Old Mold.

Mmmm, there is some tuna lasagne in the oven right now, can't wait for it to be ready to eat. Here's a goodie from last week - boeuf bourguignon, or beef burgundy.

 You can't go wrong with red wine and cooking.

I had found a HALF PRICE slab of beef in the supermarket a couple of weeks back, some braising, beef stock red wine, onions and mushrooms and hours and hours of cooking in the oven (I even made it one day in advance so it would have time to get really juicy before eating) turns into a really nice change in an otherwise very vegetable heavy diet. To be fair we have been eating many extra nice things lately, there has been pizza, chicken soup (thanks, Roomie), spinach crêpes (thanks Longhaired roomie and Finnish Friend) , vegetable pie (thanks again, Longhaired roomie) and wiener sauce (knackorvssås/nakkikastike). The vegetable soups, sauces and woks inbetween haven't been bad either, especially yesterday when we had some chicken dumplings with the wok, oh yeah!!

In other news Roomie vacuumed the house today, and apparently everything can get moldy in England:

 See those light blotches there?

The hard rubber soles of my slippers can apparently get infected. Granted, they had been lying around for two weeks maybe, since we're in a warmer period right now, but I mean come on! On the other hand, the rubber isolation on the windows get moldy all the time, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

England's rampant humidity never ceases to amaze me, I guess.

Veni Vidi Vici

Unflinching, I ventured into the beast's maw, and emerged victorious. Has anyone of you went to IKEA, and only bought one single thing  (keeping to the shopping list in a strict fashion also counts)? I got my worklamp returned and they gave me a voucher, which I used to buy another lamp (which sadly was a couple pounds more expensive than my old one, but it's blue so it's all right). It was all quite hassle-free in the end.

As a bonus I got to see Croydon! It looked like this:

 Resembles an English city, yes?

The old (150 years) department store in the area, Allders was closing for good. It had only six days to go, and was mostly empty already, but I found this:

 Fluffy, colourful textiles! Oh wow!

And that pretty much made my day (: Imagine what I can do with them! Everything is possible.

Roomie had taken care of herself all right while I was gone, she even made a new friend:

Have you ever seen such a fat and green locust or whatever it's called in English. (Grasshopper?)

Tomorrow we'll take the early train to Paris, so au revoir for a little while!

Poachers!

 After the museum visit in London ages ago I tried to draw coelacanths from memory. The finished painting below has a more correct anatomy.

 

Anyway, long time no blog. Been really really lazy. I'm back in Finland now, and there's no guarantees for any frequency in blogging. There's a couple of projects going on for me over the summer:

- thoroughly go through all the stuff and clean my old room at mom's place - it looks like a warzone. Really.

- get a job for the summer (in order to get money to pay rent during summer, and at least half of the tuition 

fee for next year would be ideal). I have an interview on Friday, wish me luck.

- watch Game of Thrones season 2

- create some sort of a script for my forest comic - helps me plan the length of the thing a little.

- creating a website would be nifty and helpful for the future

- maybe have another exhibition

- paint and draw

Well, that starts to look like enough things on the list for now. 

Here's some photos from our trip to a friend's place. First, we saw a bit of Sandwich, hometown of Lord Sandwich who invented the sandwich, since he enjoyed gambling and playing poker, so he wanted something he could eat with one hand, so he wouldn't need to interrupt his game whilst eating.

 

 

 

 It's not the size of the garden, it's what you manage to accomplish with what you got.

At the friend's place, we ate a really really nice lunch. The house was beautiful, and it was situated in the idyllic beauty of the English countryside. There were also dogs, and hens! Here's photographic evidence:

 

 

 

  Ta-daa!

 

And see, I managed to hold one without anyone 

freaking out or getting hurt in the situation!

 

Took a stroll and saw some baa baas.

We also got extremely fresh eggs with us as a parting gift. Our host recommended poaching them (boiling without the shell), and since we'd never tried it me and Roomie had to give it a shot:

 

 

At this point we were slightly surprised, because in the cookbook we looked up instructions from the poached eggs looked more like fried eggs,since the egg whites had spread, while our superfresh eggskept their shape.  When we tried with eggs from the supermarket theyspread out like in the book. Conclusion - freshness matters in poaching.

 

It was actually quite different from regular boiled eggs. The egg white had a wonderful, soft consistency. I really recommend trying - and try to get really fresh eggs too. It was very nice with regular eggs too, but the superfresh ones were amazing!


I think I have to eat some for lunch now. . .

Visitors

A certain fellow student took me and a couple more classmates on a trip to collect driftwood. We didn't find that much driftwood, but a couple of pieces of fossilized wood were found, and I myself picked half a tonne of shells and pieces of them. I also found a funny looking lead-weight used for fishing. It looked like a lunar module... or a virus. Also got treated with soup and sponge, super nice!

Tomorrow Roomie's mother and sister come visiting, we might go to London on Saturday. My goal for that trip is to buy Jelly Beans.


Oh yeah, baked more mazarines today! Or well, Roomie did most of the work, really.

Strange Behaviour

Watch out for giggling packs of around 11 year old sugarhigh little girls here in the UK. They're up to no good. Just as I was going to enter Tesco one individual from such a pack walked up to me and groped my behind just like that. My reflexes seem to work, because I automatically grabbed her hand, but I was in such a state of shock that I just kept walking and threw the hand away after a moment. The fact that I grabbed the hand in the first place resulted in extremely frantic and nervous giggling from the groper and her pack. I was halfway into the supermarket before I even realized what had happened.

In retrospective, it would have been interesting to see how they would've reacted if I'd revealed that I was a girl (short hair and baggy clothing equals boy, as we all know. Especially everyone in the women's restroom).

In short:

What the fwup?


I also created an animation today. I'll post it on the blog after I've made some final tweaks to it. It's a proper 2D animation on paper. I drew for about two hours and managed to get five seconds of animation together.