PARIS TIME CAPSULE BY ELLA CAREY

Cat, the main character of Paris Time Capsule, is a NY-based girl who’s in love with photography. She’s having the best time of her life, as she’s about to start a new, exciting life with her boyfriend, a successful, caring man. However, pretty soon she learns that there’s a gorgeous estate waiting for her to claim. That’s right, she’s inherited the riches of a woman she never knew before, and that flips her life 180 degrees.

So, Cat lands in Paris to “investigate” her new property. As it turns out, she’s now the official owner of a fantastic apartment in the 9th district, and, what’s even stranger, the mysterious woman’s family and loved ones had no idea that this apartment even existed. Yes, this whole story is pretty strange, but that makes it even more exciting and thrilling. Besides, nobody in this world just hands out a secret estate to a complete stranger, right?

The biggest question that’s bothering Cat is who is this woman, who Isabelle is? And why on Earth would she leave her own property to Cat instead of her relatives? So, the girl embarks on a wonderful journey across France, hoping to find the answers, and slowly, but steadily, she begins to forget about the way life used to be in New-York and embraces this new reality in one of the most amazing countries in the world.

Along the way, Cat discovers centuries-old secrets and – quite unexpectedly – falls in love with the woman’s grandson. And that leaves her with a difficult choice to make: to go back to NY, to her old life and her boyfriend or to stay in Paris and to say “Yes” to these wonderful new opportunities. Paris Time Capsule is a heart-warming, feel-good kind of romantic novel that captivates the readers with an amazing sense of humor, an interesting plot, and a fascinating cast of characters.

PARIS TIME CAPSULE BY ELLA CAREY

WAKE IN WINTER BY NADEZHDA BELENKAYA

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Wake in Winter, a deep, powerful, emotionally-charged novel by Nadezhda Belenkaya, a gifted Russian writer. Nina, the main character of the book, is struggling to pay her graduate program at the most prestigious university in Moscow. So, naturally, when they offer her a part-time job of translating for Spanish couples who want to adopt orphans from a small-time town in Russia, she gladly agrees. Where else would she get a chance to fix her financial problems? Furthermore, she’s not only doing it for the money: this job is a wonderful opportunity for the girl to […]

WAKE IN WINTER BY NADEZHDA BELENKAYA

Bulgarian Burgers Recipe

Bulgarian Burgers Recipe

Late-Night Beef Burger with Cheddar, Horseradish, and Onion

Late-Night Beef Burger with Cheddar, Horseradish, and Onion

Late-Night Beef Burger with Cheddar, Horseradish, and Onion

Late-Night Beef Burger with Cheddar, Horseradish, and Onion

Late-Night Beef Burger with Cheddar, Horseradish, and Onion

Baseball’s loss has been the food world’s gain. In 1985, Michael Schlow traded a baseball scholarship for a chef’s toque and hasn’t looked back since. He doesn’t have time to, because he’s too busy winning accolades: Food & Wine magazine called him one of the Top Ten New Chefs in the Country and named his Boston restaurant, Radius, the Best New Restaurant in 2000. Michael confesses that this burger is “nice and messy, and it makes me quite happy around midnight.”

MAKES 1 BURGER*

Ingredients

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

½ small red onion, thinly sliced

½ pound ground beef (20 percent fat)

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

Kosher salt and coarsely ground black pepper to taste

1 tablespoon prepared horseradish

3 tablespoons mayonnaise

1 thick slice extra-sharp cheddar cheese (2 ounces), for topping

Directions

1. In a small skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onion, reduce the heat to mediumlow, and cook until very soft and caramelized, 12 to 14 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat and set aside for topping.

2. In a small mixing bowl, mix the ground beef with the olive oil and salt and pepper. Form the seasoned meat into a large, slightly flattened patty about 1½ inches thick and refrigerate for 10 minutes.

3. In a small bowl, combine the horseradish, mayonnaise, and a pinch of pepper. Set aside for topping.

4. Heat a medium-size skillet over medium-high heat until hot. Cook the burger to the desired degree of doneness (Schlow likes medium rare, which is 2 to 4 minutes per side for a burger this size). Remove from the skillet and let rest for 2 to 3 minutes.

