Happy October! Spooky season is here, can you believe it? I’m still not fully ready for summer to be over, but at the same time I’m really excited for all things plaid, cozy nights in, tea, and reading under fuzzy blankets.
September is up there with the best months of this year for me. I got to spend a lot of time with friends, do some things I’d been looking forward to for a long time, and carefully step out of my comfort zone. It’s been a lovely month altogether and I’m really excited to share my snapshots from it with you today.
Robbert’s starting a new D&D campaign (more on that later), which involves more players than are in our usual group so we found ourselves in need of a few extra chairs. I hopped on over to IKEA with a friend to buy some foldable bar stools, and while I was there I decided to pick up some new plant babies as well. A big re-potting and shuffling around commenced, so all plants have a new home and fresh soil now.
Oof, I came dangerously close to cutting my hair into a bob early this month! My ends have been getting thinner again and every now and then I’m tempted to just cut them all off to collarbone length. That’s the length where I currently have a lot of regrowth coming in, so everything below that looks noticeably thinner and just not that great in my opinion. I tried a faux curly bob to see how it looks.
I think this length looks really cute, but I also know I’ll probably regret cutting my hair like this. I’m a long hair girl heart and soul, and I fear this length would limit my options in regards to historical hair styling. So I decided to wait it out for now, and just wear my extensions a bit more often to fill out the ends until the shorter hairs grow in (hopefully they will).
My Maxipes Fík socks! I absolutely adore this sock line based on Czech children’s bedtime stories that used to air on TV when I was little. I have two pairs now, the other one features Bob a Bobek. They’re by the brand Fusakle and I got them in Slovakia. Nobody gets the references over here in the Netherlands so I think of it as a very exclusive inside joke, haha :)
Our friend Richie’s art is on display in a café/music venue in Amsterdam, and I attended the opening. It was right after my explorer scout meeting so I was still wearing my uniform which was slightly embarrassing, but hey. It was fun!
Just want to put this out there: Violife is making my life so much better and easier. They came out with vegan cream cheese and now parmezan in the Netherlands, and I absolutely love both of them. It’s so nice to have an easily accessible replacement for these foods that actually tastes nice too.
The second week of September was largely spent in Belgium, on our backpacking trip. We had an absolutely amazing time walking until our feet hurt and then some, sleeping by babbling brooks, cooking on little campfires and soaking up the glory of nature all around us.
I adore the simplicity that a trip like this offers. As long as you have enough food and water, you pretty much have complete freedom and that is amazing. I can’t wait for the next time we go!
When we came home I experienced that weird mix of feeling energized and exhausted at the same time. After unpacking and loading up the washing machine I crashed down on the sofa with a book, and Robbert built a pillow fort around me.
I made a batch of kimchi again! It’s quite a bit of work so I don’t do it very often, but I really should because boy do I love me some kimchi. This batch turned out especially good and looking at the photo now, I’m rather tempted to make another…
With my trip to Slovakia, scouting summer camp and our backpacking holiday I knew I wouldn’t have much time to tend to my bangs over the summer. I thought it best to let them grow out a little so I could sweep them to the side and be done with them for the majority of summer. Then I realised I might as well grow them out a bit more and get myself the Brigitte Bardot curtain bangs of dreams, so that’s where we’re at. I’m growing out my bangs! My hair is pretty stubborn in the front so I still need to train it and learn to work around some quirks, but so far I really like how curtain bangs look on me. Expect a video surrounding cutting and styling them soon!
My friend and I went to a classical music festival in central Amsterdam, and decided to hop into the Vegan Junk Food Bar in-between performances. We finally tried the vegan sashimi that we’d been eyeing for a while, but I must say it wasn’t the best. That’s coming from someone who never liked “real” sashimi either though so keep that in mind, haha! Everything else we had was great as always, including this especially great cocktail.
We started a new D&D campaign! Robbert’s DMing for the first time and he did an awesome job with the worldbuilding on his homebrew campaign. We have a couple of new first-time players joining us so the first session was just a little introduction to the game with pre-made characters, and now we get to build our own. I have some fun ideas for mine but am still in the early stages of writing a backstory.
My favourite way to eat kimchi: with fried rice, tofu and soy sauce. Yum yum! Had this for lunch for days until I ran out of kimchi.
I headed over to the beautiful city of Leiden for an appointment at Clinic Lara’s.
They offered to let me try Soprano laser hair removal! I’m currently in the process of getting my armpit hair removed and I must say I’m really excited. My armpit hair is very dark and grows quickly, so when I shave in the morning I’ll have stubble by nighttime. Can’t wait to no longer have to deal with that!
If you’re interested in laser hair removal as well, they’ve kindly given me a coupon code that you guys can use for 10% off any treatment. The code is Loepsie10 :)
Autumn is probably my favourite season to take photos in. Everything’s so beautiful this time of year, so I’ve been dragging Robbert out to take photos for Instagram more and more. We now have a pretty good routine that allows us to take lots of pictures in little time, which makes it much easier to squeeze a photo session into a day.
Something I haven’t mentioned yet: my jazz dance “career” seems to sadly have come to an end. During the last classes before summer a few girls in my group announced they were leaving, and sadly that left our group too small to be viable. I’m not ready to leave the dance school and the teacher I’ve been dancing with for 20 years myself yet, so I decided to take up classical ballet with her. I’m actually really excited for it! I’ve been going to professional ballet performances a lot these past two years and it has really re-kindled my love for it. I used to take ballet classes when I was little but I didn’t have the patience for it and I disliked piano music (how??) so I switched to jazz at age 8. And now we’ve come full circle. My first lesson was lots of fun! Learning all these new moves and not being able to rely on muscle memory while dancing anymore is a new challenge, but I love it.
This is the photo I sent Robbert right after I had filmed the 20s hair video, haha! I was so bummed it didn’t work out, but I’m glad people are enjoying the video anyway.
Little Pádraig being adorable. He’s never done this before but I suddenly noticed him sitting in the bowl we use to separate his part of the cage at mealtime. Naww.
I got invited by Gemeentemuseum Den Haag to the grand opening of their new exhibition “Let’s Dance: From Tutus To Sneakers”. It’s an exhibition focused around dancewear and fashion, and how the two have influenced each other.
They have absolutely gorgeous pieces on display ranging from the 18th century onwards, including some original pieces worn by stars such as Anna Pavlova and Josephine Baker. I’m sure you can imagine just how excited I was to get to see all of this :) The exhibit is up until January 12th, if you’re interested!
And that pretty much concludes my month. Or the highlights, in any case. Imagine this interspersed with a LOT of boring computer work and household chores to get a more realistic representation ;)
I hope you’ve had a lovely September as well, guys. Here’s to an even better October!
