Entertainment: Doom At Your Service

Image credit: TvN

Okie dokie. I am a huge fan of Park Bo-young, I think she is an incredible actress and I love her chemistry with her leading men. But I also can’t handle dumb writing or horror elements so I’m sad to say I haven’t been able to finish watching a single drama she’s been in, lol.

I’m not as big of a fan of Seo In-guk and initially thought, with a title like “Doom At Your Service”, it would also be scary. But social media got me. Lol. I’ve been seeing clips of it everywhere and eventually read a recap of the first two episodes online. And I loved it.

There’s just something about the plot that interests me. I mean, there are parts that don’t make sense to me but everything else is just done so well and it seems like things align within its fantasy world, so I’m willing to look past those bits. In addition, I love PBY’s character.

Usually I’m content to just read the recaps without watching, but this drama contains so much beauty and nuance that it really must be watched to be appreciated. I’ve started watching it and so far I’m enjoying it a lot.

Note this contains spoilers for the first 2 episodes so proceed with caution!

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Personal: A Milestone or Two

Remember when I mentioned more pressing tasks in my previous post? …Well, this is mostly what I was referring to. As well as work getting incredibly busy, we just bought a house and I’ve also finally, finally submitted my greed card application! Jacky and I actually walked to the post office together today to send it in. See those files I’m holding up in the photo on the left? All those three packets of documents were submitted as part of the application. The process has been long, confusing and stressful, but I also thank God for bringing us through it all.

The photo on the right shows me cringing at our bank account just after we put in our closing payment on our property (actual amounts hidden for privacy). We closed escrow and got the keys on Tuesday, but I’ll be lying if I said I wasn’t at all nervous about how low our bank balance has dipped. I guess that’s the part people don’t really talk about: how nerve-wracking it is to be spending so much money on an item that may not even be the best investment, especially in the crazy NorCal property market.

Maybe this is first time buyer jitters, because it really is significantly more money than I ever thought I would spend (and, of course, it’s money we don’t have, because mortgage). But actually, let me take this opportunity to remind myself of just how faithful God has been these past few months on our property hunt:

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Faith: YouTube Bible Reading Update

This week I was finally able to get more Bible reading recorded. I’m so glad, because it’s something that I’d wanted to do for a while but had been put on the back burner due to more pressing tasks in life (I’ll write more on that in another post some time. I’ve also been meaning to blog, but that’s been even more difficult to make time for).

I’ve now finished reading through all the shorter epistles, and they can be found here. Whew! I had originally planned to read Hebrews through Revelation directly, but Revelation is the last book of the Bible (as well as being one of my favourite books) so when I got there, I realised I wanted to read it last.

My plan now is to go back and finish reading Paul’s longer epistles (Romans & 1 Corinthians), then read through the gospels, then go back through the Old Testament, and finally finish with Revelation.

Speaking of which, I’ve already started Romans and have updated both my blog post and my relevant YouTube playlist. I just realised that it’s already been over a year since I started doing this! I haven’t been as consistent as I’d like to, but I am plodding away slowly.

It’s been a bit strange for me in my devotionals because I am unintentionally skipping around the Bible so much in my reading these days that I don’t really know where to do my devos from anymore. We’re studying through Ephesians in Friday fellowship, 2 Corinthians in my family Bible study on Saturday mornings (we recently finished Revelation), Colossians as our Sunday series, and Jacky and I were also previously studying through Galatians with a couple of sisters locally.

On top of that, I’m slowly working my way through reading recordings. For most of these recordings, I will read through the book or passage multiple times to become more familiar with them; to better understand the flow so that I’d be able to better express the contained notions and emotions in my reading, and hopefully also make fewer errors when I finally come to record it.

Most of the time, the passages I’m reading don’t align with the passages I’m studying… so… it’s been a bit strange. As I write this, I realise that following a devo plan would probably be of great benefit to me, so that I can still do all of these other studies whilst ensuring I do not neglect my own personal time with God.

Ah, I’ve really missed blogging. I love being able to write to help me process my thoughts. Please do bear with me, because I do just write whatever comes to mind, and a lot of the time my many thoughts are a jumbled mess. Writing helps me reflect and organise my thoughts so that I can process them. Often times, it helps inspire solutions to problems I’m dealing with. It’s great for me, but I can see how for anyone reading it can get confusing haha.

I was also very encouraged when a non-believer friend of mine messaged me to say she really enjoyed listening to me read Bible, even though she doesn’t believe. While my desire is that she will come to know the love of Jesus, simply knowing that a non-Christian is willing to listen to me read Bible fills me with great joy. (I know God’s Word is attractive to those He wishes to call, and is alone enough to convict and bring whomever He chooses to repentance as He desires.) Shoutout and much love to her if she’s reading this <3

On an unrelated but also slightly related note, a stranger messaged me on Discord saying that I was the one of the reasons she decided to go ahead and do a Chloe Ting challenge! Yay! That just made me so happy. Actually when she first reached out I thought she got the wrong person because nobody outside of my friend circle had ever reached out to say I’d had an influence in their decision before. Then when we realised she did actually mean me, I was blown away.

So, if you’re someone who actually cares about my life in some way, shape or form, thank you for reading / watching. I really appreciate it!

SDG,

Crystina

At Least Now There’s Some Justice

So much has happened lately that I have barely been keeping up with world events. I only just found out that Derek Chauvin has been convicted on all three charges of killing George Floyd. Wow. I was so, so happy I cried. I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult it must have been for George Floyd’s family, friends, and members of the black community who have been facing battles like this for so long without anyone else on their side.

No wonder the Black community wept tears of relief and joy and raised their voices in triumph when, finally, guilty verdicts were announced. It’s a momentous occasion indeed, and I hope that the sentencing in a couple months’ time is also appropriate. Biden put it well when he said, “Nothing is going to make it all better, but at least now there’s some justice.”

The most recent case seems to be that of Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16 year old child. She was a child. She held a butter knife in her hands. The police department has utterly, utterly failed if it has trained its officers that it’s acceptable under any circumstance to respond to a child ‘wielding’ a butter knife by shooting them dead. Should she have injured someone else with the knife, that’s all that could have happened – an injury, not a death.

I hope Chauvin’s conviction is the beginning of a new era where police are held accountable for their actions, where bad cops are justly convicted, and police in general think twice before wielding their guns at people of colour.

A Quick Update

a lot can happen in just 3 days
Image credit: Radiant

Oh man it’s been a while again! Well, a month, I guess. There’s a very good reason for that though, so much has happened that meant I couldn’t really update my blog, the biggest reason being: about a month ago, my hosting provider suddenly sent me an email saying that they’re closing down and will be migrating me to another hosting provider that’s based in the UK and costs more for less. I wasn’t best pleased about that haha.

On top of this, my laptop and phone have started falling to pieces so I was researching new devices (unfortunately nothing has caught my eye), we’ve also been apt hunting and, with tax day coming up, I’ve had a bit of decision paralysis. It’s been so stressful that I haven’t really been able to exercise lately either. I also didn’t want to make changes to my blog while a hosting migration was happening in case I lost data. So, all in all, I’ve had to leave this space silent.

Fast forward to today, thanks to my beloved hubby, the migration is complete! I have backups of all my files and can start posting again. We also found a nice apt that we both really like so here’s praying we’ll be able to get it. I’m going to squeeze whatever use I can out of my laptop and phone and hopefully a few months later I’ll be able to replace them. And thank goodness, tax day is May 17th instead of April.

The most important thing I’ve missed updating, though, is Easter. He is risen! Hallelujah, Jesus lives!

Muchos love,

Bobbie