My 16th Birthday Weekend!

This is going to be a long entry, it seems like I had a whole birthday week! In my family we have several birthday traditions, I don't know if I've mentioned them before, but I'll recap. For girls, on the 9th birthday, you can get your ears pierced. 10th, for boys and girls, you get a pocketknife. For girls on 13th, it's lipstick. Anyway, we've made up another one for girls, on their 16th. On Valentines Day, I was told the surprise. I got to go down to Portland to get my own signature scent at The Perfume House, which is like, the biggest perfume place in the U.S.

So first off, Mama and I left on Friday afternoon. We rented a car and I got a bit wooshy after a while. I was sewing lace onto the neck of my new dress, but I stopped to take pictures. Here are some highlights.

We stopped close to Portland to go to the Pendleton Mill Store to look for fabric trim for my 1850s wool dress. We didn't get anything, but it was fun to look!


After that we went to my Aunt's apartment to drop off our stuff, then we went out to dinner at Justa Pasta. It was a crowded little bistro setting, and the food was great. We then went to an English Country Dance and learned a bunch of really complicated, fun, Austen-type dances. We then went to Powell's City of Books, and I was so tired and overwhelmed that we went back to the apartment.


The next day, we went to The Perfume House.
All those opened perfume bottles on the counter are the ones we smelled.

My Aunt fell head-over-heels in love with this one perfume, Daim Blond. She wouldn't stop sniffing her arm all day! It was even funnier because she has always sworn not to do perfume!

My perfume scent is called Fluers De Oranger by Serge Lutens. I completely adore it.

After that, we had lunch,

And wandered all up and down Hawthorne street, browsing the clothing stores and such.


My Aunt and Uncle bought me a beautiful wrap skirt made from recycled saris. It's reversible too!
After shopping, I went ice skating with my cousin at Lloyd's Center, then we all got Indian food at a little streetcart downtown. I took a few pictures on my camera, but they're too small to be visible on the computer. We went back to the apartment to do henna tattoos. It was so fun! It's supposed to last for 3 weeks, so we'll see.

We went home the next day after breakfast and a little more shopping. On Tuesday, I had my actual birthday. I chose Kahlua Torte instead of cake; it was delicious! My little sister's birthday was a few days later, and she had a chocolate cake. She has food allergies, but the cake turned out great. She turned 10, so that meant she got a pocketknife!

Needless to say, I'm just still so thrilled at my perfume and I'm so grateful for everything.

I'm off to do homework! Have a great day :)

~Sophia

Did you see. . .

Blogger added a new feature! It's cool, but pretty overwhelming (for me). It's called ''pages". Before, Wordpress had pages, but now I guess Blogger is better :P I think that Google is headed towards Earth domination. Starting with our blogs.

So, if you have a blog, I want to see what you come up with for your pages. Check out mine too : )

~Sophia

Jerry's Breakdown

Mama and I went through a internet rabbit trail, and ended up here. Amazing song, amazing guitarists. . . just ignore their outfits!




And can you believe these guys?



Cool.

~Sophia

A song

I love this song. I love singing it in church, I love playing it on my guitar, I love praying it and I love listening to it.




Kinda off topic, but I like some country music, but I never knew why I liked only some of it. So, the other day I was talking to my mother, and she said that at one point when we lived in Kentucky we were looking to buy a house. She was pregnant with me, and sometimes she'd go out in the car and drive around and look at houses. She says that whenever she turned the radio to country music, I'd start kicking and bouncing and dancing, and when she switched the station to something else like talk radio, I'd stop! Apparently it was just with country music, so I guess that I'm a country music girl at heart : ) I only like some country music, so I guess I only like good ol' Kentucky style! ; )

~ Sophia

I got a haircut!

A couple days ago, my sis and I got haircuts! It was actually a trim for me, but I haven't had one in three years. Here are "before" pictures of me, with waist-length hair:
And "after":


Ta-da! I'm glad with the way it turned out, it feels a lot healthier and I can still put it into my favorite styles. It's weird what a difference 4 inches makes!

~Sophia

I'm tired!

I had a busy day today. Mama and I went grocery shopping. And clothes shopping. And plate shopping. And impulse shopping. And Valentines Day shopping. And we stopped at the library; oh, we were so efficient : )

We got some cute plates that have palm trees on them, and we bought groceries for two weeks for eight people. One of our biggest stops was at the library where we had a shelf of hold requests. In culinary arts, my sis and I are doing fancy desserts. Mama went crazy with the curriculum, and I think we're doing chocolate stuff now (there's so much!). I wonder if we have to pay for the drool damage to the books? ; P Currently we have home at least 25 dessert books.

Earlier I had an interesting thought. I usually think this thought, but today when I thought it, I thought it was profound. We were passing the highway in the van, and I thought something along these lines:
"Wow, lot's of cars. What if there are at least two people in each car? I can't even estimate that (they were going by so quickly). There are several billion people on this planet. I'm only one of them. Every single person is unique and has a different personality. It takes a lifetime just to get to know one person." I relayed the gist of it to Mama (there are a lot of people in the world) and she laughed. I explained it to her, and we talked about how life just flashes by, it's pretty scary.
Anyway, I think about it a lot. . .

Goodnight,

~Sophia

Whoops-a-Daisy

I forgot to post a few embarrassing/weird foodstuff that have happened this past week!

Last Tuesday, I made waffles for breakfast. I put away the waffle iron and sat down to eat. I guess I grabbed the wrong thing, 'cause I enjoyed garlic butter and maple syrup atop! And let me tell you, it was pretty gross.

I threw away some 10-year-old Jell-O mix. It actually was ten years old.

Just now I opened a big bag of M&M' s (one of my fav candies) and they flew all over the kitchen floor. Oops.

-Sophia

I'm so curious

Okay, my birthday is later this month, and I've got a surprise coming. Needless to say, I'm very curious about what it is. . . I only know that I can't do anything on the weekend before, and that I don't get to write a birthday list. I wanted to go to Ted Brown Music to drool over the pianos and guitars, so I said to Mama, "I think on my birthday I want to- " and she interrupted with a, "Nuh-uh-uh-uh!" I do get to pick my dinner though, I want enchiladas and Kahlua tort.

Anyway, I was cooking up some lobsters the other day, and I was checking to see what parts you can eat. My littlest sister was watching me and after a few protests and tears, she lovingly named the lobster Matt, and his "brothers" Phillip and William. She told me not to hurt him (he was already cooked) which lead me to wonder if crustaceans feel pain. What about insects? I found conflicting answers. Apparently they feel pain, but not like we do. Check here and here (those are links).

Recently in school we've been doing "moderns" in history; Civil War to present. Us older two are at WWII, and the younger ones are learning about the Oregon Trail. Usually when we learn about a war, the younger ones like to act it out, so we had an interesting reenactment of the Civil War.

They divided up and "Johnny", a union soldier, single-handedly defeated every single confederate soldier in the southern army. He had a gun which shot "a million bullets" in three seconds. No wonder he won the war ; P. He got shot several times, but he had some "special armor" that protected him from everything, apparently. Us older ones were alternately cracking up, giving advice, and making corrections (I told "Johnny" that her gun was impossible considering the time period. She changed it so that she could load in two seconds. . .) After they got bored of the civil war, they switched over to WWI. 100-year-old Johnny's armor was still going strong! : P

The whole point of this post has kinda changed and wandered around. . . I'm done now ; D

-Sophia