Liliana's personal blog

In my last post, I discussed yearly-personal meetings. They are your large scale meetings to determine what's up and what matters.

In your semi-annual meetings, you are going to reevaluate your life, see if you're on track to accomplish everything you determined to accomplish in your annual meetings and see if it perhaps is necessary to change your annual plan. Maybe something big came up, like a life-changing diagnosis in your family that is turning your world upside down. Or a pandemic started. Or a pandemic died off. Or a loved one's death. Or, you know, something major that is changing your life. Maybe it changed your values, or your responsibilities (and thus your time), or perhaps you realized that maybe, your focus for the year is what you thought it "should" be, not what you actually want it to be.

Semi-annual meetings will happen twice a year, in spring (March, April, May or somewhere around there) and in fall (September, October, November or somewhere around there). In order to complete this meeting, find a notebook and pen, a water bottle, an hour or two of uninterrupted time, and a location without SCREENS, MUSIC, LOUD NOISES, or other DISTRACTIONS.

Then take the time to answer the following questions with horrific honesty:

1. How am I doing in achieving what I said I'd achieve in my annual meeting? Am I on track to achieve all my goals?
2. Was I completely honest about what I needed to drop, start, or achieve?
3. Does my plan need altering?
4. What are the biggest obstacles to me achieving what I said I'd achieve?
5. How can I overcome those obstacles?
6. What do I need to do in the next six months?
7. What do I need in the next six months?
8. How can I fulfill those needs?
9. What big things are going to happen in the next six months that will require my time and attention or an altering of my schedule (for example, family reunion, trip to Hawaii, or a one-week camping trip with your family)?


It should take you about two hours, give or take a little, to do so. When you finish, take the time to reflect upon what you've decided, sum up your plans and thoughts, and decide what the "next right thing" to do is.

And then you're done!

Of course, the Semi-Annual Personal Meeting is absolutely useless without the monthly personal meeting... stay tuned for how to do that next post!

Questions on how to do a Semi-Annual Personal Meeting or why it matters? Comments? Experiences with personal meetings? Please comment below and I will get back to you in 1-2 days!

You know, there is a problem with society today.

They don't know what they want, and if they do know what they want, they either (a) don't take steps to get it OR (b) don't know how to get it.

Enter, personal meetings.

In order to maximize personal meetings, they should happen at the following times:

~At the start of the year
~Start of spring and start of fall
~At the beginning of the month
~At some regular, schedule time once a week.

Sounds like a lot to add to your plate? On the contrary, it will SAVE YOU TIME, help you realize what REALLY MATTERS, and allows you to PRIORITIZE, PLAN AHEAD, and CHECK IN with yourself.

So although this isn't the start of the year, today I am going to discuss the YEARLY PERSONAL MEETING.

For the yearly personal meeting (which actually doesn't HAVE to be at the start of the year, it could be before school starts, in the middle of the summer, whenever works for you as long as you are CONSISTENT about it) you are going to find three hours, a notebook and pen, a water bottle, and a quite location without SCREENS, LOUD NOISES, MUSIC, or SNACKS.

Then you are going to get yourself situated, open up your notebook, and set an alarm for three hours later. Then don't look at the clock/alarm and take ample time to be brutally honest with yourself and answer the following questions:

1. How is life going right now? Good/bad? Why/why not?
2. What has been your biggest achievement this past year?
3. How have you changed this past year?
4. What do you want to do better this next year?
5. Is your life going in the direction you want?
6. What do you want with your life?
7. If you have one, now is the time to review/edit your mission statement. If you don't have one, now is the time to make one.
8. What are your passions?
9. What do you want to accomplish this next year?
10. What do you need this year? What needs of yours are unfulfilled?
11. What steps can you take towards fulfilling those needs?
12. What are your priorities?
13. Is there anything you need to drop?
14. Anything you need to add?

When the alarm beeps, you can be done, or keep going. Three hours should be enough to answer all those questions (that is 12.857 minutes per question), but if it isn't keep going.

If you finish before the three hours finish, take the time to pat yourself on the back, and then start reviewing your notes, adding in anything you think of.

By the end of the three hours, you should have a lot of notes, a few doodles, and a soul-wrenching period of self-honesty (yay!).

Well, now what? The yearly personal meeting is useless if you don't sum it up in fourteen paragraphs (one paragraph per question), which should give you a general idea of what you need to do and focus on this year.

And then, of course, you need to act on it.

But... again... the yearly personal meeting is completely and utterly useless if you don't follow it up with the semi-annual meetings, the monthly meetings, and the weekly meetings.

I will describe those meetings and how important they are in later posts... next one coming soon, maybe later today.

Questions/comments about the Annual Meeting? Please comment below and I will get back to you in one or two days. See you in the next post!

Here is another quick update for "new way to read." It's been going good, but with quarantine and everything, I do have a smaller limit on books I can check out, so #ProjectOtulissa is being put aside for now.

However, I am deciding to notch up all of my reading by approaching books with a question in mind. For this book I just barely finished (How To Fight A Hydra), the question was, "how can I combat overwhelm and start achieving my dreams?"

And yeah, I got answers. I love books!

And yes, I highly recommend How To Fight A Hydra, it's a really quick and enjoyable read but also a super deep parable.

Here are the seven lessons I got out of it:

~Just follow your dreams! People are going to try to stop you; don't listen to them. They don't know how capable you are.

~Learn from the great people of the present/past.

~Getting a QUALITY EDUCATION matters!

~Your fears may be justified, but they are useful. Acknowledge them, then act in spite of them.

~Go slowly; don't go so fast that you get yourself "killed." Know what you're getting into. But also, don't spend your whole life planning! At some point, you have to stop researching and start doing.