SERVE IT UP on an extra-large English muffin, sliced and toasted with the cheese on the top half.

TOP IT OFF with the caramelized onions and horseradish mayonnaise.

Late-Night Beef Burger with Cheddar, Horseradish, and Onion

30 Delightful Short Haircuts for Girls

30 Delightful Short Haircuts for Girls

30 Delightful Short Haircuts for Girls

Girls, there’s a lot fascinating happening in the world today, which you can’t waste your time on painstaking hairstyling routines. A way out is a stylish short haircut that seems to be pretty cool even though the trivial ”scrunch and go” style. No matter if you’ve reduced in to update your regular cut or maybe want a far more drastic adjust like going from medium/long to very short, you’ll discover a variety of sweet ideas below: bold pixies, fun edgy bobs and the loveliest boyish cuts are all there. Fancy having a look?

Trends Of Short Haircuts For Girls 2016

• Messy and matte razor-cut shags were sported in the springtime shows of Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford and Haider Ackermann to name just a few. Even though shags of the recent period are identical edgy as always, they feature the smooth changes between layers.


• Mullets of the above-the shoulder length are as well-liked as their longer variations. In case you have fine hair with a light wave and also look for more amount at the top of your head, select a short-to-medium mullet cut. It’s likely to work as a great self-styling solution.


• Trendy shaggy pixies hairstyles are great for girls with large eyes and also small noses, whereas strong facial aspects become a lot more pronounced with these haircuts for girls.


• Bowl cuts are usually on, however notice that they don’t flatter girls and women with a good jaw line.


• Short blunt bobs will not weaken their top position in the present haircut trends. Look at chic short bobs of Rosamund Pike, Sienna Miller, Jourdan Dunn, Lily Collins, Kristen Wiig and also Kate Mara for inspiration.

1. Short layered brown blonde haircut

2. Asymmetrical bob with pastel blue ombre

3. Brown pixie with red and blonde bangs

4. Long top short sides haircut for girls

5. Medium haircut for girls with temple undercut

6. Extra short pixie for girls

7. Short asymmetrical black haircut

8. Blonde buzz cut for women

9. Short red asymmetrical haircut for girls

10. Short curly blonde and brown hairstyle

11. Silver pixie bob haircut for girls

12. Medium wavy black hairstyle

13. Asymmetrical short haircut with burgundy highlights

14. Black bob with red highlights

15. Edgy Color Combo

16. Angled bob with blunt bangs

17. Curly black bob with marsala highlights

18. Choppy bob haircut

19. Stacked brown blonde bob

20. Bob with bangs for girls

21. Pixie haircuts ideas

22. Tapered Textured Bob haircut

23. Smooth Buttery Bob

24. Cutie cute short hairstyles

25. Sporty Ruffled Cut

26. Frankie sandford

27. Wispy Wavy Bob

28. Asymmetric pixie

29. Silky and Edgy

30. Sharp Cropped Bob

 

30 Delightful Short Haircuts for Girls

Learning To SCUBA Dive On The Island Of Utila

Scuba Diving on the Island of Utila

Utila, Honduras

The island of Utila in Honduras is one of the cheapest places in the world to get your PADI diving certification. Here’s how I did it.

Many travelers backpackers learn to SCUBA dive in Utila. It’s smaller and cheaper to visit than it’s bigger next door neighbor, the island of Roatán. Because of it’s popularity, there are many dive shops on Utila, and it can be hard to choose one.

That’s why my buddy Richard and I teamed up to check out a bunch of different Utila dive shops and find the best deal for an Open Water Diving Course. This way we could cover more ground.

Heading to My First Dive

Choosing A Dive Shop

After interviewing staff at a few different places, we decided on Parrots Dive Center. This is the criteria we used for choosing a dive shop:

• Are the employees energetic friendly?


• Is the instructor experienced?


• How many people will be in a class?


• How many instructors are there per class?


• Are there additional “fun” dives included?


• Is accommodation included? How many nights?


• How nice is the accommodation?


• What’s the quality of the equipment?


• What time is class in the morning?

