Back to the Internet

Hurray! Now I can post pictures again. We here at my house have learned our lesson. We will never again type google into google.

I don't know where to start this blog because it feels like so long since I updated...I went to the Chinese New Year celebration in the city center. It was really cold but I got some good food and the fireworks show was excellent. Then the next Sunday was one of my classmate's birthday so I decided I would make pumpking bars to take to his house...That didn't really work.

I first decided to make it vegan style, because one of the guys at their house is vegan and it seemed rude to take something only two of them could eat. So I have to figure out what the vegan substitutes are without internet (that was a long painful weekend). I ended up walking down the street and standing in front of Trof to just find the common vegan substitues site I had been to before and save it to view offline.

Obstacle 1, down. Next I took a roomate with me and we split the cost of the ingredients. He could find everything on his half but I could only find two of my ingredients. We went to the help desk to ask where the walnuts and pumpkin were. Well, walnuts were hidden on a different row than the one labeled nuts (because, why would they be where there after all?) and pumpkin is not a British fav and they don't carry it, at all. Oops. I confer with my roomate. We had everything else. Should we attempt a substitute or try a different recipe? We didn't have internet at our apartment to find a new recipe so for me that was the deciding factor. The recipe normally calls for puree pumpkin so I thought that bananas coudl easily be mashed into a puree like consistency so that's what I was gonna use.

I did not take any pictures of my mystery bars for you. I was in a hurry to bake it and take it. The end result was okay. My classmates said they really liked it, but for me it was just not what I wanted it to be. It was a learning experience. Between learning vegan substitutes, no pumpkin, and not having measuring tools it was a miracle that they ended up edible O.o

Last week I had my script critiqued and I spent the rest of the week doing nothing. Really, nothing. I read books while avoiding thinking about how I don't know what to do next with my script. I'm feeling stuck. My feedback was good in that they identified my weak points, but I don't know how to fix them. During this week of nothing I also couldn't find anything at the grocery store I wanted to eat so I broke down and decided to cook, again! This time, sloppy joes.

Raw meat again. It took hours to make this because I had to clean the kitchen first because we basically had no clean dishes. Dish washing took an hour than about an hour to cook. This is why I don't like cooking one meal at a time....

 

I think I did this backwards. I browned the meat first then added veggies. Was I suppose to cook the veggies then add the meat?

 

I chopped my own tomatoes rather than buying anything in a can. I wanted tomotaes for my normal sandwiches but they'd go bad if I bought them just for sandwiches so I combined my cooking needs.

 

When I bought aloaf of bread last time it molded really quickly. I decided to by this instead and slice it as I need it. Worked pretty well and I ate most of it before it got turned stale.

 

The final result, sloppy joe masterpiece!

I also, at some point before the sloppy joes, bought myself a new purse.

This is smaller than my other one because I found that having the ability to carry around so much, I was taking way too much stuff with me most of the time. Not I use this purse for small errands and I have my larger purse for going to school and stuff :)

A pictures of MediaCity, found it on my camera. I don't know which week I took this picture but I know it was a Tuesday ;)

So after avoiding my script for a week I realized that my next assignment due isn't actually my next draft but a pitch for my next script. Yay! A new project that I don't feel like I'm burnt out on! I dive into that and turn to my family resources for a afternoon of pre-pitching and developing a  fun idea. Now I want to work on it and I'm less motivated than every to finish my current script. Ah well.

This weekend I also went to a ceilidh for the first time. It was a whole lot of fun. The church that was hosting only has one a year but there are a few held other times around Manchester. I found a website that lists some gigs not far away and I'm going to go again! I wasn't sure I would like it, when my friends took me clubbing in Finland I hadn't known there were places that could be so horribly not fun. Line dancing is much better. The caller walked us through all the steps before hand and after that we still made a bunch of mistakes but its okay because we would eventually catch up and be able to follow the easier steps :D

Sunday night, my friends and I went to a free screening. The first movie was Snowtown, an Australian crime movie based on true events. I knew going in it was about a serial killer but I was not prepared for this show. Most of the show nothing happens, it's painfully slow and they have very thick accents so I was wishing for captions. When I did understand what they were saying I often didn't know why. When it wasn't slow it jumped into incredibly stomach-turning intense scenes. The serial killer liked to toture his victims and the movie happily showed us a few of these scenes. Overall, glad I went because we have had a lot to talk about afterwards, but it was not a hollywood depiction of a serial killer. Hollywood really glamorizes it and focuses on the psychology and charisma of that type of killer. In this show it felt like the protagonist, a young kid who gets sucked into helping the killer, has no hope of escaping from the beginning. I would not recommend the movie to anyone I know. Reading about the serial killer would be much more informative than watching an actor rip out someone's toenails and kill his own dog. Look up the show, read about the real events, skip the movie.

With these happy thoughts, I'll talk to you again next week!

More than a Hiccup

Hey, quick update.

I may not update the blog for another week because our internet is down. Our agency/landlord (who we get our internet through) just now informed us that we have only 60 GB a week of data after we complained to them that our internet was really slow. That small amount between 4 students, all skyping and some studying, is not nearly enough and when we bought it there was no mention of GB limit so we thought we were getting unlimited.

We had inquired about our slow internet, but didn't get a reply for a few days so we tried restarting our modem which now won't let us on at all and asks for our username and password, which I assume the landlord has. So we have no internet at all at our house right now. Hopefully out landlord will get us back to the limping internet so I can check emails from home again.

They are working with us and negotiations are on going but it looks like whatever we decide we are gonna be without decent internet for a while so I won't be posting pics or updating until its all sorted out. You can always send me emails over this rough patch.

