Make Tea, Not War

"Where there's tea, there's hope."- Arthur Wing Pinero

"You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."- C.S. Lewis

"Doing nothing is respectable at tea."

When you think about tea you probably either think about little girls at a pink, butterfly tea party or England,which eventually might make you think of Benedict Cumberbatch which might make you think of...wait...I guess that last parts just me. Well...anyway...my friends and I decided that tea parties were not just for little girls and the English, and it would be perfectly respectable for us to throw a tea party of our own. Unfortunately, I didn't take pictures of the 10 adorable, hand-made(by yours truly) invitations that all said, "You're invited to a tea party" on the cover. However, I can fill you in that there was a tea cup on everyone either holding a cat or a rabbit, or clad with a mustache and a spectacle, or lookin' really creepy, or just being adorable.
Although, I don't remember who's idea it was to throw a tea party, I do know all of my friends automatically went, "YAH, LET'S HAVE A TEA PARTY!" and I was once again reminded why my friends and I get along so well. Right away, my darling friend Kaely, offered the use of her Grandma's (beautiful and very neat) house and a pristine China set. Megan brought scones and her record player, Christina and Anya brought macaroons, and I made invitations and cupcakes, we set a date and time(4 o'clock sharp obviously), and picked out our formal attire and hats.
Before tea we took a jaunt through the garden while Megan finished the scones; she wanted them to be fresh and warm for everybody. We then did some swing dancing, our favorite kind actually.

Megan putting the finishing touches on the tea.

Some good ole' swing dancing to our Crosley record player...

We then sat down to hot tea and mysteriously developed, terrible but hilarious, Southern accents.

Our pristine table...

Anyay, just so dang excite for tea time!

Golden puffs of heaven...definitely worth the wait!

A fellow blogger has been spotted! Megan Evans, whom is just getting her blog started(I'll let you'll know when it's up)

All my friends are looking so sweet...ANYAY...must you ruin every pictures?

Beautiful darlings', work those hats.

"Ha,ha,ha: love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea."-Henry Fielding
As soon as we sat down, we began to embody our 1950's inner Southern ladies... and their scandalous pasts! Feeling as if we were a part of Clue, we each established our stories and new profiles as Southern gentlewomen. Read on to discover the sordid pasts of these young ladies below...

Suzy 'Homemaker' Rowling

Pictured above as the perfect Mormon girl, in love and happily married at 22 to her high school sweetheart and the previous football star. However, underneath lies a truth a shade darker then her goody two-shoes exterior. 13th in her high school class and on the track to Harvard and a respectable marriage she went to meet with one her professors and...low and behold...they fell in love! After a number of secretive meetings; the two decided to seperate but Suzy knew she could not face her secret love in a classroom setting and opted for the path of motherhood. Congratulations Suzy! However, there's one problem, will her baby resemble her brunette, chocolate-eyed husband or her toe-headed, sapphire eyed professor?

Sue Ellen

The beautiful and classy plantation wife(yah it's the 1950's...); sporting a wide-brimmed hat and a beautiful set of pearls, this Southern Belle practically breathes money. Literally. She only married one of the richest men in the South, and yes, it was very much on purpose. A keen eye for fancy things, she betrothed 'Sir Lancelot, with the hopes of fleeing her stifling mother and ended up falling in love. But wait! The scandal grows! Sue Ellen did find love on her plantation, but not with her somewhat older husband but Wesley, the stable boy! Let's just say her favorite scent is alfalfa...

"Aunt" Jemimah 

This is where are story slows down a little bit...we've come to a character who is as kind-hearted as she looks! 18, unmarried, and the sole owner of a small farm bought with her deceased parents money, her main companion is the young girl she adopted when she was abandoned by an unidentified father and a deadbeat mother. You'll read more about her adoptive 'daughter' Mary Ann up next. Jemimah is a darling girl and grows everything from pumpkins to dragon-fruits on her profitable farm in rural North Carolina.

