First Week of Movie Magic! (College Showcase)

It has finally begun! We are real film students now. Above, you see my two house mates, Andrew and Andrew, on our way to orientation day. It was a day filled with meeting other new students and faculty, going through some of the regular rigamarole of getting signed in, and best of all, a scavenger hunt around Grand Rapids! (Pictures of the hunt will be in another post).

I won't take you through the whole process of orientation because that would be tedious and boring. But I'll try to give you a glimpse of my first day at my new school. Much of the first day I spent running around taking pictures of the facilities. Most of which is on the lower level of the building.

The first common area you come to at the bottom of the stairs is Hollywood Square. It is a great little hangout area where we now have a Lord of the Rings chess set sitting for the occasional battle. It is a pretty great little spot since profs. occasionally wander out to sit and chat with students.  

We have three or four typical classrooms (below left) as well as some awesome movie related classrooms. This is the ADR room (below right); it is where you typically go to rerecord audio tracks, but there are many other uses for this room as well.

One of my favorite classrooms would have to be the one you see below. This is where we typically have our film history class, and it is a pretty great little theater.

There are a lot of other class rooms and things I could show you, but it would basically be a slight variation of the rooms you already saw plus some hallways and things (there are some great movie posters hanging all over the place). I think, for the time being, these pictures should give you a pretty good taste of what the school looks like. Speaking of school, I need to go get ready for Film Fundamentals, so I'll catch you guys up on more stuff later. 

I Will Survive!

Just wanted to show my mom that I wouldn't starve while I was away from home since she seemed a little unsure when I left. I'll admit that I've eaten a few peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches this past week, but I've also created a few culinary pieces that I thought were pretty good.

For starters, I made my own chips from leftover tortillas.










Which were pretty delicious in and of themselves. But then I got fancy. I had some left over beans and rice and I decided to cook up some queso fresco cheese to go with it. 





Added some Mexican style spices (hot sauce is always good), mixed it all together, and I had a great spicy bean, rice, and cheese dip. 








The Mexican stuff was pretty great, but then I decided to try something a little bit more classy.
It is kind of hard to tell from the picture, but what you are looking at are strips of chicken breast cooked very slowly over sautéed onions and garlic, topped with slices of green pepper and basil, all sitting on a bed of rice. I allowed the chicken to simply rest on the onions and garlic for the entire cooking time. I also turned the stove down to the lowest temperature possible and covered the pan to make sure the top of the chicken would cook thoroughly. The result was an extremely tender, juicy, and flavorful meat well balanced with the sautéed (almost caramelized) onions and green pepper. I will definitely be making this dish again. The best part was that it only cost me around $2.00 worth of material to make it. If you would like more details about how to make this dish, just ask.

So there you have it! I will not by any means starve this semester. Thank you, Mom, for teaching me the basics of cooking! I'm really enjoying it.