A few weeks ago, I finally made my way to the city’s ReUse Center – and hit the magazine jackpot! Let me explain.

For those of you who are not familiar with it, the ReUse Center is basically a shopfront where the City of Edmonton puts out small items that get donated/tossed out but, instead of being recycled, can be reused by others. Most of what we’re talking about are paper-based products, craft stuff, decorations, containers of various descriptions, and similar categories of things. Everything is free – you just pick what you want, weigh it (they keep track of what gets “upcycled” this way), and go.

There is a section for magazines, and when I went, it was quite large and full. I was in heaven!

In total, I ended up with about 60 or so magazines. Some to use for scrapbooking, and some to keep in my personal collection at home. This included some amazing vintage magazines – and even a collectible, the inaugural issue of George, with Cindy Crawford on the cover. That thing is selling for hundreds of dollars online! I’m going to keep it, as a piece of JFK Jr./CBK memorabilia.

Here’s my scrapbooking haul:

And these are some of the vintage magazines I’m keeping:

Talk about nostalgia! These are all from the mid-to-late 90s, aka my teen years. Flipping through them gave me one flashback after another. Some good, some bad. I was a shy, nerdy teenager (and not very well-off) so I spent most of my adolescence feeling like an outsider, watching from the sidelines while other people were having all the fun – cute clothes, parties, boyfriends, etc. Magazines were a window into a world to which I had no access. I loved them, but they also made me feel bad, tbh.

Now, 30 years on, I have enough emotional distance to be able to look at these magazines with the perspective of my current self (who’s living 15-year old Adina’s dream life, tbh) while also holding space for the memory of my old experiences. Bittersweet, but also just quaint and sweet.

The December 1994 issue of Seventeen hit extra nostalgic:

Little Women was my generation of teenage girls’ Roman Empire. And the one and only Laurie:

There was also an ad for a just-released Sun, Moon, and Stars – still one of my fave perfumes.

I couldn’t afford it then, but a couple of years ago, I was able to track down 2 vintage bottles (one thrifted, one on Poshmark) so I’m set now for a while. I believe they still produce a perfume under this name, but it’s not the original formulation, so I had to make sure to get the vintage ones. They smell like the 90s, in the best way.

I also found some outfit inspo … of course. How fun is this outfit:

I have a few vintage oversized blazers that could work, and a similar necklace, but I need to track down a pair of daisy-printed leggings, haha! Here’s hoping the thrift gods deliver. Remember how popular daisy prints were in the 90s? I’ve been looking for a dress like that for ages now, too, to scratch the nostalgia itch. Picture it with a white tee and some Dr. Martens boots or mary janes – it would be perfect! Haven’t found one yet, but I’m not giving up yet.

I thought this was pretty funny — predictions for fashion, 10 years into the future (so, 2004):

The caption is actually quite prescient — though it’s quaint to think that we’d still be walking around with literal faxes and radios in our pockets. But the spirit of the future was definitely haunting the page 😉

Anyway, I’ll be back at the ReUse store soon and keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll find another treasure hoard.

Hi, hello. Stepped away, I’m back. Slowly settling into the rhythm of summer school vacation. I took a short social media break, and it was very nice. The problem with social media is that consuming too much starts to feel overwhelming in a very insidious and very damaging way. Even with a carefully curated bubble, you end up having too many signals – “this is what’s important/what you should aspire to/what you should be doing” – that can drown out your own internal values compass. And you can find yourself chasing ideas and goals that aren’t aligned and true to yourself. And being miserable. And by “you”, I mean me.

I needed to re-set. And I made some progress with that (it’s an ongoing process). I missed the good parts of social media – connecting with my peeps – so I’m back, but this has convinced me that it’s perfectly okay to take little breaks, whenever it feels necessary. I am not a slave to the algorithm, lol!

