#hannah and garrett are so couple goals

[merakicharm]

check out my chatty book review of Elle Kennedy's The Deal from the Off Campus series

[h-pelessly]

January Reads

The Goal by Elle Kennedy (6.9/10) I was excited to dive into the pregnancy trope and see why everyone hates it sm. I started at the end of December and was kicking my feet at the way Tucker and Sabrina both were obsessed with each other. However, the pregnancy trope came and I was like... um... that's it? Super anticlimatic in my personal opinion, but there was like half the book left. Sabrina pissed me tf off when she didn't speak to Tucker or include him when she was deciding whether to keep the baby or not. Like she was obviously freaking out and super busy, but it annoyed me sm how the father wanted to be apart of this and Sabrina was just like freaking out alone, leaving Tucker to wonder if she already made the decision without him. But the story had a HEA so that was cool.

Knives, Seasoning, and a Dash of Love by Katrina Kwan (8/10) This would've had such a higher rating, but I can't get over how childish and annoying the FMC, Eden, was. Granted, she had a rough childhood, but the way she was irritated me. She faked her way to become a sous-chef to find out about her missing parents so she's saving up and living poorly. The head chef, Alexander Chen, falls for her so it's a case of grumpy x sunshine. Alexander (Shang)'s struggles made me cry maybe because it hit so much closer to home, but I hated how Eden was like stuck in her childish ways like she never grew at all since she was abandoned as a child. Overall, I think this was a solid read.

The Deal by Elle Kennedy (8/10) This was a reread, and it did not disappoint. I just want to say it was a bit underwhelming at some points, and I could see why some people don't like it, but I am so in love with Garrett Graham. Like he is so funny and had me giggling and kicking my feet. There were some parts I reread which made me fall in love with the characters again like Hannah and/or Allie. Or parts that I completely forgot or didn't catch the first time. I do see how this could be a fan fiction, but i don't care because I am absolutely in love with the ego on Mr. Garrett Graham.

Some Things Never Change by Cee Yang (7.3/10) I’m so thankful to be supporting an indie author. I submitted an ARC application last month because I saw it on Instagram, and didn’t know that I’ll be chosen. This book is about a friends to lovers BIPOC couple, and I was absolutely looking forward to this one. However, when getting into it, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Andy, the MMC, at first because he kept referring to things happening in the past. So I thought it was about Anthony, Andy’s twin. However, meeting Anthony, I was like yeah, this is not the guy so Andy it is. Not going to completely lie, this was more of young adult than a romance novel in the beginning. I learned a lot about the Hmong culture more than the characters interacting which was kind of cool, but I was reading for the romance so I was a bit disappointed. But at the end, JESUS. Andy’s a FREAK (respectfully.) I would also like to thank Cindy for sharing her secret of the ninth floor private bathroom because SPICY. I’m so proud of Cee Yang for this amazing debut novel.

Wildfire by Hannah Grace (7.3/10) I liked this book substantially more than the first book. Although I don't think it was as loved as Icebreaker for most people, I thought it was cute. I loved the MMC, Russ, because he's so broken yet sweet. I liked the FMC, Aurora, but she is kind of a pick me. I know she has daddy issues and stuff, but her pick me energy is insane. Her energy wavers from confident to insecure which is realistic, but reading about it annoyed me. Like why are you acting like this rn but a second ago you were crazy? I thought the story of being camp counselors and fraternization being prohibited was a cute idea, but it was also frustrating. How shy Russ was made me want to hug him. But the ending was kind of rushed and boring not going to lie. I don't think the MCs would last together in the real world tbh.

Curious by Jess Savage (7/10) I literally picked this book up by random on a romance stuff your kindle day, and I finished it within a day I would say. This book is a coming-of-age book about discovering one's sexuality (bisexuality.) People say the main character, Hailey, is annoying, but I think her being immature and freaking out makes perfect sense as she is fresh out of high school and is just discovering her sexuality. She is in love with her friend who is dating a girl older than them. Fast forward to summer, she had to watch the bestie and his gf because the gf's parents own where Hailey works. She then falls for the girl as well. I don't know, there wasn't a lot of smut and there was more content which I appreciated. There was steam, but most of it save the end was about Hailey's one person show which I honestly can't blame. She is 18 after all. Anyways, I would love to read about their future together.

