Café Le Falco

I finally made it to Cafe Le Falco with my coffee buddy C! This café has been on my list forever, but the hours make it really challenging for a working professional. They're only open Monday to Friday from 8 am to 5 pm.

Le Falco is located by metro Laurier on Ave Gaspe in an industrial and artsy area. The café is a bit out of the way, but once we made it there we stayed for a while!

The warehouse set up is very cool - industrial yet modern with a large open space. I liked the giant world map mural and the bicycle hanging above the long table. Le Falco has food options like Japanese rice bowls, as well as baked goods and coffee.

They use a Syphon coffee maker which is essentially a vacuum coffee maker. It brews coffee using two chambers and is based on the expansion and contraction of water vapor. Read more here. I enjoyed my syphon coffee and lemon poppyseed loaf. While I probably won't get a chance to go back, I'd recommend a visit here if you can make the hours.

Vortex Cycling in Virginia

New year, same me. At the end of every year, I love to sit down with a notebook and reflect on the past year. It's also my favourite time to try to pinpoint items in my life that I want to improve on for the upcoming year. A recurring theme to improve on has always been health and fitness.

Over the Christmas holidays I had the pleasure of trying out an indoor cycling class at Vortex in Tysons. Hands down, this is one of my favourite fitness classes that I've ever tried! The music was so great, and the instructor we had was so motivating. It was such a fun hour of fitness! I felt like I was dancing on the bike, but we also took some free weights to work our arms as well.

At the end of the ride, we had a chance to sit down at the café with the owner. It was a great way to relax and unwind. I had a delicious filtered coffee, and Alan had a pour over. The coffee was from a local D.C. roaster and was so good! Vortex's café offers all sorts of coffee and healthy snacks to fuel up before the class, or re-energize after the workout.

My 2018 Book List

Happy New Year!! Wishing you all a very healthy, happy and prosperous 2018!

As some of you may know, I challenged myself to read 50 books in 2016 and continued that challenge in 2017. Unfortunately I was not able to finish 50 books last year but I did manage to read 39 great ones!

I've decided once again this year to challenge myself to read 50 books. My goal is that 25 of them will be from the Time's All Time Top 100 List. I plan to continuously update this post as I finish these books, and I'll mark the Time's books with as asterisk.

You can follow me on goodreads here in case you're interested to see my ratings! Thanks for stopping by!

1. Freakanomics by Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

2. The Good Goodbye by Carla Buckley

3. I'm Fine...and Other Lies by Whitney Cummings

4. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey *

5. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

6. What If? by Randall Munroe

7. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

8. Mistakes I Made at Work: 25 Influential Women Reflect on What they Got Out of Getting it Wrong by Jessica Bacal

9. Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro *

10. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison *

11. Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

12. The Upstarts by Brad Stone

13. Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan

14. Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

15. Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America by Samhita Mukhopadhyay

16. Flash Boys by Michael Lewis

17. Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

18. Native Son by Richard Wright *

19. The Subtle Art of not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

20. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

21. In A Different Key: The Story of Autism by John Donavan and Caren Zucker

22. The Royal We by Heather Cocks

23. The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It by Kelly McGonigal

24. Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever

25. It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover

26. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Frederik Backman

27. The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills by Daniel Coyle

28. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood *

29. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf *

30. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark *

31. The Things We Keep by Sally Hepworth

32. American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

33. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller *

34. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut *

35. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler *

36. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh *

37. The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

38. Fallen Land by Taylor Brown

39. Fitness Junkie by Lucy Sykes and Jo Piazza

40. Violin for Dummies by Katharine Rapoport

41. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

42. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings by JRR Tolkein *

43. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers by JRR Tolkein *

44. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by JRR Tolkein *

45. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal

46. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

47. White Noise by Don DeLillo*

48. The Big Secret for the Small Investor

49. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren*

50. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens