- Hey friends.
Welcome back, and hello
to you new people too.
I'm Courtney.
Phaedra and Nyx are hanging
out in the room with me,
and I wanted to share
a life update with you.
I know a lot of you
followed me on Instagram,
so you see my Instagram Stories updates,
but since not everybody's over there,
I thought I would just make a video
to talk about what's going on with me.
(sighs) Number one, I just
sent my laptop back off
to Falcon Northwest because
it needs to be repaired.
When I got it back from
them, it was still broken.
The first time I booted it
up, it still had the same
artifacting issue, so I was really upset.
I was in tears.
I sent a video to Falcon
Northwest of me booting it up
and immediately having the same problem
and how I kept rebooting it
and it would have the same problem.
And so, they decided to have
me send it back to them.
They paid for shipping
this time, which is nice,
because when I shipped
to them I spent $350,
and I guess they're going
to try to replace the screen
in the laptop and see if
that fixes the problem.
It's going to through testing,
so I'm probably going to be
without it for at least another week.
This is just really upsetting to me,
because I'm really tired of using
Dave's Microsoft Surface laptop, which,
I'm grateful I have that option,
but it's not my machine
and it takes, like,
three times the amount of
time to compile a video
before I can upload it to YouTube.
So it just makes everything I do slower.
It makes video editing slower because
it's very, very sluggish at that.
It's not very good with photo editing.
So all of the stuff that I do for
my blog and YouTube are slower.
It's okay for my work, like,
for stuff I do for work
it's fine because it
doesn't have any slow-down
for the stuff that I do for that,
but it's upsetting to
me and stressful that,
you know, I'm stuck using a machine
that isn't as good as my machine.
Okay, so that's one thing.
Next, if you're familiar
with Murphy's Law,
I swear to God, that is applied to
this house at every single turn.
I bought three toilets
because two of the toilets
in my house were broken and I figured
the third is probably not far behind.
And when they arrived here on Monday,
one of them was broken, so
I was able to immediately
ship it back and get a refund from Amazon.
But, the other two seemed fine.
And so when the plumber came yesterday,
it was supposed to be $450
to install three toilets.
He was only going to be two toilets,
so I thought it was going
to be, you know, $300.
And then he puts the first
toilet in and it's fine.
He looks at all the toilets.
He decides that all of them
need this shut-off valve
that they don't have, or
it was a plastic piece
and he put in the metal piece,
so then he charged me for that.
And then he couldn't get the second toilet
into my guest bathroom,
the one that was, like,
running like crazy that made me feel like,
you know, if I believed
in ghosts I would think
there was a ghost in
that toilet making it run
all the time 'cause it just
would never stop running.
And apparently that one
was like leaking underneath
the base where we couldn't see it.
It wasn't coming out
because it was caulked in.
So that one was gross and weird.
But the toilet that I
bought to put into that
bathroom wouldn't fit because
the hole was too close to the wall.
So then I had to go to Home
Depot, buy a new toilet that
would fit in that space,
and then I had to reach back
out to Amazon to have
them come to have somebody
to pick that up to return it,
which they haven't had
somebody pick it up yet,
so I can't get a refund on that on until
they pick it up and then it gets returned.
But because this wasn't a standard job,
and there were all kinds of complications,
my $450 install for three
toilets ended up being
$1,100, which I didn't expect,
so I was really kind of upset about that.
For the one that arrived broken on Monday,
I did end up buying a
completely different toilet
that'll be here in like two weeks.
I bought a toilet with a bidet
'cause I always wanted that
and it's going to go
in the master bathroom,
so I'm kind of excited about that
if it arrives and it's not broken.
But the mess of yesterday
was just really stressful.
I feel like I've spend
so much money to fix up
all of this stuff around this house.
Like, I just spent $1,000 to get
all of the lanai screened,
and it looks great, so
I'm very happy about that,
but it's just, every single corner,
I feel like everywhere I look,
there's something broken in this house
that I have to fix, and
it's so frustrating.
Yeah, and I still haven't
sold my old house yet,
so I'm hoping that house sells soon.
I finally dropped the price
on it, so wish me luck.
