One last wishlist

As you might have noticed this blog is no longer active due to me having moved back to Finland. There are other ways to see I'm alive, for example through my art site: drawinglobster.tumblr.com

Anyway, a certain someone has been nagging for a wishlist for christmas. As they are fun to make and have been rather popular I've decided to make a final example (unless I make one next year again, turning this into a nice things I want blog).


So, I've been really really good this year again, and would love to have (in no particular order):

Lagavulin 16y 
(whiskey)

Chambord

(liquor)

Cheese

(preferably the non-moldy kind)

Fancy Olives

(I especially like these small dark ones)

 

Chorizo

(or salami, or something similar)

Digital Kitchen Scale

(flat and handy)

 

Whetstone 

(for kitchen knives)

 

Fazerin Sinivalkoinen

(chocolate)

Are you sensing a pattern here? Maybe i should throw in a couple that aren't food related at the end:

Moneys

(It's surprisingly useful)

  

Body Scrub

(I might be just a teensy bit interested in this raspberry one)

((that home made body scrub I got last year was absolutely dandy as well. . .))

 

 

Nausicaa Box Set

(comic books)

Dragon Age: Inquisition

(PC-game)

Have a good one!

Magic

Busybusybusy, have a beautiful MS Paint drawing of me!

I graduated in a Harry Potter outfit, saw Billy Elliot the musical, and saw Conchita Wurst live in London. I have also been eating extremely well lately, and paying very little to do that. Who would have known. Now, however, we are desperately trying to eat everything left in the house. Although we are taking some unopened packets to a food bank, and Finnish Friend (turned housemate ages ago) even took about 1kg of flour to a friend, there will probably be something small and silly left, like a couple of handfuls of rice and a similar amount of oatmeal, oh, and half a kilo of salt, probably. We have loads of salt left.

ANYWAY! Most importantly, I got accepted to the animation course at Turku AMK, so that's what I'm officially going to do this autumn!

Graduation

I'm terribly bad at updating it seems. Tomorrow we are going up to London as our graduation ceremony is fairly early the next morning.

In other news we had our degree show exhibition, and I actually won a price, which is a solo exhibition at The Brewery Tap (an ex pub turned art gallery) in Folkestone, sometime in february/march next year. It seems I'm not leaving England for a very long time yet, it seems.

I've also been to Finland for a couple of rounds in order to attend a couple of entrance exams, one for English at ÅA, the other for Animation at Turun AMK. I should get the results for animation in a little more than a week (probably around the time I move back, which is the 3rd of July), English a little later.

My sister arrived safely in Canterbury today, and she'll represent my family at the graduation ceremony on Wednesday (and hopefully take loads of pictures)!

Princess

Long time no write, once again. Since I wrote last time I've even been to Finland and back for Easter break. During the break we got the results for the dissertations, and I was quite happy to learn I got an A+, which is the second best grade there is (but A++ is considered almost mythical in its rarity).

Yesterday we celebrated my birthday with some home baked Super Princess Cake  by yours truly. It's super because it has lemon curd in addition to the regular filling, as well as nifty light blue decorations on top of the green marzipan in order to hide the cracks in the green make it super extra cool. To make it extra super for a real super princess like myself I even made the rose multi coloured, ha!

In other news the final crunch is going on at uni, since our very last deadline ever (at this course) is on Friday next week. I'll try getting my work completed this week so that I can focus on setting it up next week. Quite exciting indeed.

I'll be coming to Finland again on the 15th of May.

Foodblog

 There's been whey too little food blogging, don't you think?

'

 How cheesy, I know.

Ta-daa!

The meaning of this is that I'm currently into making fresh cheese, and then using the whey (vassla/ hera for you Finns) to make cold rise bread. They make for a very delicious breakfast combination, I can tell you. I have also made jelly. It was supposed to become winegums, but it turned into jelly instead. I'm too lazy to take a photo right now, but a cut piece of it looks almost exactly like this, except 348 times prettier, especially when the sun shines through it.

Speaking of the sun, the weather has been exceptionally sunny and summery, which has been nice, as it feels as if this country is drying up slowly, until the regular damp gloom ensues. One thing that has stayed in our damp entry room for too long is my winter coat, as it had some cozy colonies of mold growing on it. They seem to have perished rather expectedly when I threw it into the washing machine. The mold is one thing I won't miss when I move away.

Drawing Lobster

This is how exciting life in England can be when you're not paying attention to your own lunch.

