Sonya's Patates Braavos: Edition #32 💌🥔

TLDR: 8 recommendations, paging Hezbollah, and more… beep beep

welcome 👋 

Hello, brave patates! 🥔 Happy Fall Equinox! Now it’s time to decorate.

melting pot / recommendations / stream of consciousness

Clothes: Abercrombie: really nice fit and better quality than H&M etc. Check sale & clearance for insane prices. Did you know it was established in 1892 as a sporting goods store in NYC?!

Coffee: been loving my espresso stovetop maker I got for free from Buy Nothing (made in Italy). Sometimes simple is truly best.

Music: I'm a Spotify person. My recent favourite thing: type in the day of the week and your genre. Voila: beautiful playlists made by people just like us for any occasion and in any vibe.

TV: started rewatching Gilmore Girls because, you know, fall. Besides their slightly dysfunctional dynamic (and a great case for therapy), the small-town vibe is so comforting.

Food: Meal Prep Ottawa impresses me everytime. Healthy meals. Best value out of all in the area. Delicious flavours and textures. Always impeccable organization and communication. Oh, also try Costco's frozen chicken stuffed with broccoli and cheese. So. Good.

Books: reading Stephen King for the first time. It's definitely unsettling and gory at times but I'm still not convinced I can get properly scared by a book as much as I can by a movie. Also, yes, I am reading 3 books at the same time right now because range.

Movies: speaking of, for the love of god, please don't watch The Devil All The Time. I got trapped by the attractive cast (Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Sebastian Stan) but it was just a whole movie of bad. Just bad. Violent. Gruesome. With no real character development. Worse graphic images than Game of Thrones. Just unnecessary. Concerned for the author on whose book it's based. I did enjoy The School of Good and Evil movie which I needed as eye bleach but it was basically Harry Potter with a fairy tale twist lol.

Coffee: gave into the inevitable pull of fall and got an oat Apple crisp macchiato at Starbucks and it was delicious. No, I don't need to know how many grams of sugar are in that.

Work: The Telfer project is coming to an end but I got a new retainer client through my other client (connections is truly where it's at) and submitted an estimate to the agency I worked with earlier (the work with which I secured through a LinkedIn dm to the agency owner 😎).

Telfer: I'm once again coaching the JDC (jeux du commerce) case compétition students. They'll present every week until the end of November and I'll judge. Then they'll go to 10+ university case comp, crack a case (solving a marketing problem for a sponsor), and present in front of judges who work at this company. It's fun.

Coaching: I've begun coaching my first client and it's awesome to put the theory into practice. To practice nonviolent communication (no unsolicited advice or relating the situation to me or trying to solve it). To simply listen and allow someone to feel their feelings.

Political picture of the week: Israel may or may not be dealing with Hezbollah (Lebanese terrorist group, a proxy of the Iranian extremist regime, basically the same as Hamas) by precision striking their pagers somehow. The memes have been highly entertaining. And, obviously, there’s no beef with the regular people of Lebanon (which is why none of their devices are targeted…) and many Lebanese people came over to Israel to live in relative peace over the decades. I saw someone’s post recently that Lebanon is “under attack” on the border and it’s like… Can we go just one question deeper and ask why? Maybe it’s because Hezbollah has been sending thousands of rockets to the North of Israel for months? Because they hit a soccer field and killed Druze kids? Because it’s terrorism?

If you got this far, thanks for reading ❤️ cooked something yummy? lmk. went to a cool event or read a fun book? lmk. see you on the flip side 🥔