The weirdest tea I've ever seen

No, I haven't broken my Lent promise. But I did recently order some tea from Adagio. One of the new ones is Black Dragon Pearls, and it looks like this --------->

The leaves/buds are wrapped into a ball almost the height of a AA battery, and about as wide as the black strip on the end of the Energizer battery pictured.

Pretty Weird.

It almost looks like the 90 calorie pack Quaker Oatmeal balls you can buy, or some kind of chocolate-peanut butter cereal. I'm not much of a sugary cereal guy, so you'll have to come up with your own comparison if you want a specific one. I just know that is what it looks like to me.

I'll probably have a post on what it tastes like in, you know, 23+ days, when I'm allowed to have tea again.

Side story: I got 10% off the green teas I bought (3 kinds), plus I had 170 points, which equated to $17 bucks off the entire order. So, I spent a hair above $50 (for the free shipping, you know), but got probably $3 off the green teas and $17 off the entire order. That's $20. So I spent $50 on essentially $70 worth of tea.

Yeah, I'm pretty happy about that.

CONTEST: Help me select my first post-Lent tea!

Just post your suggestions in the comment section. I might put up some posts with possible candidate teas.

Rules: Has to be actual Camellia sinensis . It can be a tea I currently have (English breakfast, gun powder, assam harmony, ceylong sonata), but additional consideration and likely additional points will be awarded for teas I haven't yet tried. The contest closes March 31. That's pretty much it.

I guess it wouldn't be a contest without a prize, huh? So the prize will be... um, my gratitude. My appreciation. The honor of having made a suggestion that impressed me enough to convince me to go with that drink after more than a month away.

You get the idea. Its a big, big prize you can receive without the problem of having to find a place to put it in your house or where you should have it delivered or the trouble of having to find the UPS store where it was delivered.

To tea, or not to tea

This is a bit tricky.

I'm a Diest/agnostic/atheist. So I don't have a "Lent" to follow.

And my personal life philosophy adhors the idea of self-sacrifice for its own sake. Doing without/abstaining from something is supposed to make you a better person. Though I have to say, I have yet to witness that effect in practice. I'm begining to think more and more that the "satisfied" poor aren't happy because they don't have anything, but because they have a lower level of satisfaction and thus are happy with what they have and thus haven't gone out to get more. Meanwhile, the rich are likely Type Aers who are never happy.

Having said all that, I usually follow "Lent." Partly out of the momentum of having done it so many years, and partly in solidarity with R.

So, to swing this back to the title: I'm mulling the idea of forgoing tea for Lent. I'm typing this - coffee in hand - at 10 a.m. on Wednesday. That's the day the whole thing is supposed to start. And its just before my review, which means I'm both wasting precious time and divided in my thoughts.

Forty days is quite a while. And while it wouldn't be like my last break because I wouldn't be giving up caffiene altogether, it would be 4x longer. But this is a good time for it. I need to make an order anyway, so I can take these 40 days, make an order, and have some celebratory tea on by B-day, which is conveniently close to Easter this year. A true Brester.

I'm undecided and unsure. And yet I'm 99% positive I'm going to do it. And hopefully it will go better than last time I tried something like this.