In other news I've been ill and recovered since I wrote last time, just a fever, but an oddly tough one as it went on for a little over a week, although it never got very dramatic in my case. About halfway through the illness I got weird sniffles, my nose didn't get particularly blocked, and wasn't terribly runny either, but was kind of itchy and irritated all the time. It took me a couple of days to realize that the symptoms were identical to the allergic symptoms I get later in spring, and lo and behold, they went away with allergy medicine. It isn't that strange I guess, although the weather has been terrible the temperatures have been mild, so loads of trees are already blooming and growing leaves. I sincerely hope it really is the trees and not that I have developed sensitivity to mold. Hmm.


Here is a link to some animations I've drawn here at uni.


As you might devise from the link, I have started collecting my stuff on yet another website, Drawing Lobster. I'm building it with the intention of it being my sort of main, artistic showcase website for a forseeable future. There isn't very much on there yet, so the index isn't working in an ideal way yet, as some of the sections remain empty at the moment. Later on I'll put a CV and portfolio on the website as well. So, now there is another way to keep up with what I'm doing.

Runeberg!

As you may derive from the picture below I have been meaning to write for a while. I baked some Runeberg tarts for 5th of February:

They barely existed for 24 hours.

We have had guests, Finnish Friend had invited an Austrian friend she had met during her stay in Spain over. We invited some friends living in London over for a superduper tapas evening, featuring tortilla de patata, paella with mussels, ensalada rusa, marinated olives, marinated feta (sorry, Greek style salad cheese), tzatziki, houmous, parma ham, chorizo, grana padano and manchego cheeses, krupuk, fruit, flan de huevo, cinnamon buns, sangria and beer! I probably forgot some things, the table was absolutely full of food. I can tell you that we had the best breakfast for ages the following day.

On sunday we visited Whitstable to try some oysters. This was my first one (I had a chance in Nice in back in 2004 or something, but I wasn't brave enough) ever, and I actually liked it a lot. We bought our oysters straight at the harbour, we were served by a nice old man who told us he had been in the oyster business for 50 years. He was indeed very deft with the oyster knife. The oyster tasted fresh and had a much firmer texture than I had anticipated.

We have luckily not (yet) been severely affected by the floods and storms here in England, although Canterbury now has an increased number of ponds and small lakes here and there.

Take care y'all.

Dissertation Accomplished!

 This was me at approximately 6:20 a.m. on Friday morning.

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This was me at approximately 15:57 p.m. on Friday afternoon.

I would have written sooner, but I was very busy with enjoying my new freedom. While waiting for the dissertations to get bound me and Roomie went downtown to do important stuff, such as buying me a recipe folder, going to the library and borrow comics, a book on sausages and a book on cheeses. Most importantly, we bought cake! After walking back to uni and submitting the dissertations we went via the grocery store and bought lemonade and fresh live mussels (£2.80/kg was quite decent I'd say), and ate a really delicious mussel soup for dinner. I had never cooked live mussels before, and big thanks to Roomie and Longhaired Roomie for their help with cleaning them (such a time consuming hassle, but well worth it, I'd say). I'll definitely cook mussels again sometime, apparently they seem to be in season now. It seems to have been a good bag overall, I don't know about the others but I discarded three mussels in total, and there were loads and loads.

(Thanks to Roomie for the photos!)

 Cleaning in progress. . .

 

 How beautiful!

 Mmm-m-mmm!

Ooh la la! Fresh coriander on top, aww yeah!

Other than that I have mostly been playing games, reading books, eating chocolate and filling my recipe folder neatly. Best weekend ever! We also had pizza yesterday! And brown sausage sauce today! Woohooo!

And the deadline isn't until 12 at noon tomorrow, but I don't even have to go to uni at all. I could just lie in bed all morning and eat chocolate or something. The world is in my palm. All it took was 9874 words of academic English.

Deadlines, deadlines

Soon, we have been back in England for a week. The trip went well, I began feeling better on the plane, after eating my provisions (I managed to get another bout of stomach flu the day before the flight). Yesterday we had a deadline for the studio unit, so life feels much better now, although there isn't terribly much time to feel smug, as the deadline for the big bad, the dissertation, is approaching quickly. Luckily I have pretty much enough words, my work is going to be about rewriting parts and polishing it until it shines brightly like a bautiful star. Or a piece of illegibly academic writing.

Happy holidays!