So That Happened by Katie Bailey (6.5/10) If I read this book sooner, I would ate it right up. It's a closed door rom-com. In the beginning, I was intrigued. It was funny and the characters, mainly Annie, the FMC, does very hilarious things. But as the story went on, that's exactly who Annie is, a giant toddler. Who in their right mindset blurts out that she slept with her boss on the first day of work? And it wasn't even sexual like I don't know, but if I wanted to keep the job, I would pretend all is fine and dandy, plus, it doesn't mean HE remembers. Liam, the MMC, was okay. He was a good uncle, but the story treated his niece, Legs, like a toddler, which was so annoying. She's 8 and she still has a car seat? I don't know kids that well, but I'm pretty sure second graders do not have to have car seats to ride in vehicles. So I guess it was like the Hating Game with it being a workplace romance, but the FMC was so unlikable. She's like New Girl's Jess in the first episode without being a kindergarten teacher.

Totally Pucked by Lauren Blakely (6.6/10) This was a short novella that I claimed during one of the stuff your kindle days, and I decided to pick it up because I might have thought it was another book that I recently saw on booktok. I thought it was a menage trois, and that is a book of the series, but this one was a novella so I was like FUCK IT. I mean, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't good nor memorable either. It's a friends to lovers trope, which I'm honestly not the biggest fan of from the jump start, but also, since it's a novella, all the major details are skipped so I just knew Fisher (dumb name tbh) was a horny ass hockey player for his best friend. They are always taken/single at different times, but this time, Katie was single and needed bedroom lessons bc her ex said she was weird in bed. Her weirdness? She liked dirty talk and being loud-- jesus. And the spice was eh.

The Beginning of Our Ending (6/10) I got this as an eARC, and I thought it'd be a love triangle, but it really wasn't. I wanted to be supportive of this indie author and her BIPOC representation, but it wasn't really my cup of tea. This is the only book that I feel should've had only one point-of-view because yes, it's true that both men loved Skye, FMC, but they were aggressive as hell and domineering which was unattractive as hell. There were a lot of pregnancies that bothered me since the trope really isn't my favorite, and the reasoning behind it was superficial as fuck like because it ruins the mood??? YEAH, but also safety? But also miss ma'am never liked Lance, and she just let him tie her down. From the beginning, I felt like Skye and Desmond were meant to be, but they broke up for a stupid reason, but it's kind of like meant to be, so when they forced their way back to one another, I was like no effing way.

[blueboyluca]

Motivation Rambles

I have been thinking a lot about what changes I want to make next year and how I want to better myself as a person. I know it doesn’t work usually to come up with a list of habits to begin in the new year, but I have boiled down all my goals to the one new habit, really. And that is: to keep a planner.

The point of the planner is to organise my life more easily. My big failure of 2017 was a lack of good dog training. I barely trained all year and when I did, it was without any clear goals or guidelines. From all the advice I’ve been given, training aimlessly is pointless. So I want to make sure that doesn’t happen this year and instead set goals and always work to achieve them.

Since I’ve had time off over the Christmas period, I have been doing a lot of thinking and researching how I am going to achieve these changes and I wanted to share what I’ve come up with. I am going to start it all Monday 1 January now that I have completed all my preparations, and I’m going to come back here and blog about how I’m doing.

I’ve been enrolled in a Fenzi course called No More Excuses - Building Accountability and Motivation. (Honestly I do not think this course is worthwhile at Bronze level and I do not recommend it to anyone. I’m sure Gold level is different, but at Bronze it feels like I’ve paid for some blog entries. A big difference to previous courses I’ve taken that included in-depth breakdowns and dozens of videos. Thankfully I have managed to get some things from it, but unfortunately not stuff I feel is worth ~$80.) One of the links provided early on in the course was this video by Daniel Pink. It posits the question: What is my sentence? This got me thinking about what I want to be and do in life. It’s not useful for the way I think to choose a sentence for my whole life because that’s overwhelming. But I do think choosing a sentence for the next year could be useful.

In the past I have successfully kept diaries, both for organisation and the more journal style. I’ve also been enjoying using a Bullet style system for my dog training journal, so figured a good method would be to combine all of these things into one planner. So I bought a pretty, durable, pre-structured planner from kikki.K. It’s laid out in a traditional weekly style, but it also includes monthly breakdowns.

My next step was to work out how I was going to organise the planner to suit me and my goals. (My goal at this stage was just: use the planner.)