The employees at Parrots seemed laid back, professional, fun. The shop was locally owned too, another important factor. We even received 5 free nights in a double room away from Utila’s noisy main street, when most places only offered 4 nights in a busy hostel environment.

Two free fun dives were included with the course as well.

There were 6 of us in the SCUBA class. Our 4 day course started with our instructor Alan teaching us basic diving principles of depth, pressure, breathing air underwater. In the mornings we sat in a classroom, in the afternoons we practiced our new skills in the bay.

Dive Master Alan

SCUBA School

Learning How To SCUBA Dive

Some of the underwater skills we needed to learn: equalizing the pressure in our sinuses, clearing a flooded mask, sharing air with another diver, and proper timing of our dives at different depths to avoid Nitrogen Sickness (aka “The Bends”).

For one of the tests the instructor turns off your air tank underwater! This important test is to simulate running out of air. You don’t want to panic in a real emergency, so this experience lets you feel the effect due to an equipment (or human) error.

When the air is turned off, it takes a second to notice. The effect isn’t instant. You will slowly begin to have trouble breathing.

When this happens, you get the attention of your buddy with hand signals in order to share his/her air supply with a backup regulator mouthpiece that every diver carries.

So now I know what it feels like to run out of air deep underwater…

Open Water Diving in Utila

Weightless Underwater

The real fun started when we finally went diving for the first few times. Slowly sinking 60 feet down to the ocean floor is an incredible experience. But it keeps getting better!

Once at the bottom, you press a button on your BCD diving vest and inflate it with a bit of air from your tank.

Because you’ll be wearing a weight belt (mine was 14 pounds) to help you sink, adding this air to your vest will level you out. This makes you weightless underwater. You won’t sink to the bottom, or float up to the top.

It lets you hover at one depth, neutrally buoyant.

Underwater World

Superhero SCUBA Powers

I ❤ SCUBA Diving!

I thought I knew what weightlessness would feel like, but I was wrong. True underwater weightlessness is an amazing experience! You can control your body just by breathing.

Want to go up a bit? Breath in a bit deeper. Want to do down? Breath out a bit longer.

Hang completely upside down, swim sideways backwards while spinning, or do 20 somersaults in a row. We removed our fins to engage in Matrix-style movie stunts, jumping at each other feet first, followed by backflips.

We’re all just a bunch of grown-up kids down there. ★

READ NEXT: How To Find Cheap Flights

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Learning To SCUBA Dive On The Island Of Utila

SECRET DAUGHTER: A NOVEL BY SHILPI SOMAYA GOWDA

Secret Daughter is a wonderful novel and a must-have for all the fans of deep, powerful and touching stories that resonate on a whole another level. It’s moving, insightful and inspiring. Shilpi Somaya Gowda managed to create a one-of-a-kind story that talks about the most important things in life, including love, warmth, kindness, and life itself. If you love the fascinating chemistry between teenage girls and their mothers or like reading about adopted kids and their struggles, this book would be a great pick for you this year. By the way, Secret Daughter is this author’s debut novel, which makes […]

SECRET DAUGHTER: A NOVEL BY SHILPI SOMAYA GOWDA

Titanfall 2 review: Prepare for more mech-dropping, wall-running action

Before we get started, let’s just all agree that releasing Titanfall 2 the week between Battlefield 1 (which is quite good) and Call of Duty: Dumb Subtitle (which will sell regardless) was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. Such an awful idea that I kept expecting EA to last-minute delay Titanfall 2 to…pretty much any other month.

No such luck. Titanfall 2 releases as scheduled, in between two juggernaut shooters (one of which is also published by EA), and it’s a bad omen for a sequel to a game that’s world-renowned for rapidly losing its multiplayer audience the first time around.

So I am admittedly skeptical whether Titanfall 2 will have a multiplayer community in a few months. Respawn’s biggest ploy is that all upcoming maps and DLC will be free, and it’s admittedly enticing. But we’ll see.

With that bit of bookkeeping out of the way: Let’s talk specifics.

Multiplayer

Titanfall 2 is still primarily a multiplayer game. Sure, there’s an actual campaign to play this time, but the game’s roots lie in the dual infantry-and-mech combat established by the first outing.