Mary Ann

Oh goodness. What to say about Mary Ann...words cannot be found to explain this unusual child. 16 and lacking anything close to manners. She slurps her tea, she stirs her tea with the honey spoon and puts it back in the pot, and makes numerous vulgar remarks when entirely unnecessary! The child is continuously giving poor Jemimah a heart attack and running off to Atlanta to opium dens and trying to get Jemimah to plant the 'whack-whack' plants, claiming they'll be ridiculously profitable! Abandoned at age 3 and raised in an orphange until rescued by Jemimah, everyone in the community and the church has urged her to seek help but she'll listen to know one, not even her darling aunt!

Grandma Virginia

Unfortunately, I'm lacking a picture of Grandma Virginia(because it's me and I didn't take one) but I can tell you her life story... I mean scandal as well. At the ripe old age of 28, Virginia is a very unloving grandma, and for that matter, mother as well. Pregnant at 15 by an unknown father, she was the Mary Ann of her day. As soon as she felt her daughter could be married (so basically after facing 12 agonizing years as a shunned single mother)her daughter was married. She was nice enough to marry him off to a relatively young, good-looking man with plenty of money that could take care of her daughter, and her granddaughter, much better than she ever could. Now she's happily single and ready to jump back into the scandalous scene...to be honest the only reason she attended this tea party was to find out the gossip and then become a part of it. 

So there we are, a bunch of scandalous Southern ladies from Northern California! After telling our stories and laughing an insane amount, we took another stroll in the garden...mostly to take pictures!

Honestly, one of my favorite pictures of the day...their faces are perfection!

Pshhhh...no this wasn't posed, most definitely Kodak!

What pretty little potatoes you all are!

She's basically a painting!

This is my dragon fruit tree...isn't it be-u-tiful?

Of course we had to pose are head wear, to make an adorable picture!

 These hats are either celebrating the graduation of our first tea party or their just jumping for joy!

                                          

Maybe having a tea party is pretty ridiculous to most people but I haven't had this much fun in forever and I'm so happy I could share it with all of my beautiful, and scandalous, friends! I don't know about them, but I'm already planning our next tea party, I'm thinking winter-themed! Here's to Suzy, Sue Ellen, Jemimah, Mary Ann, and Grandma Virginia and all the other people who will be enlightened to celebrate their own tea party with their own version of 'The Pretty Little Liars of the 1950's". Jewel. 

* Note: All of the characters in this blog are completely fictional, from everything to their love affairs, their terrible characteristics, their drug habits, and their property choices.

Four Days=Countless Amounts of Fun!

Due to the fact my teachers needed not one, but two 'teacher work days', that took up yesterday and today, my fellow students and I received a four day weekend! After school on Friday I went to lunch with my madre at the 'Joe Caribe Bistro and Cafe'. They specialize in 'fresh, ethnic and Caribbean flavors' according to their website and I would certainly that their food is not only fresh but amazing! My personal favorite is the Vegetarian burrito which not only has your average burrito ingredients but whipped sweet potato, which might not sound good but it definitely is! Anyway, after a late lunch and some car shopping for my sister I headed home exhausted after a long week at school.
The next morning, I joined my school's Key Club to take part in cleaning up the Bear River, my school's namesake actually. Donning elastic gloves and grabbing trash and recycle bags, we set to work combing the river banks for any trash that inconsiderate and laze people left over the summer. Although we mostly found cigarettes, glass shards, and bottle caps; we did find a surplus of butane gas, a suspicious head of a genie sculpture, a goat skull with a feather wired to it(I suspect homeless voo-doo), and a food-saver. I hope our Key Club and the other groups who were taking part in river clean-ups across Nevada County and elsewhere made a difference for the environment and our community.

Beautiful Morning cleaning at the Bear River.

After I headed home, I went to the 28th annual Draft Horse Classic hosted every year at the Nevada County Fairgrounds. We arrived mid-day, the perfect time since this is when the barns are primarily open, and set to going through each barn.

This big guy wasn't very happy to be getting a bath!

You can't tell in the picture, but these horses are nowhere near regular size!

