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!