. So visiting this store was an occasion worth dressing up for, like every other day in my life.

Well, I will say one thing, this Whole Foods is like 1/20th the size of an average Whole Foods in America. It was freaking tiny. They did have a ton of awesome stuff, but I was disappointed with the fact that there was no bulk section. The bulk section is the best! But I was thrilled by the selection of tea, as visible in the photo above.

Why no bulk section!?!? (photo shamelessly stolen from the Whole Foods flickr)

More disappointing was the lack of Nutritional Yeast. That was half the reason we went – Nutritional Yeast is essential to delicious tofu scramble making and I still haven’t found someplace near Barking to buy it. I have to order it online.

I got a bunch of stuff, but this raw food bar was SRSLY yummy. It was a lot like the fudge babies from Chocolate Covered Katie (except not as good) if you’re too lazy to make those things. Speaking of which, Chocolate Covered Katie is my new favourite blog! I’ve made a bunch of recipes from her site lately, and they’ve all been amazing. If you’ve never eaten anything from her blog, I command you go there immediately and make something. I eat chocolate like every DAY now. I need to take pics of food more!

Until next time… xxxo.

I stumbled upon Yuffie Soaps on Etsy when I ran out of Vitamin C serum and foaming face wash. It is a fairly new store, created in May 2011. I wasn’t crazy about the price I paid for the last bottles of serum I bought, so when I searched Etsy this time I arranged the results by price (low to high). I was also hoping to buy them both from one shop instead of two different shops like I usually have to. Yuffie Soaps was the cheapest on the whole site, and had both products, so I decided to explore further.

Additionally, the company’s name is the same as the only awesome thing to come out of the worst Final Fantasy game ever, so I won’t lie, that also influenced my decision to buy from them.

Oh yeah, I went there

The good thing about Yuffie Soaps is that everything in the shop EXCEPT for a few bars of soap is vegan – and the stuff that’s not vegan is clearly labeled. I only ordered what I needed – Vitamin C serum and facial wash. When I got my order, she also sent me a sample of under-eye cream. The sample was vegan of course, like all the other facial products in the shop, but it included ingredients as well. I HATE when I receive a sample from a company and I can’t tell if it’s vegan or not because they didn’t include a label or ingredients!

The Products

I was surprised at how much product I received. The face cleanser is especially big considering how cheap it was!

The big thing I was pleasantly surprised about Yuffie Soaps was that the products included directions for use – well, except the facial soap, but that’s pretty easy to figure out. Including directions on products seems like a no-brainer, since all of the big skin care companies display directions on their bottles. However, most indie companies don’t bother to include directions on their products at all – in fact, Yuffie Soaps is the first indie beauty company I’ve purchased from that actually bothered to put directions on the products themselves and not just on the website.

As a relative newcomer to the wild world of skin care, I’ve many times purchased a product without knowing how to use it. When I first started using facial toner, I bought it from another Etsy store, and the bottle had no directions for use. So I used to just rub it all over my face with my bare hands. Then a friend gently let me know that you’re supposed to dab it on with a cotton ball. Whoops!

In the case of the Vitamin C serum, it advised gently rubbing it in an upwards motion, which I had no idea to do, but makes perfect sense! The sample of eye cream included similar directions for use which, needless to say, I found extremely helpful.

The facial wash is BLACK! I’m not sure if that’s intentional or just due to the ingredients but I thought it was pretty cool.

I liked that the product was liquid-y instead of viscous because it comes out of the bottle a lot easier. No squeezing required. It made my face feel fresh and clean, so it does the job. It’s gentle and feels good on my face, definitely a lot better than the stuff from ASDA I’ve been using lately.

The vitamin C serum smells good and as far as I can tell, works fine. My skin feels good when I wear it, and I only need to apply a little.

I’m not sure I can comment on the complete effectiveness of the eye lotion since I sleep so much that I don’t usually have to worry about bags under my eyes. I used it as a moisture boost around my eyes and it works great for that!

Yay!

Overall, I’m SO happy that I found Yuffie Soaps and I can’t wait to check out some of the other products they have available. There’s tons of other things that I’m DYING to try in the shop! As the company is still new, I can’t wait to see what products they release next. If they also sold vegan sunscreen, retinol, and vegan moisturiser cuz then I could buy everything in one place! And if they made a soap inspired by Yuffie, I guess that would be kind of cool too.