Dear Adagio

Dear Adagio,

It's not you, its me.  Honestly.

You've always been there for me when I needed  you.  Quick to come to my aid when I called.  You were my first love and introduced me to so many new things.  You've been a warm cuppa on a cold day, and a nice relaxing way to ease into a work afternoon. 

But I've changed and you haven't.  When we first met, everything was new and exciting.  But over the years, as I've tasted your wares, I've come accustomed to them.  They are fine, to be sure, but they are no longer new and exciting.  I'm sure they are perfect for someone else, but for me, I think I need more.  Sure, sure, I know you've added some nice new gourmet things, but those aren't my interests, and I don't feel comfortable shelling out that kind of money for something new when so many things are new.  It's not that one of us is wrong, its just that we aren't meant for each other.

In other words, my eye has began to wander.  Your products are great, but I've started to notice new and enticing aspects that others can offer me.  I just don't feel I can be committed to you in the way I have in the past, and that isn't fair to either of us.

I may call you up in a moment of need, or when I'm longing for the sweet comfort that familiarity provides, or when I've made some horribly stupid mistake that I need to correct with old reliable.  And this isn't necassarily goodbye forever; someday maybe we can get back together, someday when we have both gone out in the world and come to realize that we are perfect for each other.  Until then ...

I'll always remember you.

Bryan

This would tea me off

The price of tea could be rising in the near future.

Say it ain't so.

Sadly, seems like it is so. Blame poor weather and rising wages in China for the increase. And I plan to do just that.

These are a few of my favorite things

Black tea: Yunnan Jig, followed closely by Assam Melody
Green tea: Sencha

And I should note that after, oh, 3 or so years of brewing, I've managed to coax a subtle sweetness out of it to go along with the usual bitterness.

Green with envy

Black tea, that is, after this WebMD article on the benefits of green tea.

Nothing horribly new. Green tea compounds have been shown to fight all manner of things, including heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, non-Supermanism and stroke. But most of the studies are in the lab, not on people. Still.

The story notes that most human studies involve those from the East, where other factors could influence results (don't they adjust for that?).

The story also notes the lack of individuals who have a long history of drinking tea that they can study. Uh, right here. Hello! Willing participant with 8 years of 3-6 cups of 50% green tea drinking experience available!

And yeah, I made that pentultimate disease up.

Sprout!

I received the following message in my email this morning:

Your tea tree has sprouted Congratulations! Your tea-tree has been selected & is being raised in an indoor nursery until it is ready to begin its outdoor journey. In the next few weeks we will update you as to its status & provide instructions on how you can help to take care of it along the way.In the mean-time, please enjoy the glimpse of what your Earth Day contribution has done thus far!

Yeah!

I like to think my plant is pictured in the second photo (the lowest picture) and that my plant is the tall one.

Tea tree for me; tea tree for thee?

So, Adagio has this pretty neat thing going on for Earth Day. You can plant - i.e., reserve space - a tea tree on a tea plantation in one of three locations. An area of China - known for its white teas; and area of India - known for Assam; or an area of Sri Lanka - known for its Oolong.

Click here, Captain Planet, to save the world - one tea tree at a time.

Now, I'm pretty sure the farmer/Adagio would plant the tree anyway. They let you pick the spot in the field you want to plant the tree, but something tells me if you pick a spot way in the far corner and no one picks the ones near you, they aren't just going to forego planting in the rest of the spaces and then go out and tend to your tree standing 200 yards away by itself. My hunch is the whole field is going to be planted anyway - probably with or without you and possibly it already has been.

So, from an Earth Day stand point, its might really be a wash. If the tree is going in the ground anyway, my selection isn't really doing very much. But it seems like it couldn't hurt.

Oh, and you have to digitally care for your tree. Like a Digipet, except its a Digiteatree. I assume that means watering and weeding, probably along the lines of the god forsaken Farmville crap that is on Facebook, but whatever. The actual instructions weren't all that clear. But hey, its not actual weeding and watering, which is kinda hard work, so again, no harm, no foul. Or at the very least, little harm, little foul. Certainly little enough to ignore.

And last but not least: If you ditigally care for your plant to maturity, they will send you four free ounces of tea from your plant.

This last part is just not believable, and is somewhat makes me question the whole program, even if it is for a good cause and blah blah blah. I can believe the tree will be planted. But am I really to believe that a poor/poorish farmer in a little regulated tea plantation in India os going to label my tree and keep track of it and then when it comes time for harvesting seperate my tree's leaves from the others to ensure that I get tea from - again - my tree?

Sure, why not.

Anyway, I planted a tree. Its in India. Its the third plant from the left in the first row in the second field. If you want to know why I chose the third planting spot, you haven't been paying attention. Three. Triangles. Pyramids. Strongest, least likely to tip over? Ringing a bell? Don't get it? Ask in the comments and I'll explain.

