Monthly Random: August

Hello there, visitors of my neglected little blog!
It's really bugging me a lot that I don't get to write anything more often, but at the moment, my whole life is totally crazy and very, very exhausting. But it's time for another "Monthy Random" as August is coming to an end and while I have no big stories to tell I can at least throw in some random pictures taken in the last weeks.

I only wore make up 4 or 5 times this month :'D I feel really bored with my face because of that D:

That internship I started is taking its toll (having insomnia, rashes, cold sores... my body has a very funny way to deal with stress...). I'm working 10h or more every day, while my boyfriend is finishing the apartment renovation. We ordered some furniture and also our kitchen (it ended up being waaay more expensive than we had planned, but YOLO! ... I guess....), and by now all the walls are painted so we're really close to the finishing line! However, for every few steps forward we seem to go one step back again - this time, it was the carpenter who was supposed to craft and deliver our new doors, who told us he  won't be able to deliver everything till the middle of September....

Future bedroom :D The walls are all white, finally! ♥ I love white walls!
(Also: there's actually a decent floor underneath that cardboard cover. Just in case you thought it's cement or something)

Celebrated shark week with style! I got this lovely T-shirt from friends who went to the US during their holidays ♥ I love it so much! Too bad I currently can't find it because this place is a big mess and that 9m² bedroom is bursting with all my clothes and stuff.... ;__; I hope I find it again when we move out!

Went to see "Man of Steel" with my boyfriend and wore some "theme" make-up :D Do you remember my last "super hero inspired"  make up look that I wore to the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises last year? :D
WITH CHRISTIAN BALE, THE TRUE DARK KNIGHT!!!11 for now and ever! of course.

As you can see on the first picture of this entry, I had some fun with Directions hair dye! More photos to follow soon in a separate entry :3

 Spent several hours compiling a gigantic excel file in an attempt to figure out a schedule for the next semester. And of course, all the interesting subjects overlap -__-

At work I sometimes have long waiting times where have literally nothing useful to do. It feels feel awkward to just browse the internet while sitting in the office, even though I guess nobody minds... I used the time to make the schedule, but soon I really didn't have anything useful to do, so I started updating my Wish List with some Lolita items (that I won't be able to afford anytime soon anyway, but I can dream! XD).
On a related topic:  There's actually some pretty big news I haven't told you yet! I was chosen as a model for the fashion show at the Innocent World Tea Party!
I am really excited about it, as I have never been part of a fashion show. I feel extremely honored to be chosen, as I am not a Lolita for very long and also because I didn't really expect anything when I sent my application. I am curious what I will get to wear and how the show will be managed. I also have the coord I wanted to wear more or less completed, I am just not sure if my plans will interfere with the fashion show and if I will have to maybe adapt the styling or something. This is all really exiting and new for me, but I will do my best to not make them regret their choice :)

Talking about challenges. I haven't done ANY sports in the last two months. I feel really bad about it, but I am just too exhausted from work to even move an inch at night when I get home. But on the other hand, I also eat less because I just have no time - so at least I don't gain any weight right now. I swore to myself to take up a pilates routine again once we are settled at our new home!

I've been looking really boring lately, doing mostly boring stuff, so there aren't many pictures to show this time either. Anyhow, in case you wanna know what I'm up to you can always follow my twitter (where I currently rant most of the time :'D sorry!).  One of my favorite things to rant about right now is the public transport that I have to take each day to get to work and back home. It's funny and sad at the same time to rely on these means of transportations. Funny because of the inherent, unwritten rules people in trains and buses follow in order to make as little contact with strangers as possible:

If there is a seat next to a person, but also free double seats, you shall not take the seat next to the person. But if you sit next to a person because there was no other free space, and a free double seat opens up, you shall not go over to that seat without an awkwardly mumbled excuse, as it would be considered rude to the person you sat next to.
You shall not accept the fact that the bus driver is doing his job. You shall comment on his route when you feel like it, and talk audibly in third person about his rudeness for not letting the lady with the gigantic wheeled shopping bag leave that said bag standing in the aisle so that nobody can pass through.

