Eat, Dance...Kitty!

When I started the blog, my intent was just to let friends and family know that I am still alive, and share a few stories with everyone so I don't repeat things over and over again over Skype or email. At the beginning of this program I imagined I would be talking a lot about films, traveling, and writing. While I do talk about those to some extent, I've noticed that I talk a lot about food on here. Is this because I'm hungry when I write my blog posts, because I miss good old home cooked meals, or that I just always have a camera around when I cook so it gives me something to write about...Probably a bit of everything. I do like to photograph my cooking experiments though because, a) it's always a big undertaking and whatever time the online recipe says it will take, I double that. b) If I don't photograph my home cooked meals no one will believe that I'm actually cooking!

As you may have guessed, I did some cooking this week.

 

Garlic toast and stuffed bell peppers. The garlic toast was really good and was nice and simple. The stuffed bell peppers are another story. They took me nearly 2 hrs to make. Simply Recipes estimated 1 hr, most of that being oven cooking time. Not so much! Now that I've done it once I'll be much faster next time though. They turned out okay, but not for the amount of time it took to make them.

 

Went with another ceilidh with friends this weekend. It was a 45 minute trip to get there because we were taking the bus, but we wandered around a bit and found Bridgewater Canal. It was a really beautiful area, I don't know the name of the cemetery that were beside but it was very impressive.

Another shot of the cemetery.

 

After the ceilidh we took the metro home, because the bus we needed doesn't run that late. Now I have ridden the Manchester Metro!

 

 

Nothing else big to share about this week, but I will leave you with some pictures of cats I saw on Saturday.

 

The expression on this one reminds me of Juliet. Seemed a bit annoyed that I stopped to take pictures of him.



A Taste of Manchester

Well, due to teachers not feeling well, class was canceled this week. Left my classmates and I with time to go do stuff in Manchester AND I even took my camera with me this time.

 

Friday night we went to a Ludovico Einaudi concert. He is an Italian pianist and the concert was beautiful. Ludovico played on the piano you see on the stage there, and was accompanied by a small orchestra made up of some violins, cellos, violas, as well as a variety of other instruments as required (percussion, electronic, acoustic guitar, etc.) His music is amazing and I encourage you guys to check him out!

 

On Saturday I went with some friends to one of Manchester's art galleries. I believe this is the main one, because it's right there in the city center.



 

This was an interesting one. The fabric is covered in what I think are pins. Was interesting and warranted a few close inspections, but I couldn't get a good picture of the details.

 

A visit to a museum or art gallery wouldn't be complete without a few drawings! This painting caught my eye. There is so much expression in the poses of the animals! With my sketch I was just trying to mimic the motion and poses of the figures.

This painting is entitled "Ophelia" The word on the frame are a quote from Hamlet, describing Ophelia's suicide. I was drawn to this one more for the colors and the mood the colors envoke for the figure. I didn't try to copy the colors in my version, just playing around with sketching with that drawing. I may go back and try a more detailed copy at some point though.



 

After the museum we went to one of my friend's favorite café hang outs, a place called Home Sweet Home. I ordered the cheesecake as seen above. They have a different flavored cheesecake everyday. That day it was Reese's and Oreo. It was REALLY good.

They serve the cheesecake in this jar. It is amazing cheesecake but very sweet stuff and I found I couldn't finish the whole thing as much as I wanted too. Perfect for sharing though :D

Their fries are also excellent. My friend tells me their burgers are equally excellent but we weren't that hungry at the time. The French fries remind me of the Cajun style fries at Five Guys. Very yummy and they give you the sauce on the side there which was really good and very spicy. I will definitely be going back here :)

Time to Get Back to Work

The Easter break is winding up. This week I did something to my wrist so it hurt to type so once again, no homework got done. Although the limited use of my right hand made it for a little bit boring, quiet week (not only could I not type but it hurt to play computer games or draw) that only slowed me down on Tuesday and Wednesday.

My temp job at the library is officially over, but my boss recommended me to another librarian who works in a different section so I could keep working for them. After recommending me, my boss realized that he was going to need more temps over the summer so they have invited me to work some more in June and he and the librarian he had recommended me to are now fighting over who gets us temps that are already mostly trained :) It's a nice problem to have. Over this temp position I have only worked 60 hours, but on my last day I took a half day off because my boss informed me that I was ENTITLED to a half day off. In all the various part-time jobs I have worked, I have never had paid vacation time before. I thought it was the most adorable thing. I'm hired to work 60 hours and they pay me vacation time to not work for about 4 hours of them. Before coming I had noticed that British people seem to take a lot of vacations because in trying to get all my paperwork done every other week or so I'd get automatic email replies from people telling me that they had gone off on vacation, in the middle of me trying to sort things out. This phenomenon of people constantly going on vacation has continued as I try to do paperwork now that I'm here, but I can now also take off random vacation time. I think Britain is just adorable.

Since I am avoiding my homework, I have undertaken a nice little side art project. I'm going to take my ugly cracked and spotted walls in my room...

And I will cover them with drawings. My goal is to eventually have so many little drawings they all overlap and it becomes a kind of temporary wall collage. I tend to like my drawings for about a week or two, and then the flaws start to become all I can see. With this collage method, once I get tired of a drawing I just rip off the wall and put something new up. I've got a small start...