Next I've been working
with a trainer with Nyx,
and Phaedra, but mostly Nyx,
and I'm finally starting
to see some progress
and seeing things in her behavior
that I don't like improved
so I'm really happy about that.
This guy is doing all
positive reinforcement,
and like, treat training,
and instead of doing clicker,
we're doing yes, so like,
if she does what I want,
I say yes, and I'm finding
that I'm getting a lot
of the results that I wanted
that I wasn't getting before.
Which was frustrating for
me that I wasn't getting
the results before, but
now that I'm doing it
slightly differently, I'm
getting results, which is great.
So I'm probably going to be doing that
for still another couple months.
So in very, very personal news,
I've been very unhappy with
my weight and my eating habits
because I think I'm addicted to sugar.
And what I mean by that is
that I always want to eat
dessert at night after dinner, always,
and so I decided that I really
need to change that behavior,
and I've tried a lot of different things.
And of the things that I've tried, like,
what worked best for me in
the past was doing Slim Fast
if I'm working out, but when
I tried things recently,
they didn't work for me,
so I started looking into
the keto diet so I'm trying the keto diet.
And I've only been on it since Monday,
so I can't really tell you
if I love it or hate it yet.
I can tell you that I'm feeling full,
which is nice, and I'm having problems
meeting my calories,
which I didn't expect.
And basically, the keto
diet for what I'm doing
is I'm prioritizing fat then protein
and I'm doing as low carb as possible.
So, for example, for breakfast today,
I had a cup of cottage cheese.
For lunch I had a Florida
avocado that I mixed
with lemon juice and a little
bit of pink Himalayan sea salt
and some Cholula hot sauce;
I like mixed that together.
Basically to kind of
make like a guacamole,
and I just ate that for lunch.
On Monday night I made this
really, well, "I made."
Let me rephrase that as Ray cooks,
I assist him when he
cooks, but we took salmon,
and we took like ricotta
and cheese and lemon juice
and mixed it together and then
put like the ricotta mixture
on the inside of the salmon,
and then we took asparagus
and then we wrapped the salmon
around the asparagus and
baked that in the oven.
And it was amazing, so if all of my meals
are going to be delicious like that with
a lot of cheese, I'm
probably going to be okay.
I haven't found myself going for ice cream
or going for cupcakes or anything
like that, which is good.
But I will say I did try a
bite of Halo Top ice cream,
and I know people rave about it,
and maybe it was just
the bites that I tried,
because I tried two flavors.
I tried a bite of the candy
bar and the sea salt caramel
and the candy bar tasted godawful to me,
like something was horribly wrong with it,
and the sea salt caramel
was a little better
but still not great, and I'm like,
I know people rave about this stuff,
but I just, it doesn't taste right.
And I like coconut milk ice cream.
I like almond milk ice cream.
I like alternative dairy ice creams.
I just didn't like this at all.
So if there's a good flavor
of Halo Top out there,
let me know, because I'm really curious,
'cause I feel like, wow, I
expected it to be amazing
and it was not what I expected at all.
Whew.
By the time you see this video,
I think it's going to be live,
but I did a collaboration
video with Jen Luvs Reviews.
She interviewed me to talk
about cruelty-free beauty,
and I was really excited
to talk with her about it,
and I tried to answer all of
her questions as best I can.
So I'm going to put a link
to her channel up here
so you can go check it out,
but I was so, so excited
to be able to talk about
cruelty-free beauty.
And anyway, I hope that
you show her support
and show that video support.
Anyway, I think that's all
that's really going on with me.
Mostly just I'm really stressed
from a lot of house stuff,
and really stressed about my laptop,
so hopefully I can find some
ways to reduce stress soon.
Because my stress has been
going through the roof.
And you know I take medication
daily for my anxiety.
I take Buspirone and I see a therapist.
But right now I feel like my
stress is at an all-time high.
Like, it hasn't been this high in years,
and it's been so hard to manage.
I feel like I'm basically
neglecting myself
and not doing a lot of normal self-care
just because I'm so stressed.
So wish me luck at getting
my stress under control.
Anyway, let me know what's going on
with you in the comments below.
If you like this video, give
it a thumbs up and share,
and if you haven't already, click on that
little subscribe button down below,
and I'll see you in my next video.
Bye.