If you leave a bag on the free seat next to you and other people have to keep standing because of that, nobody will ask you to remove it, but you shall burn in the sulfurous fires of hell anyway.
You shall never smile. Unless that lady who is talking on the phone so loudly that the whole bus can hear it suddenly realizes that everyone is following her conversation on her child's ballet course, and starts to talk in this weird, pretended whisper voice that is still perfectly audible for everyone.
Last but not least: If there is rail replacement bus service, it will always be so fucking slow that the express train that started half an hour later will pass you before you reach your destination. Also, if the rail repair work is said to last till 23. Aug, don't expect it to be finished before 1. Sep. When school starts again and the rails are not finished, mayhem shall be unleashed when school kids overrun the rail replacement buses!

Ah, the joys of public transport. That reminds me, I have to get to bed, getting up early to catch the train tomorrow morning.

I wish you a good night an hope you had a nice August! What did you do these last weeks, anything special?

My brother's wedding and other stuff ~

Wohooo finally something that remotely resembles an interesting entry on my blog, hahaha!

So this week end was my brother's wedding - the civil wedding was last week end, and this week end they got married in a church. The bride's family is rather religious, so despite my brother being atheist he agreed to the ceremony. The wedding was rather big with about 150 people and of course the party was great :3 The bride was so beautiful, I wish I could show you pictures of her! Her dress was in an empire-style waist line with a long train, it was offwhite and had two layers, the top layer made of lace and little gemstones. It sounds super kitschy but it was really, really beautiful. I don't think that I would wear such a dress personally but it suited her very well, and I liked it a lot :3 My brother, the groom, looked very handsome as well - with a gray suit and off white waistcoat and tie. Before the wedding he was joking around that he wants to wear a red suit, but the bride wasn't too happy with that idea so he gave in to her wishes, haha!

Unfortunately I have no photos of my outfit :< But I wore a pink floral summer dress with pink high heels, hehe

The ceremony was not at all boring - despite the fact that I haven't set a foot in a church in a while this was a church I knew very well because it was next to my elementary school, which was led by nuns, so of course it was rather religious school and we went to church quite often. So despite the fact that I consider myself an atheist, I have a lot of happy memories connected to that church - and my brother's wedding is just another happy one to add to this list! There were also two musicians who played piano & violin and sang beautifully - a very fitting accompaniment for the ceremony. This reminded me that I was thinking about joining a choir sometime in the future.

Make up: Nothing special, so I only took a quick cell phone snap. And my eyelid shape looks weeeeird D:

The party after the ceremony was held in a restaurant about 20min from the church, and my step dad had rented a pink Cadillac plus driver to take the bride and groom there! Another surprise for them were the 150 white balloons that we let fly as a surprise and as a symbol for good wishes. At the restaurant, friends of them had set up a camera and asked everyone to take a photo with this old fashioned frame. The photos were printed out right away and then they had this "wedding book", which wasn't like the usual books with blank pages but with different questions to fill out on each page, so you would put your photo on a page and fill in the questions ans good wishes based on different topics, such as family, love, happiness etc.
And they played a classic prank on the groom, where they would write the words "Help me!" on the soles of his shoes, so when he kneels down in church everyone can see it, hahaha.

The restaurant itself was beautifully decorated with flowers and little glass bottles filled with M&Ms were used for the name cards - as the couple's initials are M&M this used to be running gag for ages in out families. They also had bottles with bubble liquid on each table so people would occasionally turn the dance floor into a bubble disco! I danced a lot, and after about 13h in high heels I was totally exhausted around 2am. We left quite soon, thinking it was 3am already, as there was this old clock that had stopped at 2:50, hahaha! We later heard that this turned into a running gag for my cousin's boyfriend who got pretty drunk but kept insisting that it's "Not even 3am yet" and they could still party on - even when the sun rose around 5:30am, hehe. I kinda regret a little bit that we went home so early, but I was really exhausted from getting up early and the days before thanks to my internship and out renovation. But we met the next morning for breakfast, many people stayed at the place over night, my boyfriend and me spent the night at his dad's house which was close by. People were so tired and hungover, but still we had a lot of fun :) We then helped out to bring the presents and leftover cake etc. to their place, and my boyfriend and me spent the rest of the day in out apartment, painting the walls, feeling like Cinderella must have felt the day after the great ball, haha.