 

Covering the wall is going to take a while, but it's gonna be fun :) So far I've just done charcoal and pencil drawings with just a hint of color ink. I was going to do a bit color, but discovered that I had neglected to pack my ink palette, so I'm going to have to go to the art store and pick up a cheap replacement before I get too serious about inking. Here is the most recent charcoal and pencil drawing I did...

 

I'm using ref pictures from DA right now which is why my drawings are half decent ;) You'll be able to tell a distinct difference when I get bored with this practice work and decide to branch out and draw from memory. The quality goes down significantly. I think my panda actually turned out pretty cute.

The other big adventure for this week was an attempt at making etouffee.

 

I did a good bit of research for this actually, but didn't find a recipe that clearly said - this is like Yat's spinach and mushroom etouffee - so I took a shrimp etouffee recipe and played around with it. It wanted me to use a fish stock, but I substituted that with cream of mushroom soup instead and every recipe had a different list of spices and I didn't want to buy everything for this one recipe, so I bought a blend that had several of the spices recommended, plus paprika. The spice part was good. I think it needs more cream of mushroom and less of the frozen prawns. I'm fairly confident in my experimentally abilities now though so I will try jumping into adding spinach to the sauce next time and just perfecting my Yat's etouffee copy.
 

This was the finally result. Not Yat's, but still good. I will keep working on it, maybe trying a new version every other week or so...depending how much I continue to crave spicy meals (so, pretty often).

Easter Break Continues

I didn't do too much this week, and I again have no pictures for you. I just haven't been taking my camera with me anywhere. This week I spent three days trying to write my script, and I wrote 4 sentences. It's not going very well. I'm not close to the deadline though, so once that begins looming I'll probably get serious and write something in a rush. It may be the only way for me to power through the ending. I don't like endings.

On a happier note, I went to see Wreck-It Ralph this week. Very cute, light-hearted and exactly what I wanted and what I expected. I really like animations. I should watch more of them.

I worked this week at the library and next week will be my last week. I'm sad to see it end. I really enjoy working, though this job isn't particularly challenging. The librarians have all been nice as well as my fellow temps. I've been doing some manual shelf checking (not one of my favorite tasks). Last time, I was going through the art book sections and they have so many cool books, I forget that there is more in a library than the fiction section :) I may have to spend my free-time there as well as my work time.

Saturday was one of the nicest days here in Manchester so far. The temperature was still low, but the sun was out so it didn't feel cold. I went to the Holi Festival with friends and while I did not participate in the color throwing I enjoyed my spectator role and my friend and I found a bench to sit on and soak up some sun. It was a good day.

In an effort to avoid my script I have been in a sketching mood and am thinking of decorating my walls with some art. Only when my room is decorated will I again be able to write ;) Or I could just go to a café or somewhere else...which is more likely?

On this day, the first of...

Well there was a tornado here in Manchester this week. We don't have a basement and all the rooms downstairs have windows so we were very unprepared for this new bit of British weather. The British people must be use to these random tornados though because people were still out on their bicycles. We know this because one lady went past our front window riding her bike. She even waved at us before she was blown down the street. Afterwards we went outside to find our house miraculously undamaged and the world seemed full of bright colors after the storm.

An understandable side effect of the tornado is that it wrecked havoc on the postal service. I had a package to send but I had to go to three different post offices in Manchester to find one willing to take the package. First one was closed. I found another post office. That one couldn't get the machine to read the address on the envelope so they told me to try somewhere else. It was getting kinda late in the day by that time so after I had found a new envelope and carefully rewritten the address I raced to yet another post office. This one was working but it also had quite a line. I paid for the Owl-fast service and breathed a sigh of relief.

When I got home my roommates had cleaned up the yard and a whole bunch of brave spring flowers that had been braving the freakishly cold Manchester spring had ended up in our yard after the tornado. We separated out the flowers from the trash and decided to do some decorating. Our house is...kinda boring so being artistic types we decided to make some temporary wall art. We hot-glued some branches into a frame, hung it on the wall then basically just tried to fill up the frame with flowers, using the hot-glue as needed. Don't worry, the branches were really light so we didn't have to use nails on the walls, just some of that blue tacky stuff. I think it turned out really nice.

Hmmm, the other thing of interest I found out about is the Easter phoenix. Most people know about the Easter bunny of course, but I found out that he has a lesser known cousin (distant cousin) the Easter phoenix who symbolizes rebirth. I thought this sounded really cool and wondered why I hadn't heard about him before, but when I thought about it...it makes sense. The Easter bunny is a cute round fuzz ball with awkwardly large teeth. A cuddly vegetarian that brings you candy and is followed by a plethora of baby animals. Compare this to the Easter Phoenix who spend the week before Easter moping and molting, not a picture that makes you say "Awww". Then on Easter he bursts into flames, screaming in agony another not so kid-friendly image. Afterwards he is reborn in the ashes as an egg. The egg bit the Easter bunny adopts so his cousin doesn't feel too left out. Really nice of him. This is the Easter egg I had found when someone was kind enough to tell me this story...

Remember, the Easter phoenix. He's not as cuddly but don't give all your love to the Easter bunny!

That's about all I have to say for this week's happenings. Happy April Fools everyone!