It survives relatively unscathed. Titanfall 2 is a spectacle in action, on-foot Pilots sprinting down alleyways and running up the sides of buildings while hulking Titans shoot oversized rockets and lasers at each other in the streets below. It’s a dynamic I loved in the original, and I’ve been happy to sink some hours into a sequel.

Some of the beta’s more egregious changes have been rolled back, too—particularly the method by which Titans spawn. Early in the beta, Titanfall 2 had it set up so that Titans were earned only through kills, greatly reducing their prevalence. Now it’s (as far as I can tell) some combination of kills and time, with raucous three-on-three Titan battles a common occurrence.

The other big complaint coming out of the beta was that Titans no longer have shields, and unfortunately this aspect survived through release. Instead of a rechargeable shield you can now steal batteries from enemy Titans and plug them into your own for a quick repair, but it’s a huge pain to pull off and has barely factored into my matches so far. Maybe when people get more accustomed to the game we’ll see more of it.

The immediate outcome of that design decision is that Titans feel altogether too fragile. Being outnumbered is an immediate death sentence, and unless teams coordinate their Titans (which will never happen in public matches) it means easy pickings for the enemy.

I’m having a decent time, regardless. I do appreciate how much Respawn bolstered the customization/load-out part of the game, as that was one of my main criticisms in the first. Titans now come in six varieties, including one that wields a sword and one that spews fire. Pilots have a similarly broad range of weapons, each with some sort of stupid gimmick to differentiate them. (The one that made me laugh hardest is a gun with horizontal recoil.) You can also change the color or pattern of just about everything, which adds to the “It’s mine” factor.

Oh, and instead of grenades you can equip flame-spewing shuriken. It’s absurd and amazing.

But at its core it’s Titanfall, for better and worse. The AI grunts in the default Attrition and Bounty Hunt modes are still dumb cannon fodder, there are too many modes with too few players, and the maps are lovely but feel sort of interchangeable after playing through them (except for the meat grinder that is Crash Site).

My biggest complaint is that the 12-person cap on most modes returns, making larger areas feel awkwardly empty. Like last time, I have to imagine the low player count is due to consoles, and again like last time I’m left wishing the PC version ramped to a more chaotic 16- or 20-player load. I firmly believe it would be more interesting, especially given how gigantic the maps are (to allow for Titan-on-Titan fights) and how much time you spend running back to the action as a lowly Pilot.

Singleplayer

Enough about multiplayer. The biggest addition to Titanfall 2 is, as I mentioned earlier, an honest-to-goodness singleplayer campaign, drawing on Respawn’s ex-Infinity Ward DNA to create something that feels remarkably like mecha-Call of Duty. World-ending stakes, big explosions, no-time-to-chat as you blast your way through a bunch of linear environments.

To its credit, they’re pretty creative environments. Over the course of six or so hours, Titanfall 2’s campaign explores every permeation of its core mechanics: shooter, mech-shooter, and platformer, all combined and re-combined in various ways.

And this experimentation leads to Titanfall 2’s most memorable moments. There’s a level where you reposition bits of scenery with huge cranes, creating paths for your pilot to run between enemy-infested platforms. Another has you navigating a massive factory, engaging in shootouts while trying to avoid being crushed by the assembly lines. A third has you scrambling across the hull of a spaceship trying to take out its thumping gun batteries.

These sprawling vistas are a treat because they remind you that you’re playing Titanfall. Your pilot’s mobility is begging to be used, and ironically it’s these levels—which often rely on your wall-running skills more than your guns, like a bizarre homage to Mirror’s Edge—that best take advantage of the series’s unique strengths.

Not every experiment is successful. Some levels (especially the first few) drag on too long, a series of tedious Titan-on-Titan boss battles kill the pacing, and I wish there were more difficult platforming sections included. Also, the brilliant environments are undercut by some of the dumbest AI to grace a shooter since…well, the original Titanfall. But overall, Titanfall 2’s campaign is wildly creative when taken from a level design standpoint.

From a writing standpoint? Not so much.

You play as Jack Cooper, a young and untested Rifleman in the Militia. As Cooper, you’re sent to the planet (or moon?) Typhon, there to investigate an IMC presence and take out the enemy stronghold. Unfortunately your grizzled old mentor (since five minutes ago) is killed in the opening salvo, and you’re left to take over his Titan and “Uphold the mission.”

