Best Bits of 2014

Happy New Year everyone :-)  I hope you all had a really lovely Christmas and if you don't celebrate Christmas, then I hope you've had a really great holiday week.

 Just a little heads up, I will be doing a 'what I got for Christmas' type post but as I have a couple of other little gifts on their way to me in the post from one of my friends, I wanted to wait for that to arrived before I did the post.

Ok on to today's post, I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect over the past year and the good things that have happened in my life during 2014.

 Link Park Concert:

Of course the main highlight for me this year, was going to see my favourite band in concert in November, it really was a truly amazing experience.  I've seen them twice before but not for years and since I've been a fan of theirs for over 13 years, it meant a lot to me to be able to go and see them perform.  I just can't wait for their next concert :-)  You can read all about my brilliant night out and my true love of music in my post When Words Fail Music Speaks.

Finding New Friends:
One of the nicest things for me this year, was finding a great new friend.  Because of my general health issues, I don't get out much and so meeting new people is near impossible half the time.  I only have a handful a people in my life that I can really call friends and some of them live a really long way from me, so I never get to see them and sometimes I just really miss meeting up and going shopping with friends.  So about 18 months ago I signed up to a website called Girlfriend Social, it's a site for girls who want to make new friends simple as that, it's free too (always a bonus)!  I never really interacted with anyone for a long time, then about half way through September I got a message from a girl called Helen (Helz for short) and basically we totally hit it off.  Luckily we don't live too far from each other and so we met up quite soon after that and we've been great friends ever since, we meet up most weekends and chat most days.  It still amazes me how much we have in common (she's even a Linkin Park fan) and she honestly is the nicest, sweetest person you could wish to meet, I'm just very grateful to have found her :-)

Dating:
If you've been a reader of my blog for a good while, you'll remember my Break Ups post back in August, I had been dating a guy for over 4 months but it sadly came to an end.  However I'm still glad we dated and I'm grateful and appreciative of the things we did, the places we went to and for generally having an enjoyable 4 months.  At the time I was really happy and it was so nice.  I also found that the more activities we did, the better my health seemed to be and it gave me a new sense of hope on that front too.

Party Invites:
As you may already realise, I'm a huge fan of Halloween, it's my favourite time of the year and I just love everything about it.  Back in my college days, I used to go out dressed up every year but since then, I just haven't had the opportunity to do that hardly at all, so I was really excited to get invited to a proper fancy dress party and once again come up with a very cool costume.  I went with two of my best friends (including my new bff mentioned above) and it was great fun!  Oh and you can check out my post all about it, my costume and Halloween makeup here :-)

Blogging Hard:

Another great achievement for me this year has been keeping up with my blog posts, I'm quite proud of myself that I pretty much always get my posts up in time and I'm really happy with each finished post because I always work really hard on them.  I spend quite a bit of time perfecting everything from the photos, to re-reading and re-reading the text to make sure I've got it sounding just how I want it and I don't click publish until I'm satisfied my posts are as good as they can be.  I am always SO grateful when you guys leave me comments/tweets too, letting me know if you've enjoyed certain posts because of course I want you to really enjoy them as much as I love writing them and it makes me really happy when I see that you have.

My First Blog Birthday:

I also had my very first blog birthday this year in November, it was quite exciting to reach a milestone like that, even my first one and I'm really looking forward to the next.  I also launched my very first giveaway to celebrate my blog's first birthday and it turned out to be a great success.  I sent off a little parcel of some of my favourite makeup items to the winner Mary Chaz and she seemed to be very happy with it :-)  I'm really looking forward to doing another giveaway soon too.

Blog Awards:

I've also been nominated for two blogger awards within the past couple of months, the Liebster Award and just last week, the Versatile Blogger Award (post coming soon), which I'm very happy and excited about!  I love doing these kinds of posts and I'm so grateful to the two lovely bloggers that nominated me to do them – Jasmine from Color U Bold and Rebekah from The Rebekah Koontz Site!

New Followers:

I never really thought my blog would be that successful, not in the beginning but over this past year and especially this past 6 months, my blog has gone from strength to strength and that's all down to you, my readers.  It has made me SO happy every time I've had an email from Bloglovin or Twitter or Google+ telling me I have more new followers.  It was only back in June or July that I had just 14 followers on Twitter, I now have 68!  And on Bloglovin my blog now has 148 followers :-)  Ok so it may not be in the hundreds or thousands but that doesn't matter to me, I'm so grateful to have each and every single one of you and this time last year, most of you didn't even know my little blog existed! Just knowing that there are people out there who enjoy reading all the things I witter on about, feels SO amazing!!!  :-D  So a very HUGE thank you to all of you!

