Ring-necked Parakeets in a nearby forest

I was going on a walk with my father looking for things to photograph. We went to a tiny forest nearby and came across some parakeets.

Here are some photos:

Making Cornish Pasties

I thought it would be nice to make a new recipe, so I picked up a cookery book that said it had simple recipes in it. One of the first pages that I saw that had a recipe and not just ingredients on it, had mostly different pies. The one that caught my attention was "Cornish pasties". When I saw the title, the first thing I thought was "Difficult", but I read on. It turned out, you don't actually have to make a stew with lots of ingredients and then put them  into home-made pastry dough; you can just use meat, potatoes, onions, salt and pepper and ready made pastry. I decided I had to make the Cornish pasties, so my father said he'd get some ingredients on his way from picking my mother up from East Finchley. While he was gone, I cut some onion up finely (We had that ingredient already) and did the potatoes (We had those already too. Surprise surprise!). For the potatoes, I found out you have to cut them in to small flakes (This is called "Shripping"), so I used a peeler instead of a knife.

My dad came back with the ingredients we didn't have (Pastry and meat) and I cut those up and shaped the pasties. Shaping isn't at all hard. One just rolls out the pastry, uses a bowl as a template to cut around, puts the filling in the middle of a pastry circle and pinches it closed.

When the pasties finally came out the oven (After about forty-five minutes) I tucked in hungrily. I thought they could do with a little more water to moisten them out, but otherwise, I really enjoyed them.

Duolingo

Duolingo is a website for learning languages. There are only a few languages you can learn on duolingo, but you can learn well on it. I joined the website last week because I've started learning French (We're going to the French Alps for Christmas).

Duolingo is similar to the language learning program called "Rosetta Stone". I prefer it though because it doesn't make a horrible sound when you get something wrong, and it has explanations in English. Also, it has a picture of an owl smiling when you get something right, and has words like "Well done".

The website is a little bit like a game because you can unlock lessons and levels. That's also why I like it. So far, I've unlocked five lessons, and I am on level four or five.

When doing a lesson, you start off with four hearts.  Getting a question wrong loses you a heart, and when all the hearts are gone, you have to start again. It is only possible to get up to the next level if you have a certain number of points, and in order to accumulate theses you must to practice lessons. For these there are three hearts, and you can choose whether or not to be timed.

A quick way to get up to the next level is to do a test and get most of the answers correct. There are three chances to do this on each level.

Learning French has been going really well for me lately. I'll be doing more soon!

Bruce Castle Exhibition

Last week I went to an exhibition at Bruce Castle museum, which is where I do drawing classes every Wednesday. At the first term I did the class, one of the activities that I did was drawing a statue of a person's head. Paper with watercolour washes were available to do drawing on, so I chose one with a dark background because I thought it looked the nicest. I chose a graphite stick as well, and drew the head, which was slightly difficult, as it was tilting a bit. When I'd done that, I used some white crayon to show that there was light reflected on one side. The drawing is one of my favourites, so when I heard that there was going to be an exhibition of art from my drawing class, I picked that picture to be in in.

My favourite part of the exhibition were the tortilla chips, but the drawings were pretty good too. Mine was at the end, but it's quite bold so I could see it easily. In my opinion, one of the best drawings was one of part of the museum. Its really detailed and covers quite a wide space.

One of the people who came to the exhibition was the head of the childrens' Prince's Drawing School classes. Mum and I chatted to him, and also to most of the other adults who were still there after the tortilla crisps had finished.

There will be another exhibition, so I'd like to enter some of my work into it. Maybe that drawing again, or maybe something else. I'll keep drawing to keep up my practice. In fact, I've got to do some now. Bye!

Meeting homeschooling couchsurfers

Last week my dad drove us for two hours and fifteen minutes to get to to the house of some Italian couchsurfers on the other side of London. The journey was supposed to be one hour and fifteen minutes, but we followed the SatNav instead of our intuition.

When we arrived, the whole family (Including their seriously cute kitten) came to the door to greet us. There were three girls aged eight, eleven and twelve, and their parents. Now their kids go to school because they have moved to London and want to meet more children here, but they used to homeschool while they were still in Italy, which is one reason we wanted to meet each other.

After we'd greeted each other they led us to the TV/ Living/ Playing room where we played a game called "Twister" which I don't think I'd played before, but I'd heard of it. When we finished that game, we played on their Wii set. My family don't own a Wii set, and I usually think it's really boring, but it wasn't when we played it at their house. 

At lunchtime, I walked into the dining room and saw the most delicious looking foods. There were about five different salads, and they were all really colourful and nicely laid out. I had some orange and onion salad with the main dish, vegeterian lasagne (Yay, I spelt lasagne right first time!) and a piece of toast. The lasagne was really tasty. Usually I don't like the idea of vegeterian food because it has canned beans in it most of the time, but it was super nice this time.

After lunch we played with the Wii again, and with the kitten, who is really small. When we got tired we went upstairs and played with some dolls.

A few hours after we got to their house, we were joined by another homeschooling family with a son and a daughter. The twelve year old (Alice) and eight year old (Bea)  played with them, and my sister and I played with Zoe and the kitten upstairs. We chatted with her a long time, and got to know her better than we knew her sisters, but it would be nice to spend more time with Bea and Alice as well next time we see each other.

At about eight or nine we left their house and went home taking a much shorter route. I think we're seeing them again in a few weeks.