What I’ve Been Up to: June and July 2020

I think I included some June things in May, but I feel like June and July were connected in a lot of ways. I had 3 classes, tons of wedding prep, little time.

I cut down on social media (easy to do when one actually has stuff going on in real life, amazing how that works), tried to curate a bit. I’ve got a YouTube addiction problem, so I moved many YouTubers over to my Pinterest YouTube overflow board, in an attempt to not have enough YouTube to binge at a time, so that I don’t check it obsessively. I didn’t really have the time to before, and since I’ve finished school, I still have wasted a lot of time on it, but I do think this was a step in the right direction.

For Instagram, I felt bored of a lot of Instagrammers, I tend to go in phases, because I will follow people who focus on a specific craft or hobby that I’m interested in at the moment, and then I get bored of seeing it. But also, some of the more “professional” ones drown out the smaller, more interesting bloggers and those who feel more like real people. I also started a habit of deleting Instagram from my phone on the week, because I would get on it at work and just mindlessly scroll during my breaks. I’d already really only been posting on the weekends, so as to keep in from being stressful. But I really like that mind trick of deleting it. I resisted doing that with Youtube, but I probably should, even though YouTube on my computer is more of them problem.

I shared some wedding posts on Instagram. I made little seed packets for the wedding favors, but not many people took them, I don’t think most people noticed them as they only had a limited time in the lobby for obvious reasons, I do think they would have been more popular on the table even in a more normal wedding environment.

I made a cheesecake, and I also made the cake. I used this recipe for the cake and icing (no filing) with dark chocolate cocoa. I made a practice run, and I decided to forgo the espresso powder, use proportionally more cocoa in the icing, and add the cocoa AFTER the other ingredients were beat together in order for the icing to stay dark. It taste AMAZING.

I learned that you need pans with a 4″ difference in diameter in order for a cake to look properly tiered, so although I made cakes for three tiers, I had to leave out the middle. Also, naked cakes are hard too, I thought it would be easier, my cake was super moist and a bit uneven and some of the edges were falling off so it wasn’t quite naked. But with the berries and low light it was fine. I guess.

We had tons of the Costco cake and cheesecake as well as my cake and cheesecake leftover even though we didn’t overcalculate near as bad as with my other sister’s wedding. But better to overcalculate than under.

I also had to hem my dress, with my genius, I manage to overcut and make it tea length rather than floor length, but since I’m prone to stepping on my long dresses, my shoes hurt my feet so badly that I ended up taking them off instantly after the ceremony, and I plan on wearing the dress to less formal events, it works out fine I think. I got my dress on Poshmark, a J Crew dress for around $80. I loved it, it was so flattering, and it nice that it got two wears and hopefully more to come.