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).