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!