The Beauty Within

So how did you guys celebrate this new year?

I just spent it at my parents’ house with the family.  Nothing special at all.. well, we turned on the TV and counted down with Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest.  My sister’s hubby was complaining that new years here is SOOO boring, because apparently in Romania, there’s just tons of food and alcohol everywhere.  Here?  Unless you go out to somewhere special, it’s just family time.

Today my dad thought we’d take a small excursion to… Cabazon outlet stores.  It’s an outlet close to Riverside, and they do have pretty good shops there.  My dad loves to shop, even if he walks home buying absolutely nothing, he’ll categorize the day as a great day because he got to shop all day long.

I ran into some problems when I first got there.  Before we left our house, I just put on a small but warm sweatshirt and a knee length skirt.  It was about 70 degrees where I live, so I was very warm and ready for the day.  Little did I know that when we got to Cabazon, the wind would be blowing at 50 MPH (ok, I’m exaggerating, but it felt like it could blow me over!).  Now, my knee length skirt is extremely flowy, so guess what happened?  Yep… the wind started to blow the skirt upwards.  I know some girls love to pretend they are Marilyn Monroe, and others like Britney would just skip the underwear and flash their coochie, but I’m not one of those girls.  I seriously crouched down in the middle of the shopping center trying to hold my skirt down!!

Luckily I saw this blue thermo/leggings for less than $10, so I bought it and put it on underneath my skirt.  I also saw a cute white v-neck sweater for $20, so I bought it since it was 100% cotton.

The BEST part of the trip was this one cosmetics store.  They had pallets/gift sets from previous seasons for really great discounts.  I saw some Bobbi Brown ones (but didn’t get since I just bought so many pallets recently), Stila, Estee Lauder, Clinique, and MAC.  Yes, they had MAC products for a discount.  The products of course weren’t new (a lot of skincare products have new packaging now, and they only had the ones in the old plain white plastic bottles), and there wasn’t a wide selection, but it was good enough for me.   I ended up purchasing a paint in some metallic purple color, a pinkish lipstick, and a lip glass.  I totally don’t remember the names, but I’ll take pix of them and put it up.  I also scored an old brush set from MAC, probably from a few seasons ago, for only $33.   The set included a travel size 219 Pencil Brush, which I’ve been wanting to get for a while, as well as other goodies.  The original price was $47, so yea.. I got a really really good deal.

By then it was about 6, and we were a bit tired and cold from fighting the wind.  Not to mention we were hungry.  We ended up going to AppleBees to eat since my dad has never been there.  I  gotta say…. the commercials make the place look so much better.  The best thing I had was probably my strawberry lemonade!  Everything was just so salty or bland.  There was pretty much no other taste except for salt!  Their shrimp alfredo tasted like something I could have made at home.  The medium cooked steak my dad ordered was well done on 1 side, and medium rare on the other.  It was seriously weird because the commercials pimp it out like such a decent place.  Bleh.. one of the worse American chain restaurants.

Anyhow.. Happy New Years everyone!  I wish a great year to everyone, for you to reach your goals and dreams this year, and be happy!