If you want any more background—say, “Who is the Militia?” or “Who is the IMC?” or “Why are we at war?”—too bad. Without even a “Previously on…” to tide you over, Titanfall 2 just assumes you remember its predecessor’s lore, which is maybe one of the weirdest assumptions ever made by a video game sequel.

Did you play the original Titanfall’s campaign? If not, I would’ve said you hadn’t missed anything. It essentially threw you into a series of multiplayer matches, except random voice actors read lines of dialogue during the midst of battle. At best, it was boring. At worst, it was incomprehensible.

But Titanfall 2 doesn’t really bother to bring you up to speed. It just points you at the generic rent-a-bad-guys and says “Fire at will,” filling in the gaps later with over-the-top villain dialogue—especially one three-minute long audio log (yes, it’s only audible if you stand in place and listen to it) where the IMC’s head General repeats ad nauseum “Human life to a certain extent is expendable.”

It’s so cliché as to almost be hilarious—which I think might be the point. All the villains are one-note caricatures, including an Austrian-accented mercenary named Richter who says “Don’t try so hard to be a hero. You’ll live longer.” A villain who parodies Arnold Schwarzenegger? Yeah, I think there’s a bit of Saturday morning cartoon-style silliness here.

Your relationship with your Titan is similarly cheesy, taking on a sort-of buddy cop feel. The writing relies a bit much on the overplayed robot-doesn’t-understand-human-idioms joke, but ultimately the partnership between you and BT-7274 is the story’s peak, with a lightweight dialogue-choosing system injecting some life into your otherwise-bland character.

It’s not great, okay? It’s not. Titanfall 2’s campaign is a pastiche of other, better sci-fi—be it game, film, or book. It’s predictable to a fault, often generic, and the voice acting is hit-or-miss. But it makes for a decent night or two of dumb, mindless action with a friendly robot buddy. I’d say it’s worth playing through, if only to see some of the more creative ideas Respawn’s packed into the levels themselves.

Bottom line

I wish we’d gotten Titanfall 2 the first time around. The multiplayer is as unique as ever, and the addition of a singleplayer campaign (however brief) helps to pad out the game and give its best ideas more room to breathe. Not everything works—least of all the writing—but if nothing else Respawn proves it’s a studio willing to experiment, to push boundaries in a way Battlefield and Call of Duty largely stopped doing years ago. That makes Titanfall 2 interesting, despite its flaws.

Now cross your fingers people stick around this time.

 

Titanfall 2 review: Prepare for more mech-dropping, wall-running action

THE WAY HE LOVES ME 2 BY DIAMOND JOHNSON

Diamond Johnson entered the literary elite with The Way He Loves Me series, and now, when it’s time to say goodbye to the characters, you can rest assured that you’re in for a treat. In this final chapter, all the secrets will be revealed to the world. Part one ended on a shocking note: Mackenzie realized that the man who’s supposedly Junior’s father is also the daddy to Maddison’s daughter.

So, what’s she expected to do with this kind of information? How does she handle it without hurting anybody but still sharing the real truth with the ones that need it? Or maybe she should just forget she even found out about this and move on? Besides, she’s got her own stuff to take care of. Now, when she’s finally with the guy that she wanted to have for a very long time, it doesn’t feel like paradise.

Can she keep him? Is he really the man that she thought he is, or maybe Mackenzie is supposed to let go of him and find her true love? Those are the main questions in The Way He Loves Me 2, and the readers will get the answers to all of them. If you loved the first book and want to learn what happens to the characters and how the story ends, you will most certainly not be disappointed with part two.

It comes with betrayals, heartache, thrill, scandals and a whole bunch of secrets. The Way He Loves Me 2 is a stand-out cut in modern-day literature and grabs your attention with a rich, layered narrative, a unique writing style and likeable characters. Diamond Johnson managed to write the grand finale that everybody’s been waiting for and it’s safe to say that the fans got the perfect ending for their favorite series.

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THE WAY HE LOVES ME 2 BY DIAMOND JOHNSON