Hyvää Joulua, God Jul, Merry Christmas! Hope you all have a good one, whatever you celebrate and in whichever language you do so.

UWAA!

Oh wow, time really flies, doesn't it!?

Flying back to Finland TOMORROW! We have to wake up a little before 5 a.m. so I'll be going to sleep pretty much now. I'm switching to my Finnish SIM-card as well.

The huge plus is that we are taking a cab to the airport, as it's so early in the morning that a cab actually proved cheaper than train tickets for four people.


See you soon (if you're in Finland)

I have been a very nice girl. . .

The last week has been rather eventful!

Bad things:

- Our oven had a partial breakdown

- Our boiler had a full-scale breakdown (no hot water!)

Good things:

- I managed to repair my other bicycle brake myself (100 Big Girl points, right?)

- The oven got fixed.

- The boiler got fixed.

- We had tortilla today

- We had an Australian guest over yesterday

Time flies, it would seem it's time for the Wish List again! Please note that I gladly accept other types of chocolate than the ones listed here, such as Fazer's Blue, Tupla, Dumle, Toffifee and so on.

The List



Money
Rahaa  
pengar 

Always appreciated.


...

Let's wish for something really girly for once:



Body Scrub
Vartalokuorinta

I just really kind of like it, and I would probably never buy it myself.




Okay, back to normal:




The Elder Scrolls: Anthology

 

Look at all these games! And there are even maps included!
I would never need to play anything else again, not for, like, 500 hours at least!





Angel Chocolate Bars
Enkelisuklaapatukoita
Änglachokladstänger

Mmmm.






Cloetta Center Toffee (original)

 Oh, yum yum yum!



Punch-rolls, or just green marzipan (Sallinen)
Punssirullia, tai ihan vain vihreää marsipaania (Sallinen)
Dammsugarbakelser, eller helt bara grön marsipan (Sallinen)





Naminami.



Arrack
Arrakki
Arrak

For baking (mostly, ahem)





Glögg-concentrate
Glögitiiviste
Glöggkoncentrat

Glugluglug.




Recipe Journal
Reseptivihko/kirja
Recepthäfte/bok










Should have a combination of pages to write in and plastic pockets to
hold cut-out recipes. Super plus if it has different sections for starters,
soups, main meals, snacks, desserts and so on.




Who Cooked The Last Supper?
by
Rosalind Miles


Seems like a funny and interesting book.


Dough
Fyffee
Stålar

Can hardly have too much.

Only two weeks until I arrive, be prepared!

Circular Heating Element.

Another chapter in the "everything breaks down in our final year in this house" story. Apparently the circular heating element at the back of our fan-assisted oven has decided to suddenly stop working. The good news are that the grill element still works, so the oven is not completely useless, and that the reparation shouldn't be too expensive, if it is indeed only the element, and not some strange electrical fault. We noticed this yesterday when we made lasagne, and put it into the supposedly pre-heated oven only to find it cold, although the light was on and the fan was blowing merrily away. 

The next tenants will find themselves in a truly pristine house, at least when it comes to all kinds of appliances, we'll eventually have them all broken and switched to new ones before our time is out.

In other news it is steadily getting colder, someone told me they heard a long time cold scare prognosis of this winter going to be one of the worst in all time British history, with temperatures possibly plummeting below -25ºC. Hopefully it won't happen, for the sake of everyone living in these poorly insulated houses, and England will simply cease to function.

A couple colder days would be nice though, since the freezer really needs defrosting. It builds up frost really fast, due to the outrageous indoor humidity.

Announcement

This beautiful MS Paint still life portrays an earring that seems to have been lost here by one of our guests last spring. Does anyone recognize it?

In other news the dissertation draft deadline is on monday, so this weekend seems to be destined to be filled with writing. Today, however, this dreariness is considerably lightened up by the plan of preparing and eating sushi. We actually bought a tiny piece of fresh salmon to use in it. Wow-ow!

Mera Camera

I've actually been spending some time in the darkroom lately, here are some pictures from a couple weeks back:

Bugs on the water.

Roomie in the woods.

This is what the fifth tenant looks like.

As you can see I took a bite of the big one on the left.

 

This is what happens to a light sensitive paper when you 

mess up and it gets a little too much of not-pitch-black

It has been a lot of fun.

The weather is getting colder and colder. We are approaching "triple sweater plus leggings under your trousers, scarf, and a cap on your head" indoor temperatures. Have I mentioned that hot water bottles are the best thing ever?