As for my outfit(s), I don't have any photos, unfortunately :< Just some close ups of my make up.

I spend hours cutting and styling my bangs before the event, haha! I haven't been to the hairdresser in over a year now, and the tips of my hair look a bit ratty. But I can't afford a hairdresser right now, so I'll at least cut my bands by myself. I think I'm slowly starting to get a feeling for it. And I should straighten my bangs more often, I like the way it looks! Too bad it's really difficult to style them when they're so flat...

The other day, for the civil wedding, I tried to curl my hair with paper curls! It was fun to try it but unfortunately it didn't work at all! The photo speaks for itself. It ended up a very curly, super voluminous mess! But it was okay, people around me don't even believe me my hair is "my real hair" anyway, hahah.
I didn't wear much make up to the event because I was asked to be the photographer for the event, and also, I was just kinda lazy and too scared that I might overdo it and stand out too much (as the civil wedding was only a small event with few people, and everyone as more on the casual side).

I'm sorry that I can't take any proper outfit photos right now... We're still staying at my parents' place and they have only one full-body mirror in the whole house and it's in a small room with bad light and an ugly background.... But I promise that once we're set up in our new apartment the photo quality will get better again. I have already checked for remote control programs for my camera, I have a camera stand (but no space for it here) and a beautiful, snow white wall just for the purpose of outfit photos! I also might be able to get a dress form so I can show some coords on it in the future. Mainly I wanna get one for sewing, and my cousin has one that she would be willing to give me. I just don't know if I'll be able to use it for sewing, it depends if the measurements fit or if it's adjustable. But even if it turns out that it doesn't have "my size", I think they're a pretty cool decoration :)

I still have five more weeks of internship to go, and in the meantime also have to finish the renovation... it seems like it will never end, but slowly, slowly we are making progress and I hope we'll be able to move in at the end of the month, even if we won't have a kitchen till the end of September.
Until then, please bear with my crappy cell phone photos and lack of interesting topics to talk about!

But back to the topic of weddings. I was wondering if any of my readers are married already?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Two of my old high school friends are getting married soon. My brother has been with his girlfriend for 10 years now before they married. Their wedding day is actually their 10th anniversary. My boyfriend and me, we've been together for 7 1/2 years now.... maybe we'll get married for our 10th anniversary as well, haha! To me, marriage is a rather practical thing. If you buy a house together or have kids, it's better to be married for legal reasons I guess. Other than that, there are not many reasons to marry for me, as I don't believe in god. But a wedding, whether in a civil office or a church, is probably one of the most beautiful ceremonies mankind ever invented, and it's a wonderful way to express your love to another person and celebrate it with all other people you care about. It brings two families together, or, like in the case of my brother's wedding, even four families, as we are a patchwork family (my brother is actually my stepbrother, and he has step siblings his mother's side as well). So I guess I will marry some day, but I wanna earn my own money first so I can buy the most fabulously beautiful dress I could imagine, hahaha! 

How about you? Are you married? Do you plan to marry sooner or later in the future? Tell me about it ♥

No time to waste

Good news! Finally my laptop came back repaired and could write more form now on!

