BBQ

While Vicki was off in London seeing the sights and visiting some friends, Leanne had Becky, Mel, Alix, and I over for a barbeque. 

Unfortunately, neither Leanne nor anyone else had any experience with a charcoal BBQ - those of us who did know how to BBQ (Mel and myself) had never used charcoal before (we use gas BBQs like normal people).

It made lighting and heating the BBQ a bit of an adventure.

Happily, it was a lovely day, Leanne has a very nice backyard, and we had lots of snacks to keep us going until the real food was done. I had some very tasty cheese and veggie skewers, while the others ate ALL the meat (I don't know how they thought they were going to eat all that meat - they had burgers, chicken wings, lamb kebabs, and I'm pretty sure they also bought sausages, though they didn't end up cooking those... even getting through the lamb was a struggle). 

However, for all the complaining about the charcoal BBQ and its various inefficiencies, I have to admit, it was very cute looking. 

Adorable. 

More under the cut.

LBF & Camden Lock

The second day of LBF was just as fun as the first, starting with an excellent talk on BookTube, which gave me some really good pointers for my own youtube channel (beware of cussing if you decide to watch my videos). Again, I'm not gonna go into too much detail, as you can again find the complete twitter recount over on my tumblr (again, read from the bottom up). 

Hachette had a balcony! Also, another bonus of this trip: I learned to pronounce Hachette properly, and not like a painfully oblivious anglophile.

This was the first year that the gaming industry had been invited into the book fair, so I ended up going to quite a few talks on that, as they were really interesting, including a Q&A with Rihanna Pratchett,  who writes for video games and also happens to be Terry Pratchett's daughter.

I got quite a few totes at the London book fair - you can see a couple more of them in my video recap of the LBF - but this one was definitely my favourite, from Laurence King Publishing.

There was a meet-and-greet at the Publishing Scotland stand at the end of the day at which I spectacularly failed to network at, and which Laura, Alix, Rachel, Kate, and I eventually ditched in order to find some food - we decided to head over to Camden Lock for some cheap street food.

I really like the neighbourhood of Camden - apparently its really tourist-y, but it also seemed to be where all the weird people hung out, so I liked being there.

Plus all the buildings are decorated.

Kate and I decided to go for vegetarian curry - all that? Cost me £3. YUM.

Super beat up motorcycle seats...

After that we decided to get crepes for dessert because it was crepe happy hour, so they were a quid off (yeah, no, we would have got them anyways).

YUM. 

This trip has resulted in a lot more people being aware of just how much I am not kidding when I talk about how crazy my hair is - as seen in this lovely before-and-after shot. 

Pancake Party

So Fat Tuesday or Pancake day is apparently a pretty big thing here. I honestly had no idea what was going on when Eve invited me to a pancake party, I just heard pancakes and was THERE. Because I didn't want to share the kitchen with other people (I'm not very good at that) I made my pancakes before going over to Laura's. I really wanted to make Æbleskiver but my pan is currently in Canada and I am too poor to buy one here. However, I was telling Eve about this and she asked me if I thought a cake pop maker would work. I thought it might, and so did Connie, and it turned out that Eve actually owned one, so I borrowed it and... 

AREN'T THEY CUTE?! It worked really well, they were smaller than Æbleskiver usually are, but still tasty! I also made some normal yoghurt pancakes, and then headed over to Laura's.

However, everyone else was apparently much less prepared than me, and as I arrived they were all leaving, heading out to the store to buy flour and other ingredients, but the Sainsbury's by Laura's was actually out of flour (like, pancake tuesday is a really big thing over here for something I was totally unaware of). So there was a bit of challenge in finding ingredients, but we managed, and headed back to Laura's for Æbleskiver, yoghurt pancakes, crepes, and Swedish pancakes (it was a very diverse group of pancakes). The Æbleskiver were, of course, a hit, because they are awesome, and Melissa and I promoted the joys of real maple syrup to everyone else.

After pancakes, Ali brought out his edition of Cards Against Humanity that he had gotten for his birthday. I had to leave before the game ended as I had to get up at seven the next day, but Alix apparently won.

MORE cookies?

Measuring time by the cookies that I make every week, it has been three weeks since I did a proper post! Ah!

The week after I posted about the Mars Bar cookies, I made another batch of the same, both because they are always so popular, but also because I had some leftover chocolate bars...