It's my Birthday

As you may realize from the title, it was my birthday this week. I was told by various members of my screenwriting gang to plan to do something on my birthday, my choice. I apparently didn't have a choice about planning something. I considered a few options and decided on laser tag. Bowling we had done before, ice skating times weren't too convenient, and while paintball sounded awesome, it also sounded painful. So, I found a laser tag site, booked ahead, and we tried it out.

 

 

I was part of the red team and we were REALLY bad. First game it was about 100 R - 600 G. Well, half my teammates didn't know we were suppose to go after the other team's base for big points. We took one of green team's players and played again. I thought I was doing better at least but when the game was over it was 40 R - 640 G....By myself I had thousands of points so I really don't understand the scoring system. Does the final team score only count hits on the base? We decided that the British hate red and the game was stacked against us :O

 

 

Afterwards we went out for dinner and I had fish and chips for the first time. It was very good and I plan to have again, probably quite often.

 

 

This week also marked our first day back at school! We've split us up into two group and each week we will read half the group's progress on their script. My script was one of those. I was feeling pretty good about it. I knew I had some issues in my script but was thinking it just needed some ironing, but after hearing from my teacher and thinking about it all this week it feels like the whole story needs a major rewrite. It'll be tough, especially because I haven't sat down and written any more on it this week, but I think the changes will be for the better in the long run.

 

 

Here are a few pictures of the campuses. Our classes are held at MediaCityUK.

 



This is the lobby where we all met up at the beginning of the day. There was this horrifying video playing on the screen back there, over and over again about the miracle of birth. We stayed there though because we were meeting our teachers down there and we didn't have a classroom assigned yet. I was sitting in one of the chairs facing the screen and when it came time to start class we were all relieved.

 

Here's one of the upper level rooms. The furniture is all clean lines and modern as seen here. The stairways are cool and have large colored glass panes as barriers. Each floor has a different color glass so the building feels kinda whimsical in that sense rather than simply practical.

This is the view from the bus stop on our way home. It was raining when we left so the picture quality is just so-so.

 

I also visted the main Salford campus. This was the view across from that bus stop :)

University of Salford is in the middle of a park with a river. I thought it looked nice (I mean, hello, there are plants that's a miracle in itself) but the other students were not impressed. We are all glad we chose to live in Fallowfield rather than on campus. I will admit that Platt Fields by our house is a greener park.

 

 

Well. That's the main stuff for this week. Today we are going to the city center to check out Manchester's Chinese New Year celebrations. It should be fun!

The American Mexican

Sometimes I wonder, myself, if New Mexico is a state :) Started off this week with REAL cooking.

 

See? Look at that, actual chicken meat there. I had to cut and cook it myself. Alone. Plus the veggies there had to be chopped. This was a big step, and I chose to do it with some good old americanized mexican food. The mexican food section at the local grocery store here is a lot smaller than in Finland which I think is kinda odd. Indian cuisine is much more popular here while I didn't see much of that in Finland (of course I wasn't looking for it either).

I found these two boxed sets of Old El Paso fajitas and enchiladas so I grabbed those right off the shelves along with hot sauce and guacamole. With my staples collected (I grabbed a bag of chips first thing walking into the grocery store) I felt ready to face the week.

I get home and read the box. I need chicken, an onion, and two bell peppers as well as the box. Okay...

I went back to the store (only 2-3 minutes walk) and picked up these items. I sorta balked at the chicken. Raw meat...eww. But I remembered the beautiful picture on the box and bought the chicken. The box was helpful and told me that I'd need vegetable oil to cook the chicken in so I grabbed some of that too. It even specified what color of peppers I should get, but I just grabbed a pack of three. It was colorful and pretty.

Home again and hungry. I tackle the chicken first. It said to cut the chicken into strips. Yeah...I cut it into chicken chunks. If they looked bite sized that was good enough. After having to handle the raw meat to chop it, the rest was easy. The box said to heat up the tortillas in the microwave but I heated up in a skillet with butter. Much better.

 

I used a stove and everything.

 

Doesn't that look good? I know you wish you could try some of my amazing box-direction fajitas.

 

Oh look at that, leftovers! They didn't last long either and were still good reheated. I cooked the other box with one of my roomates who is vegetarian. We just winged the ingredients, threw in some stuff to substitute the chicken the enchiladas wanted. They turned out pretty good. I still have tortillas left over for quesadillas now :)

I've been thinking about the fact that over here I appear to be half Mexican because A) I'm from "New Mexico" which is often confused as Mexico, and B) I eat a lot of mexican food. For now I look pretty white but if I get a tan this summer people will no longer believe I'm American. I visited a small baptist church that is five minutes from my house. I was complimented on my excellent english and asked if I was raised bilingual. I was really confused at first then realized it was the "I'm from New Mexico" thing going on. I'll seriously have to skip those 7 years of my life and just tell people I'm from Texas. For the last 7 years I've lived in the desert in the middle of nowhere, no state. Then I can be the "weird girl from Texas" rather than "that sweet little Mexican" >.< Good times.

Just to be clear, I'm not raging about the confusion. I think it's pretty funny to be mistaken for being Hispanic with excellent english. It is a little sad though when southern US is mistaken for a whole other country.

Now that I have amazed and inspired you with my multi-cultural cooking, I'll tell you what I had for dinner tonight. I went to a pub with a roommate and we had traditional Sunday roast. I ordered the chicken roast with a brownie for desert. The brownie was AMAZING. The roast was pretty good, the bread and veggies the best part. Would still opt for Tex-mex any day :D