Could - if it weren't for my internship that started this week.
I am super busy there and it's rather exhausting. Today I worked for 10h, so I'm dead tired and already in bed (so glad my laptop is back!). Also it's currently super inconvenient to commute to my work place, as parking spots in Vienna are scarce and train tickets ridiculously expensive (also, there's repair work done on the train tracks till the end of the month so the schedules are all messed up. Still not as bad as in Mainz, though ^^"). I really have to consider taking the train despite the car being the cheaper option (ridiculous but true), as I can't be sure I'll find a parking spot near my work place. But it kinda hurts to pay so much to get to my unpaid work place ;____;

Anyway, I will try to write a proper entry this week end!
I have some stories to tell about our apartment (my poor boyfriend has to do most of the work that's left now that I'm working in Vienna), last Saturday was my brother's civil wedding, the churchly ceremony will be held on Friday. Tomorrow is a public holiday in Austria but I'll work to get Friday off instead. And on the week end we will have to paint the remaining walls and do some furniture shopping for our apartment. So the next days and probably weeks won't be any less busy than the time before, probably even more stressful. But maybe it will get better and I won't have to work 10h/day every day.

Uhhh I really wish I had some funny or cool picture to add here, but I just felt like dropping a few lines so that the blog won't be so empty :'D But I haven't sorted out and edited the photos from the wedding yet, and my instagram pics are better used in a 'Monthly Random' post, so here's a pic that describes rather accurately what I do every day when I get home from work:

Have a nice week and hopefully a less stressful time!

18th Lolita Meet Up in Vienna & Helnwein Exhibition at Albertina

Hello everyone!

Last Saturday we had a Lolita meet up in Vienna - it was my first big meet up to attend and I was really excited! I planed my outfit ages before the actual date, and it was really difficult to find something nice to wear because of the heat. Currently, we're having a heat wave in Austria with up to 38°C, not a single cloud in the sky and no soothing wind or summer thunder storms. On Saturday the heat wave was more or less at its peak, and the idea of going to the city in full frills was not very appealing to me... but on the other hand, I had been looking forward to the meet up for a long time already, so I just tried... not to die, haha.

(If you're not interested in the outfit blabla skip to the group photo to read about the actual meet up & exhibition!)

Photographer: Andreas Zuckerhut

So, originally I wanted to wear an Old School Gothic Lolita look in black x white, but it was far too hot for me to wear sleeves or anything covering my neck or legs. So I wore my Baby JSK without a blouse and did a (rather sloppy....) updo with my hair. I really love this JSK because it works quite well even without a blouse. It shows quite a lot of skin of course, but the straps can even cover the shoulders if you pull them down a bit (too bad it won't last long if you move around a bit D:). I was thinking what kind of hair accessory I could wear, and couldn't decide on white or black at first. I have a small white and pink bow but nothing white only, expect for a rose, but I thought the bow would look much better with the big hair bun.

Photographer: Jou P. Ri /// Spring Raindrops ; editing by me

In retrospect I am not 100% happy with the outfit... The pear bracelets don't really stand out, neither does my necklace, so the white of the lace socks seems a bit misplaced and makes the outfit look a bit unbalanced overall :( Also, I gained some weight recently *bohoo* so I didn't feel very comfortable showing off my arms and legs. (I actually had a white bolero with me but it was far too hot to put it on) I remember when I thought about losing 3 or 4 kg until my brother's wedding back in May or so. Now it's merely a week till his wedding and I actually gained another kg since then. Bah, I'm really pissed at myself, but it's difficult to keep up a workout routine and healthy eating with all the stress and exhaustion from working on the renovation. But anyway. Let's get to the more interesting part, the meet up itself!

Photographer: Andreas Zuckerhut (I guess)

We met in front of St. Stephan's cathedral in the heart of Vienna. The cathedral was a nice background for our photos, and we had a lot of fun taking pictures. Thanks to all the busy photographers who took so many great photos despite the heat! You can check out more photos here and here!