I won two free Mars Bars, which was pretty sweet, both because hey, free chocolate! And also because I had bought so many of the freaking things in two weeks I would have been really annoyed if I hadn't won at least one :P

Ahhhahaha, I was just rereading this and realized that I said "pretty sweet" about free chocolate, hot damn I'm HILARIOUS.

The next week I made my mum's favourite cookies, incidentally while skyping with her, which might have been mean, but whatever (it would have been meaner if smells could be transmitted across space and time via mobile phone).

These cookies were also a big hit, though I think quite a few people were sad to not be getting Mars Bars cookies AGAIN (those things are rather addictive, though with the amount of sugar in them, no wonder...). But the more healthy option was also appreciated.

This week I was going to make peanut butter cookies, but when I told my friend Maya this, she informed me that she didn't like peanut butter (a fact which I believe lead to me threatening to fight her, adding to a long list of things that we are going to fight about, including my preference for Xbox which is in conflict with her preference for PlayStation). However, I decided to make Monster Cookies instead. I didn't realize until I was standing in the grocery store holding the recipe that they had a cup of peanut butter in them.

Whoops.

However, I decided to just go ahead with them, which was an excellent decision, as they turned out delicious and everyone once again really enjoyed them :)

#adulthood

This week marked the first full day of our publishing in practice live project. While I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say about what we are producing yet... (I'll have to check with our marketing and rights departments!)... but it is already very exciting, if rather hectic (one of our project involves a lot of original content, with our final submission date for printing being May 7th, that does not leave our authors much time to get us the content, much less time for editing and prod to do their thing). So it is going to be pretty much full throttle from now until then but I am very excited for everything, and I think we have a really good team going forward!

Today I had my first class in my Interactive Media module. Given how hectic the live project is going to be, and that I am Project Manager on that particular course, I am more than ever glad that I decided to go with this module instead of the Magazine module (they also are doing a live project - two magazines). So those who chose Magazine that are in the general MSc Pub course are now doing two separate live projects... I predict quite a few melt downs from that group before the end of the semester. Personally, the live book project and the placement are more than enough excitement. Beyond any time concerns, though, I am genuinely excited for the interactive media module. We will be covering things such as social media, gaming, blogs, movies, books, interactive platforms... it should be very interesting, and will tie in quite well with some things I covered in my undergrad (my text and technology class, my religion and technology class). Another bonus: there are two projects for the course. First, to make a 'blog' on tumblr (for those of you not familiar with it, tumblr is sometimes called a microblogging platform... to be honest, I've never considered any of the tumblrs I have had to be real blogs. So it will be fairly low-maintenance - they only require 2-3 posts a week, no more than 500 words per week). Our lecturer did spend quite a while today talking about how tumblr and different blogging platforms work, and given that this is the second blogger blog I've had, in addition to two wordpress projects, and about six tumblrs, I was kind of zoning out at various points :P He was quite nice though and I think it is going to be really good. 

It was fun, when he asked who there would consider themselves gamers, it was all girls who raised their hands (breaking stereotypes, hell yeah!). This module is also outside of the publishing program, so while about half the class is publishing students, the other half is (somewhat randomly) scriptwriter students. I was expecting people who were doing some sort of technology-focused major, but it will be fun to get to know some new people! 

After that course, I attended the PPA Scotland's Digital Meeting which was held at Napier. There were speakers from White Light Media, DC Thomson, and Flipping Pages Media talking about digital media, online engagement, and how to build websites, if it is worth it to develop apps for magazines, etc. My program leader requested we either tweet about or blog about the event on the MSc Pub blog, so while those of us in attendance are planning on doing a group blog post, I was also actively tweeting throughout the meeting (Georgia commented afterwards that she was impressed by the speed of my tweeting... someone would say something, she would pull out her phone, then see I'd already tweeted it - clearly I can now put 'social media guru' on my business cards). 

(Maya and me - Maya is from the States)

So that was fun. We hung out after that for a bit, for the networking and wine, but most of the "adults" had left, so I didn't stay long, instead heading out to The Merlin for dinner with Jack, Becky, Eve, Candice, and Melissa (I really like it when we go there because it is about four min from my flat :P). They also do a two meals for £9.99 thing which is pretty awesome. 

Check out my awesome sauce stack #adulthood. 

I don't have any class tomorrow, so I don't really have a lot to do until Sunday, which is Alix's birthday party, unless something comes up with the live project, but hopefully none of the departments run into any issues with their first week :)