Some random mules mid-Draft Horse

After eating a baked potato(they're the best around) and getting a 'Nevada City Cappucino' which is actually a lot like a frappucino...just better, I went home and got ready for a Comic-Con Dance, hosted by a Mormon Church in Nevada City. Of course when I heard the words 'Comic-Con' I at first held back the tears that I didn't attend San Diego Comic-Con and meet the beautiful Benedict Cumberbatch and of course the numerous other beloved actors and then I realized I could be Benedict...or Sherlock actually. So, acquiring my mother's purple shirt, my great-grandmother's coat, and my father's magnifying glass; I transformed myself into Miss Sherlock Holmes, or as my Dad put it 'She-lock Holmes'.

Yah I did spend 10 min. taking selfies of myself with this magnifying glass. No shame...

Complete Sherlock Outfit

Megan, Kaely, and I(I'm that white flash in the corner) 'sherlocking' while Anya looks really excited for some reason...

I ended up having tons of fun at the dance with Megan, Kaely, Anya, Andrea, and numerous other people all dressed up as everything from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Avengers. Megan and I both went as Sherlock, while Kaely was John Watson(both Megan and I's "best 'friend'-'man') and Anya went as the Tenth Doctor, which she nailed especially since she had gotten a pixie cut earlier that day.(which looks adorable by the way).
The rest of my weekend was spent taking my first Driver's lesson(since I'm permitted and all that!),  facing the smoke from the King Fire to take a short trip to Nevada City on Monday, and doing homework(since the Teacher's had to give us tons!). If you take a closer look at my Draft Horse Classic pictures you'll see a haze in the background similar to the haze in this picture...

This isn't a Delta fog setting in this is smoke from the King Fire, that has burned thousands of acres and made a cloud of smoke big enough to see from space. I hope everyone affected by the fire is safe and I want to thank all the firefighters for trying their best to keep this basically uncontrollable fire under control! I hope everyone else had a wonderful weekend(four days or not)! Jewel.

Girl's Camp...in the running for the happiest place on Earth

This last week I went to a Girl's Camp about 45 min. from beautiful Lake Tahoe. This camp is through a Mormon church and accompanied by three of my best friends and a giant duffel bag I headed up for my fifth year at this beautiful forest oasis. As a fifth year at at the camp, I was considered a 'big sister' meaning the 1st-4th years were the 'little sisters' and two years of 'big sisters' watched over them and helped them out with skits and the like. Each group of 'big sisters' gets assigned one group of 'little sisters' with a theme. My 'little sisters' were all fourth years and sadly didn't need as much help as the first years or second years per say but I still loved helping them with their skit for their theme...Alice in Wonderland. Before they arrived we decorated their 'bunk house' and their table in the dining pavilion(which feeds us A-mazing food).

A table isn't a table without a Cheshire Cat

Tilt your head...and look down the rabbit hole...

I'll fix this pic as soon as I can...

Camp is such a great experience every year, starting from the first moment you step on to the ground you're swept away by the kindness and true caring you feel. You meet these amazing girls your first year and every year you go back they're there and sometimes you become friends with them outside of camp, and there you go, you have a new best friend. I'm lucky enough to have three of my best friends; Megan, Kaely, and Isabella; coming with me on my mountain adventure with meadows and ponds galore. 

The mysterious...'FREMONT' on the bridge

Megan being the 'big sister' theme: Lost Girls of Neverland

We heart...

Girl's Camp!

Breathtaking isn't it?

And then we have Isabella's alter ego... the Isabeast

A highlight of camp is to come up with skits for 'campfire'. For our 'Alice in Wonderland' skit we appointed all the girls from our unit to be a character from Disney's version of AiW. We were lucky enough to have identical triplets in our group and they became the three white rabbits...so they could say 'I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date' in unison of course! All of our characters did a great job at campfire, but here's some pics of the rehearsal!

"It's a Golden Afternoon!" for these flowers

Three white rabbits?

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum with pillow tummies

I'm so happy I was able to enjoy the beautiful people, landscape, and lessons learned at camp once again this year and I can't wait to go back next year and do it all over again! and of course see these amazing people:

My amazing 'little sisters'

Lookin' sharp Kaely and Jessica!

Until next year Girl's camp and until my next blog people of the internet(hint it's about my wonderful sister Ashley's house!) Jewel.