Maybe you spotted our VIP guest on the group photo: Japanese Blogger LaCarmina made a visit to Vienna with her film crew. From what I understood, she is preparing a report on European alternative scenes, so she came to our meet up :)

After the photo session, we split up in two groups - some people went to a café and others went to Albertina to see the Helnwein exhibition - among others, I went for the museum. I didn't know anything about Helnwein before, except that somebody mentioned that he had worked with Rammstein and Marilyn Manson as a photographer before, which got me kinda hooked up. Some people said that probably not everyone will like his art as it is not suited for more "sensitive" people. Honestly, I was a bit scared his art would turn out to be something like Nitsch, which (as I once wrote about) I have a great dislike for. But it was oh so much better than that, and better than everything I could have imagined!

Helnwein is an artist who grew up in post-WWII Austria, in an era where people would keep silent about the atrocities of the war and pretend they didn't happen, while at the same time bragging about the most unnecessary and stupid little things. People would insist on a very strict social order, wouldn't allow kids to ask questions, and it sure wasn't easy growing up in a time like that. The fact that the horrors of the war were tolerated and not spoken about while the most blatant things could cause uproars of society influenced his art and early career.

His major motive are children. They are present in almost every single painting that was shown in the exhibition, but in contrast to many other artists before him he doesn't use them as a symbol of purity or innocence. Helnwein's children are victims, mutilated, bleeding, bandaged and tortured - and at the same time they are offenders, armed with weapons or symbolically wearing what looks like a military uniform.

Some of you might know the album cover and related art of Marilyn Manson's The Golden Age of Grotesque. Helnwein closely collaborated with Manson in this project. The exhibition showed the two rather famous photographs of Manson as a white and black "Mickey Mouse" like character. I would have loved to take them with me in poster format (Golden Age of Grotesque is actually my favorite album from Marilyn Manson) but unfortunately they didn't have them in the museum shop :(

What impressed me most about his pictures was his extremely photorealistic way of painting. There are some artists where you would stand a few meters in front of the work of art and think "Oh wow, it sure looks like a photo!". With Helnwein, sometimes, even if you stand only inches in front of the picture you can't tell if it's a painting or a photo, unless you look at it from a slightly different angle and start to see tiny brush strokes.

Some people, I guess, wonder what's the use of depicting something in a photorealistic way if you might as well just take a photo. But the point is that Helnwein projects his messages onto those children he draws. He draws them with expressions they wouldn't have in real life, their eyes reflect horrors they haven't probably really seen - because they are the horrors of the grown up artist. I am sorry to be such a philistine but to me, an artist has to show a certain skill with his art, a proficiency with the materials he uses, that goes above randomly splattering paint (or blood) on a wall, in order to impress me. With Helnwein's art I felt a very strong connection. I looked at those images and I felt something, I felt like I could understand what the artist meant when he worked on it - even if it might not be the truth and his true intentions. With Nitsch, who - from what I've understood - has similar motives in his work, such as the breaking of taboos and violence, I don't feel anything but disgust. Nitsch's message doesn't reach me. Helnwein on the other hand not only "reached out" for me but also "touched" me and left me deeply impressed.

After the exhibition we went to an Asian restaurant nearby where we waited for the others to catch up. I hadn't planned on joining the group in the restaurant because I wanted to be home not too late but since we got there much earlier I decided to have a little to eat before I headed home. The restaurant had an interesting "All you can Eat, but à la carte" menu, where you pay a fee of about 18€ but then you can order everything from a special menu that you want, as often as you want. It's a pretty cool idea, but unfortunately all you can eat never pays off for me because I couldn't possibly eat all the money's worth. So I went with avocado maki :)

Purple rice! How cool is that?!

I had a really great time at the meet up, I enjoyed chatting with new people and those I already new, I saw fantastic art and had a great dinner ♥  My first "big" Lolita meet up was a lot of fun and I'm already looking forward to the next occasion!

Closing this entry with a crappy cell phone photo of my make up. I was deeply impressed how well DUO lash adhesive worked. My lashes stayed where they were meant to despite the heat and some sweating. The same goes for Gothmetic foundation. I didn't even have to apply powder during the day. This is really one of my favorite foundations for hot weather, I mix it with my BB cream to get the right color and it's really long lasting that way!