So what are you most grateful for this past year and what are your new years resolutions?  Let me know in the comments.  I wish all of you a VERY happy New Year and lots of happiness for 2015.  Until Next Year Stay Happy ♥

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When Words Fail, Music Speaks!

Hi everyone, today I want to write about something that I am so completely and utterly passionate about, aside from loving makeup and crafts and Poodles, my real true passion in life, is music.

Music calms me, energizes me, it fills me with passion, hope and energy, it makes me feel truly alive!  I listen to a certain few songs and I feel like I could have enough energy to run a marathon, well in my head any way!
The title of this post "When Words Fail, Music Speaks", is my most favourite quote and means so much to me, because music is the one thing that's always been there when I've felt at my worst, my best, my happiest and my lowest.  It's everything to me and it's the one thing that I can rely on to make me feel better when nothing else can.  There have been a few songs along the way, that have so much emotional attachment and so many sad memories with them that sadly, I don't feel I can listen to them anymore but there are others that make me feel more confident, more energized and more stronger than anything else can!

I also love to sing, I've been singing for many, many years and it's a total release for me, it's a way to expel my pent up energy and I feel a real power in it.  I'm not saying I'm any good, I don't really know, I've never really been brave enough to sing in front of anyone, well not for a long time anyway but I feel I can do it and that gives me confidence too.

That said, everyone has their own favourite style of music that they love, whether it be chart or country, dance or HipHop, Jazz or rock.  And everyone has their favourite groups, singers and bands that they love to listen to the most, one that means so much to them and nothing else comes close. . . For me, my most favourite band in the whole world is Linkin Park :-D  I could quite happily listen to them all day, every single day, for the rest of my life and never get bored!  I have been a fan of their music for over 13 years, since I first heard their amazing track Crawling, just after it was released back in March 2001, only their second single.  I can still remember sitting in front of the TV watching Kerrang music channel and it came on the screen.  I'd never heard anything like it before and I was totally mesmerized and completely hooked from then on!

And so, last Saturday night I was extremely lucky enough to see them in concert at the Phones 4U arena in Manchester, along with hundreds of other LP fans, and I had the most amazing time.  I love seeing live bands and I have seen the old few, but nothing, absolutely nothing can compare to seeing your most favourite band performing live on stage, nothing comes close!  Just the thrill of being there, the over-whelming size of the place, the smell of dry ice, and the incredible feel of anticipation coming from every single person in there, all waiting eagerly to see this phenomenal band play live.

As the lights went down, the crowd went crazy and the first notes of Guilty All The Same started to play, I couldn't contain my excitement and not only sang every word to every song they played but I couldn't help smiling like a Cheshire cat all the way through too!

The music was very loud, my view was amazing and thankfully I was even able to video the whole thing to be able to watch over and over again whenever I want too.  But best of all Linkin Park were absolutely incredible, they certainly know how to put on a show!  This was my third time of seeing them, but even thought I'd had to wait 6 years to see them this time, it was totally worth the wait and I just really hope they tour here again soon!  In the meantime, thank goodness for YouTube and my mp3 player!

What I wore:  About a year ago, I went in for a Linkin Park competition to design a T'shirt with the theme of one of their tracks Castle of Glass.  I worked really hard on it and had it all ready, but on the day of the deadline, I was ill and couldn't send in my design.  I was so upset that I missed it but I was determined to at least get the T'shirt printed so I could wear it, and once I heard about the concert back in July, I thought great I will wear my T'shirt.  So I found a great little T'shirt printers near where I live and they did a really great job.  I loved wearing it to the concert, as it made the event even more special, wearing my own design to support the band I love :-)  I teamed it with a basic white long-sleeve T'shirt and my favourite jeans and boots, I wanted to be comfortable as I knew it would get quite hot in the arena.

Just another little note, for anyone who's interested, I have uploaded the videos that I took of the concert on my YouTube channel, click here to see them.  It's the first thing I've ever tried to upload to YouTube and so far I'm quite amazed at just how long it's taking.  There's also a link to it on my Twitter page, DaniJ72.
As it was filmed on my mobile, the picture quality is not the best but the sound is pretty good.  It's also uploaded in a 3 separate videos, as it was obviously quite a long concert but they are now in a playlist.  I hope you enjoy it, if you did please leave me some comments on my channel, thank you :-)

What is your favourite type of music, who do you listen to constantly, do you like Linkin Park?  Let me know in the comments below.

Until Next Time, Stay happy ♥

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