I did this in a couple of ways. Another link in the course I am doing was to Hannah Branigan’s website where she offers a free training plan template. I love the way this template is laid out, it makes a lot of sense to me. But I don’t want to print out pages all the time, so I needed to find a way to incorporate this plan into my own methods. I’ve decided this will be a combination of the planner and my training journal. The planner does not have enough space per day (because it’s a weekly planner) to put all the notes and everything in it, so the training journal will be the brain dump. The planner is just for organising.

But! I’m still getting ahead of myself. Before I begin preparing the planner and the journal for all this I had to work out my goals more specifically. For dog training, that required me to first complete a reinforcement hierarchy table. I’ve been given these before in training classes, but I never found them useful because they were single columns. However, Susan Garrett has a good one in Clean Run’s special motivation issue from 2007. She includes grade categories from A+ (crazy about) to E (does not care for) and the examples she used made a lot of sense to me.

Here is Luca’s:

There is still stuff I could add, I’m sure, but it gave me lots to work with for now in working out rewards/reinforcers.

Something else I wanted to do beyond training was to improve my working relationship with Luca and make more use of games. @dontstopretrieving slipped me some Recallers info and I have decided that every day I will play 3 games for <5 mins total.

I’m going to try to do these in the morning as a way to include more time with Luca during the week. In theory, I will only need to wake up 10 minutes earlier each day, which isn’t a big deal for me.

So, these will be the foundations for training in 2018. On to planning! Going back to Hannah Branigan’s training plan, the first step is to just make a big list of all the skills that you want to teach your dog, breaking them down to specific items.

Some of these are long-term goals (like being calm around our neighbour dog Shirley, which is a dream goal and perhaps not completely attainable). But some of these I can begin working on right away. The next step in the training plan is to work out the skills you want to focus on and then break them down per session. The thing I like about this training plan is how it buffers working on the specific skills with warm-ups and transitions. So I made a list of what I would do for these and how I would go about it.

Hannah says that it is best to end every training session the exact same way, for structure and clear communication. For now, I am going to end sessions by running to my bed, which is already a thing Luca knows is fun to do. For my own structure, I have laid out the four steps I’ll do for each session, which is:

Check the skills for that week

Create a session plan

Perform training

Take notes

Hannah also says that she finds it best to re-assess the plan every two weeks. I think this is probably a useful way to do it, so I am going to try this in January. For now, I’ve blocked out the first two weeks only and what I will focus on.

And this is how I will write up my session plans (without printing endless pages of Hannah’s version):

So now we come back to my main planner. The planner is a way to make my goals and tasks clear (and the training journal breaks that down into more detail). To use the planner most effectively, as I said before, I decided to combine a few journal methods. I also decided to pretty much hack into it and make it fit me. That meant removing pages, gluing in new paper and essentially making a mess.

Most of my inspiration for this came from the YouTube channel Overall Adventures (which I found through @emiliotheexplorer so thanks!). I got ideas from lots of her videos. I got the ideas for a removable key and clear goals from this video.

I got the idea of doing year at a glance from this video.

I got the idea of having monthly goals and highlights from this video.

And I got collage and beautifying ideas from this video.

For the weekly breakdown, I am not sure which is the best method yet. For January I am going to try a method of dividing the page into me and dog. The me section will include regular daily stuff, work stuff, etc. (I am hoping I will have motivation soon to start a new exercise activity, preferably something social, but I’m not going to rush into it so as to focus on the planner instead). The dog section will have all my dog training tasks laid out clearly for me to check off, and then I will migrate to the training journal to add detail. I may organise my training journal a little more clearly by adding numbers and then I can add the numbers to each day in the planner for referencing.

I’m leaving weekends out at this stage so as not to overload my brain with structure. Given that my weekdays are already structured due to work, I figure adding something at the beginning and end of each day isn’t that much of a big deal. (I don’t actually really need to add ‘walk’ as a task because I already walk 6 out of 7 days a week, but I figure I may as well track it if I’m already using the planner.)

The part below that is blacked out is because I will be in Sydney and away from Luca, so I can’t do dog training. I thought the visual of missed days would be clearer this way.

So that’s my resolution for 2018! It all begins tomorrow and I will try to update here weekly or fortnightly to determine how things are going and what changes I make. I am going to really try to keep this going and see if it works for me and if it improves my life. I hope that anyone who read this far got some useful tips from anything I’ve written and I hope that you find motivation for the things you want to achieve in 2018.

Don’t forget that 2018 is Year of the Dog. Happy New Year!