~Learn to recognize your treasure and adapt your plans accordingly; it might not be exactly what you thought it would be, but it's still going to be amazing.

~And finally, take advice from those who have succeeded, not those who have failed or given up. Learn from those who know what they're talking about and use it in their own life!

Sadly, the 2020 Spring Shakespeare Bootcamp is over. I had a lot of fun, understood a lot more Shakespeare, and had some god bonding time with Elisabeta.

Due to the success of the bootcamp, I think I am going to do something similar every year, although they might not all be Shakespeare based. For example, one year I could read something by Aristotle everyday; another year, I could sight-read through an original Beethoven piece everyday.

And my bootcamps will ALWAYS be in the first weeks of summer... because that's the best time to do it.

Elisabeta and I just finished another Shakespeare play... which she approved of more than the last (All's Well That Ends Well). Basically, it's another big tangled romance..... that ends happily.....

Honestly, it's hilarious! I'm not going to tell you plot.... you should just go watch it. I watched THIS production. The actors etc are AMAZING!

So... my favourite lines......

"Methink you are a fool."

"O time, thou must untangle this, not I; It is too hard a knot for me to untie."

"Ay, he does well enough if he be disposed"

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."

"Be not afraid of greatness."

"There is no darkness but in ignorance."



And yeah, this play is such a comical mess.... It's sooo funny.

It all starts with a forlorn maiden... one of lowly class... who is desperately in love with one of high status. After having received her love's mother's blessing in her effort to find a way to make the match work, she heals the king of a terrible malady and demands as payment her choice of husband. She, of course, picks her love.

However, her love disdains her for her lack of noble title. After much threatening from the king, he agrees to marriage.

~pauses in telling plot to rant~
FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, is this maiden (Helena) DAFT? Marrying someone who has been forced to marry you is a recipe for disaster. Resentment, anger, and frustration and going to build up and explode into divorce or worse. BAD IDEA!
~continuing on in telling the plot~


Her love, Bertram, hating his new wife, flees to fight in the war, leaving his wife at his mother's house. Realizing what happened, Helena feels horribly guilty for chasing him "from thy country," and decides to leave in hopes that he will return home and be spared from the horrible war, though knowing that she could never be a beloved wife of his.

Knowing that her husband would not call her wife until she had born him a child, and swearing that would never happen, Helena tricks her husband, bears him a child, confronts him, and says she is his wife.

It's a bit of a confusing romance... and also kinda boring. The best line is at the very end: "Mine eyes smell onion, and I weep anon." Other than that, it was just okay.

And here is Elisabeta's two cents: "We keep doing romances." (rolls eyes here...) "I'm sick of them. We need to do something FUN like Macbeth... or maybe we can go do Julius Caesar again..."

Soon, Elisabeta.

I just barely finished the Merry Wives of Windsor and am two days behind in my Shakespeare reading! I'll have to do a second play today and two tomorrow, but that's fine. I really enjoy Shakespeare.

Anyways, The Merry Wives of Windsor is a tangled mess of attempted affairs, thwarted affairs, and humor. All in all, it was enjoyable but one of the harder ones for me to understand.

Moving on....

Here are my favourite lines:

"All of his successors, gone before him, hath done't; and all his ancestors, that come after him, may..." XD

"Why sir, for my part, I say the gentleman had drunk himself out of his five sentences" (and then the next line, by another Mr, is, "It is his 'five senses'; fie, what the ignorance is!)

"All is in His hands above."

"Hang the trifle, woman; take the honour."

"Sheath your impatience."

"You were wont to be a follower, but now you are a leader."

Greetings.... I have been off my blog for a comparatively long time, because I've been extremely busy. But we're back on schedule now!

So today I was bored silly and decided to try a new recipe.

It's a chocolate chip recipe that is processed-sugar free (assuming you use RAW honey...) and it's so good!!!!!!

Because my family eats (mostly) dairy free, I made a 1-to-1 substitution of butter for coconut oil, but you don't have to.

Also, as you can probably see from the photo to the side, I did not do chocolate chips. That is because 1/4 of my family is allergic to chocolate (oh horror of horrors!).

I plan to use this recipe as a good base to add in anything I feel like, which I think will work really well because, other than the chocolate chips, it's a very basic recipe.

This time, for add-ins, I did 50% coconut shreds, and 50% chopped craisins.They are amazing! It also went really well with the coconut oil.

Some add-ins I'm planning on doing are: walnuts and a little extra honey; oatmeal; carob chips and craisins; dried apricot pieces; and sliced almonds.

For those of you interested in trying out the recipe, you can find it at TheCookieWriter.

I just barely finished Romeo and Juliet.

Wowza, wowza, wow.

I mean, almost-fourteen and seventeen is WAY too young to marry............. But I guess Juliet's father was determined to get her married anyways.... BUT STILL.

So here are my thoughts on it...

It's all going well, according to plan, etc., until Romeo shouts "I defy you, stars!" Then his actions get himself and his tragically young wife killed.

Stupid Romeo. (To go on a tangent, at one point, Romeo was totally out of control and had given up all hope and the friar demands, "art thou a man?" My answer: "Romeo art not a man... for he hath the immaturity of a boy." Poor Juliet... she got way less that she deserved.)

The friar (a representation of God) had everything perfectly under control, the perfect plan to heal their families and allow them a "happily ever after." But then came the tragic line: "I defy you, stars!" It is at that point that Romeo abandons the plan, and kills himself, causing his distraught wife to kill herself as well.

So basically, everything was running smoothly until Romeo defied God.

Likewise... God has everything in control in our lives. It is all going to plan and it will come out perfectly wonderful in the end if we do not defy his will and try to take fate into our own hands. As we are not all-knowing, we are just going to ruin everything and "kill" ourselves and those we love.