Things have been pretty quiet; between the weather (which messed with more than one set of plans) and the see-saw of my mental health, I haven’t been doing much. Trying to enjoy time with the kids as much as I can before I lose them completely to teenager-dom, and picking away at my hobbies whenever the mood strikes. Gardening has been nigh impossible, thanks to the mosquito apocalypse of 2026, and thrifting has been a bit blah – though I did find a few great pairs of pants lately, and a ring I’m obsessed with. Scrapbooking, of course, never lets me down or disappoints.

I’ve been feeling discouraged about writing (social media strikes again!), so I decided that the best cure for that was … um, editing two books at once. Lol whut?! But, actually, it kinda helped. They’re two very different books (genre, writing style, setting, etc.) and somehow the contrast helped me to see their respective merits more clearly and enjoy them both for what they have to offer. I was having doubts before, but now I’m pretty sure that one of them will be publishable (with a few more rounds of edits). The other one is still up in the air, but it’s a maybe.

As far as reading goes, I’ve been in a bit of a slump, but I think there is light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve been slowly accumulating books to take with me on my annual family trip to BC – which is always a reading fest for me – and I’m excited about diving into them. Meanwhile, I just treated myself to The Clock House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji (the latest in the Murder Houses series, which is one of my faves) as well as The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, which has been on my to-buy list for ages. I’ve already started on the first, and it’s so good!

I’ll share more of my summer reading list soon.

Have a great weekend!

I’m not sure I’ve ever been more relieved to reach the end of a (work) week before. Work itself was fine this week, but I was not. I’ve been hanging in there, but only by the proverbial thread, and it’s time to do something about it, rather than simply hope that things will get better on their own. I’m planning to totally unplug this weekend, perhaps even take an extended social media break, because the idea of being constantly “on” — which is, unfortunately, the reality for indie authors — has become completely overwhelming. There’s burnout and then there’s … whatever this is. Oof.

I don’t like complaining (too much) on the internet, because the internet is forever and because I know I’m pretty damn lucky, no matter how difficult life feels in the moment. But I also don’t like pretending, in those situations, that it doesn’t feel difficult, because that doesn’t seem authentic and, frankly, takes energy I don’t currently have. Extending myself the same grace I would to anyone else in my life — to feel their feelings without trying to make them palatable to others — is a lesson I’ve been working on this year, and it’s time to put it into practice.

There were a few highlights this week. Last weekend, I thrifted myself a new (old) iMac — an impulse splurge but not really, as I’ve been needing a new personal computer for a while — and to complete the set-up, I also bought a new (new) keyboard. It’s shaped like a cake that’s also a cat, and it lights up like a mini discotheque. It’s completely unserious and I’m obsessed with it. It makes the creamiest, “thockiest” sounds — perfect ASMR material.

On a different thrift visit, I ended up talking to a very nice young woman at the jewelry counter for a bit. Our conversation made me think that she would enjoy reading The Mysterious Affair at Gaunt Hall so I worked up the courage (to overcome my fear of being a weirdo and/or imposing on a stranger) and offered her a copy. She was thrilled and accepted, and that felt great. Since I’ve not felt great about writing recently, it was lovely.

Another highlight was reading Trust by Hernan Diaz. It has an interesting meta-fiction premise that kept me riveted all the way to the end. Highly recommend. If the random video that popped up in my IG feed, coincidentally as I was finishing the book, can be trusted, Dua Lipa and her new husband met-cute over this book. I am not sure why these people are suddenly all over my social media bubble, but I guess they have good taste in books?

I’ve also got a couple of other books on the way that I’m very excited about: a collection of short stories by Silvina Ocampo (friend and collaborator of Borges), and a novel by Stanislaw Lem, one of my fave sci-fi authors. Will update you on those … at some point, hah.

We were supposed to be taking the kids on a little roadtrip to Calgary today/this weekend, but the weather is expected to deliver another rainmaggedon, so we’ve changed our plans and staying put so we can keep an eye on the house. (Lots of folks in Edmonton had basement flooding last weekend, and they are forecasting similar volumes of rain this weekend.) But we do have some fun, local adventures planned, which will hopefully make up for missing out on a visit to Fair’s Fair and some of our other fave Calgary spots. Gotta look for the rainbow, right?

Have a great weekend!