Sidenote: wth, already over 300 followers via GFC and almost 100 via bvloglovin' ! You're making me blush! Seriously, thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy your time here on my little blog ♥

Status Quo: Destruction contd. and a lot of dust.

Heya!

So, my laptop is still not working, and as a result I cannot really write regularly - I also have to admit that I don't have any time to read any blogs at the moment, write or answer comments, but just so you know what I'm occupied with anyway, here's another little update about our ongoing apartment renovation for you!

The last weeks have been full of very exhausting and boring work, and after the initial tearing down of most stuff, the detail work left to be done took an disproportionally larger amount of time - much more than we expected, actually...

Plans for our new kitchen :3

We went to a friend of ours who works for an intereur design company or something like that, and asked him to help us plan our new kitchen. It didn't take us long to figure out what we want, as we already had very specific ideas on what we like and don't like. The details aren't 100% clear yet though and the deal is not yet made, but ideally we will place an order next week and hopefully get it in mid September.

But before we can have our nice new kitchen - we had to get rid of the fugly old PVC floor in that room and replace it with tiles!

So, underneath the PVC floor, a layer of old glue and coconut fiber (don't ask me what the hell that's doing there) revealed itself to us. It took us several days to scrub that stuff off the floor and prepare it for the new tiles -_-

When you see it...

My stepdad was so kind as to help us with the tiles. I've never done that myself so it was good to have him do it for us. We helped out of course, and I think that if every necessary, in the future we could do it by ourselves too!

Sandcastles in the saaaaand *sing*
Other people spend the summer building sand castles in the sand at some beautiful beach... we... we just.... oh well.

Other than that, we spent our time scraping off wallpaper glue and sanding paint residues from the walls in all rooms. There are tons of dust everywhere, it's impossible to clean it all up because it's so fine, and we aren't even finished yet.... I'm seriously already freaking out at the thought of cleaning the whole place before we move in D:

THIS is actually pretty weird. This image of what I'd call a hand grabbing a doll (?) revealed itself underneath a wallpaper in my former bedroom. Just what the hell is it doing there and who put it there? When I still lived in that place in the 90s we already had wallpaper so... who carved that into the wall? D:

So the last weeks we've been doing nothing but sanding, sanding, sanding. We used sand paper and a belt sander, and in some places also water to wash off paint. In one room, it's near impossible to get the paint off the walls, so we borrowed a heating gun, which helps to make the paint brittle. Still it's very tiresome work that progresses super slowly...

Don't be deluded guys, there's absolutely nothing glamorous about renovating. But I do have to say that my 'hat' looks rather fancy, doesn't it.

Nevertheless, we decided to paint the first room, even though the others aren't ready for painting yet. We were just to exhausted from sanding all the time, and wanted to finally see some results (and also get a first impression on how well the paint will cover small edges in the walls so we know how smooth we have to get them). It's actually pretty cool to see some progress after all. I am really looking forward to seeing those rooms painted white which have the new black floor tiles ♥

So, as you can probably guess there's still a lot of work to do. Sanding, mostly, then evening out the walls and painting. The ceilings are especially difficult as both me and my boyfriend are not very tall so it's rather exhausting. I prefer working with a small brush in the corners and on the edges of the room, it's more fun, haha. I'm also planning to do a wall "tattoo" in the living room, we'll see if I can really do it as I imagine it...

Alright then, that's it for now.
Currently, we're doing a lot of accounting and research work to figure out how much we can spend on our kitchen and furniture and where to get cheap kitchen equipment etc. We already decided on the new doors which should be delivered in about two weeks, and until then, all the painting and floors should be finished of course. So there's still a lot to do!

I was wondering, if everything's done and I move in, would you like me to do a short youtube video or something to walk you around our apartment? :) I thought it would be fun, and you could hear me talking a bit (English or German?). Let me know what you think about this idea!

Silly bonus pic - we found this at a local building center, and if it weren't kinda goofy we... who am I kidding, of course I was all like "WE NEED THIS!11" I mean, come on, it's holographic!!! XD