St Patrick's day!

So this week I have been working hard, again, but found time to have fun as well. I went to two ceilidhs. They had several this week because of the St. Patrick's Day Festival. My friends also had a house party on Saturday after which we went to a club. This is the second club I have ever been to and I am still not impressed. On the plus side, the music in this one was better. I didn't stay long as their is no point in sitting and watching a crowd of people dancing in a loud smoky room as you try to breathe as little of the smoke as possible and avoid looking at the seizure inducing lights...Clubs are not from me. I can now say I have tried multiple clubs so the first one for sure wasn't a fluke and I am not motivated to try another.

The ceilidhs, on the other hand, are amazing. They are a lot of fun and I am looking forward to finding more to go to!

On St. Patrick's day I went with my housemates and we went to see the St. Patrick's Day Parade. Mmm, I've seen better and I've seen worse. The cars and floats were okay but the crowd (at least where we were standing) was fairly unenthusiastic. No cheering and the people on the floats weren't smiling anymore by the time they got to us so it was not a very cheery parade. Seemed odd to me. The bagpipe players were good though, probably my favorite parts of the parade.

Here's some pics!

Zombies in Your Kitchen Sink

Whew. I worked a lot this week. Working consisted of sitting in front of my laptop drawing a blank most of the time. I managed to achieve my goal of finishing my homework by Saturday, sorta. I finished before I went to bed Saturday but technically it was 12:30 am Sunday. I'm still counting it as a win though!

For fun this week I went to a special pre-screening of the new tv show called In the Flesh that is coming out on BBC 3. When the British people I met have heard this, their reaction is "Oh. BBC 3." Further inquiries reveal that BBC 3 is known to be the cheap channel, low budget. I didn't have this prejudice going into the show so that didn't bother me :)

I enjoyed the show. It is about a rehabilitated zombie who returns to his home having to deal with the fact that he killed people as well as living in a town of zombie haters and family drama. It is not your typical zombie movie, not a lot of blood and guts (though there is a bit). In the Q&A session the writer and director both liked to describe the show as a kitchen sink drama. This means its kinda slow paced and the tension hovers just under the surface. A lot of the time kitchen sink dramas move too slowly for me, but the zombie level of complication gives me something to stay interested in while the family and societal dramas play out. It comes out March 17th (I think) and I plan on watching more. We got to see the pilot episode. It is an hour long episode, and only three episodes.

I meant to go out and see an Irish music gig this weekend. The Manchester Irish Festival started on Friday and they are doing a whole lot of Irish activities to celebrate St. Patrick's day, for a whole week. I didn't make it to the one I original looked at but there are a lot to choose from so this week hopefully I will make it to at least one!

I have been bad about taking pictures. Here is just a few so that I leave you with something.

I visited a friend's house to write and saw this magpie in their backyard. I had to take some pictures because one of my dragon characters in my current script is named Magpie. Her scales are a black and white pattern like a magpie's. So imagine this cute little bird as a dragon but still as captivated by shiny things :)

When I'm not writing at home or at a friends house we like to go to cafes to write. This is one we often go to, Fuel. This is the upstairs which is very cold. Could be sitting outside, except we have wall plugs for our laptops :) We sit downstairs when it's not full but that doesn't always work out.

Mmm, peanut butter cookies I made. Brain food for writing!

Work and Play

Yo,

Today was a productive week. I wrote out my pitch on Wednesday so I had time to do fun things guilt free this week. Thursday I dragged one of my friends out to play tennis at Salford which was an adventure. It's a 45 min - an hour bus ride to get there (it's free to play there, which is why we were going, and we had already paid for week long bus passes). So we arrive and ask the receptionist where to go to play tennis (it was an organized sport from a flyer I was emailed). She gives us a blank look like she had never heard of tennis before. She looks at her fellow worker and that one realizes that we are wanting to go to the free multi-sport event. They point us to a big empty gym and we are told to wait there. Ok. We wait. My friend is all dressed up in work out clothes and she gets out tennis shoes she packed just to play in and we wait. And wait.

We go back to the desk to make sure they haven't forgotten us. Turns out the employee who is suppose to be running it just hasn't shown up for work that day and they hadn't worried about it until now because no one has been showing up for these free events. On the flyer it had said to just show up and make friends. I was really glad I had brought a friend because I would have looked really pathetic showing up to play tennis by myself >.< So we pack up our stuff and head outside, giving up on playing tennis. We are about to turn the corner of the building when one of the staff members run outside and flag us down. This one has access to the equipment and can supervise us (aw, we need supervision just like when we were little!) so we head back in to attempt to play tennis. She takes about 10 minutes to get it set up but we do eventually get to play tennis and we had a pretty good time. Neither of us were very good, but being at the same level made the game fun. I had been picturing a couple of tennis courts and people showing up who had some training, but it was just us in a big empty gym so it didn't matter how far we over shot.

After tennis I went home, took a nap, woke up, ate dinner, then headed out to meet my friends for ballet lessons. Now I have been told before that I look like I would be a good dancer, or that I have posture like a ballerina or other compliments implying that I'd be a good dancer. I've not done any dancing that requires this level of instruction before but I thought this would be my chance to see if I was secretly an undiscovered ballerina talent. Fear not, I have proven conclusively that I am not particularly gifted at ballet. I managed not to fall on my face at any point so I count that as good enough. The ballet was fun and good exercise but I don't think it's going to become an every week thing. Every now and again is probably fine.

Over the weekend I sat down and made myself work out some of the problems with my current dragon script. I feel like I have mentally gotten over the problems that were blocking me before so now I just have to sit down and write out the new scenes. I've made a start, but since the newest draft won't be due utnil the next Tuesday (the 12th) I've got some time to procrastinate yet. I also spent a lot of time baking this weekend. I made more peanut butter cookies, to take to the pastor of the church I'm attending who were nice enough to invite me lunch, and I made blondies for my roomates who are kind enough not to complain when I give all my baked goods away.

A writing update,
I forgot to give credit last time to my wonderful sister who was the inspiration for my new script pitch. It is thanks to her leaving FB that I was thinking about big brother and what it would take to go off grid and led me to deciding on planning my new little conspiracy theory story. In a few months this may go from to thanks to WHHhhhhhyyyyyyy, but in the end it will be worth it and hopefully I'll even enjoy it :D I'm loving it for now at least!

While working on the basic structure for this conspiracy theory movie, I'm still writing my dragon animation script. I am halfway through it. I'm rewriting the first half again, but will be finishing the latest rewrite soon and in the upcoming week I'm writing another thirty pages of it which will put me at about 3/4 through the script. I'm almost there.

As if school wasn't enough, I found out that BBC is accepting script submissions in a talent search. I can send them a script and the ones they like the BBC people will talk to the writers and start building a relationship with the ones they think have talent. The trick is they only open submission at certain times of the year (like now) and you have to be a UK resident to enter so this is something I have to take advantage of while I'm here. I'm really excited about this and I'm thinking I will dust off my Shikrah script (many of you will have read my pilot episode) and with all this new found knowledge I have gained from school I will tear up my pilot episode and rewrite the thing for BBC. They said it is possible if they love it they will send it on to the appropriate department to look over but it is highly unlikely they would buy whatever I send in. This is mostly just a talent search, but this is more opportunity than I have by not sending anything. So while working on my two movie scripts for school I'm also going to be revisiting this old tv show idea of mine. I'm going to be busy these next two weeks.

I didn't take any pictures this week, but this post is pretty full without any photos so I will wrap it up now. I've been talking to more British people and as I'm spell-checking my post I find myself reading it with a British accent which is pretty entertaing. Try it out and I'll talk to y'all again later!

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