10.25.2011

New Adventures in Old Tea

There's this tea that Aveda salons carry that I love, called Thé Tea. It has this interesting after-sweetness that is great because then I don't add sugar. The only downside is that it costs $15/20 tea bags, so I usually just get it from my aunt for Christmas. Last night I was buzzing around the internet and found a recipe for it and decided to try it. Thankfully the local health food store has a pretty nice selection of dried herbs, and had everything I needed.

Recipe:
1 1/4 cup powdered licorice root
1 cup peppermint
1/8 cup fennel powder
1/8 cup basil (I used sweet basil, but I can only imagine it works with both)

The whole set up cost me less than $5, and it tastes exactly the same. My only problem was that since the licorice root and fennel were powdered, a tea ball wouldn't be of much use, so I sewed up a nice little drawstring teabag for myself. I think it'll be a pretty rare day that I purchase teabags again. I got a cup of peppermint for about $0.40, and since mint and this tea are my favourite and pretty much all I drink, I might as well just buy the straight herbs. Plus, I can make up my own teas! How fun!

Isn't my teabag fashionable?





10.19.2011

Pets

Today I cleaned the turtle tank at the school where I have my practicum. It was fun and all but I don't think I'll ever have turtles. You can't knit sweaters for turtles.

10.12.2011

Weird things I like

-Fruit on otherwise normal pizza
-Cinnamon and tomato sauce
-Flannel sheets in the summer
-Making up recipes
-Most foods
-Knitting graffiti
-Bubbles all the time
-Big flannel shirts
-Slide stairs
-Mini animals
-Mini houses
The day before I came back to Cornell this year I stopped by the high school to pick up a copy of my old A.P. Psychology textbook for Forrest (I already bought my own copy. Nerd alert). I’ve been back on several occasions since graduation, but every time the smell and atmosphere of Cedar Falls High School hits me in the gut and time travels back to journalism classes, the Alpha room, and speech team. It’s a powerful whack out of reality and into the past. The smell always stays the same.

I unconsciously start becoming more conscious of who is in the hallway with me (librarians are notoriously strict about the cellphone policy), I jump down the last three stairs like I always did, and peer around corners to make sure it’s okay that I’m out of class without a pass. Eventually I shake off the old feelings, talk on my cellphone in front of a librarian, and stride confidently through the halls. But for that first minute or so I’m just a shadow on the wall again.

Kids with cars...

(This is a draft I saved like a month and a half ago and promptly forgot to finish, ta-da)

Tonight Marshall, Sarah, Danny, Cate, Rachel, Alyssa, Henry, Colin, Brooke, a few other lovely souls and I went to the state park and had a grill out/bonfire/italian baby talent show/sing out/dance party. It was lovely. I can't quite describe how wonderful it is to be out with people who are a little crazy. We ran around and didn't fall in the lake and made banana boats and ate fresh tomatoes from Henry's garden. It's nice to just lay around with people and eat food.

10.09.2011

Last Night I Went to a Honky-Tonk Bar.

I was not really expecting what I got. I thought I was getting myself into more of a Jane Austen-type scene, with skirts and reels and bowing. So please imagine my surprise when we pulled up to the “Dance-Mor” in Swisher, Iowa and I saw 10 legitimate looking cowboys leaning against the building, smoking like chimneys. I clung to my hopeful delusion and thought that maybe they were just simply local color who enjoyed dances from the 1800s. 

This delusion was quickly dispelled when my friends (who apparently knew exactly what we were getting in to) and I walked through the doors to hear an electric guitar make itself loudly evident. We exchanged our $6 for tickets from a severely bearded man and walked through the double doors into everything I was not expecting: Oversized belt buckles (regardless of gender), oversized cowboy hats, flannel, WalMart chic, cowboy boots, and dim lighting. Despite my reservations about the government telling me what to do, I silently thanked them for the Iowa Clean Air Act. 
 
As we walked further into the fine establishment that is the Dance-Mor, I realised what kind of dancing I was expected to do: Synchronized. I have a pretty well established phobia/general ineptness at synchronized dancing, which was made especially evident when I attended a Zumba class and ended up in tears. I found a chair and made myself responsible for watching over everyone else's sundries. And then, just to make sure every person in the room knew that this girl, dressed as I was in non-cowboy boots/hat/flannel, did not belong anywhere near a dance hall in Swisher, Iowa, I began to crochet a scarf.

All in all, it felt like a high school dance except with beer and very little grinding. But I did have fun, mostly because it was just so entertaining to be expecting one thing and to get the complete opposite. Like that one time when I drank milk and thought it was going to be Mountain Dew. Yeah, kind of like that.