A tea tree takes 3 years to reach maturity. Which means in all liklihood I will have long since forgot about digitally nurturing my little tree and foregone the free tea. But I thought it was neat, cool and worth a try.

My hat, is a very very fine hat

The headline has to be sung to the tune of Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to sound anything but arrogant.

So, as promised, here's a look at my new hat!

And from a different angle:

Hate it? I don't much care.

Maybe this is more your flavor: I also bought myself a kind of birthday present/necessity item (if you define necessity as the need to have like 100 of an item). A new tea cup.

It was the second one I picked out, after worrying that first one was too feminine. Tea stuff can be so girly sometimes. But this seemed masculine enough. Masculinish, at any rate, I suppose. And I like it; despite the fact that it appears to have, for no discernable reason, a Maple leafesque leaf on it. I'm familiar with tea leaves, and this one would be something I'm not all accustomed to seeing as a tea leaf. Maybe it is and I am just not aware. You can kinda see it above the large "a" on the cup. Its not the single, slender leaf that I usually associate as a tea leaf.

Anyway.

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.

The Adventures of Tea Man

I may not be doing the "tea" thing during Lent, but that doesn't mean its not still on the front of my mind. Its in my thoughts even more now, perhaps.

So this Inquirer article about the trend of men drinking tea caught my eye.

Admittedly, I've - at different times - been squimish about my love of tea. The whole doily, pink tea houses, flower and fleur-de-lis & hen teapot, old blue-haired ladies with pinkies outstretched stereotype made me somewhat uncomfortable.

So I smiled two weeks ago when a male character from my favorite show - Lost - asked for Earl Grey tea, and was greeted by another male character with the reply "ah, a gentleman's drink." The first character is alternatively butch and a whiner, and the second went from one of the best acted creepy-evil characters of all time to a neutered follower, but you can't have everything, can you?

Then I smiled even larger at the Inky article.

So imagine my smile at following the Inky story to TeaGuySpeaks (just google it - I'm not providing a link) . Here. And then imagine it widened to Cheshire Cat-sized proportions when I followed that link down the rabbit hole to steepster.com. Where I promptly signed up quicker than the Mad Hater went mad. (How quick was that, do you think? - Cause I signed up right away, so if it was a slow, gradual dissent into madness than my point is kinda ruined) Man I wish I had created a website that could be described as "one of the liveliest tea communities on the web."

Heck, I'll settle for this admittedly awesome website (and humble!), which might as well be a straight rip off of my original song and dance. You just have to imagine mine an octave higher and with one more assemble. Without, you know, the work, advertising or risk that went into something like that.

I'm kinda just hoping my combination of an ounce of dry wit, pound of variety and half teaspoon of talent makes this blog take off one day. Then I'll worry about making it lively. Though I guess that's kinda like building a cart without considering the possibility affordability of actually buying purchasing a horse, but whatever - its how I'm going about it.

Anyway, back to tea. So steepster.com will let you rate teas, put a wish list together and see real-time reviews by other tea drinkers. It's kind of the facebook of tea.

Meanwhile, back in Wonderland, I calculate its only another 792 768 hours until I can have a cup of tea. Man in the sky that seems like a long time.

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.

What I'm drinking now

Irish breakfast, Casablanca twist, Fujian Baroque & Dragonwell

Alright. Time to take a break from the anger and vitriol and take a deep breath. In other words - its tea time!

I'm currently enjoying a cup of Fujian Baroque, a pretty full flavor tea. Malty with a chocolatey aftertaste that is just great. I have this, or Irish breakfast, in the morning.

It's Dragonwell in the afternoon. It's definitely a green, but its more subtle, less grassy than some. Has a bit of a smokiness that, for its price, I'm not sure I'm wild about. Still, the leaves are as flat as those of Sencha, but much, much wider. Its interesting, and it makes scooping up the tea something of an adventure. Casablanca twist is pretty minty, and I rely on that pretty much solely as an after dinner drink. Not pictured is Sencha Overture. A grassy green that is my everyday tea at work.

Tea is a perfect time filler, like today when I'm waiting for my appointment to have my stitches taken out. I did a limited workout Wednesday - nothing that required gripping, just some push ups and leg work. Thursday the tingling was really down and I had a lot more movement in my thumb. Today its even better. I'm starting to be able to grip things. That's a nice change after a week and a half of walking around - as Renee likes to say - like Bob Dole.

I finished Curious Minds. After the last essay, as Pink Floyd said, "I'd thought I'd something more to say." Turns out that after going back to it, I really didn't. I'm currently zooming through David Sedaris' book "Me talk pretty one day."

And I've written 25 "parts" - they aren't really chapters, I'm not writing a 50 chapter book - in my book. Two this week alone. I'm guessing that's about 28,000 words, give or take - half way. I'm starting to see the light at the end of the chunnel. Instead of 50 different things to write about and directions to go, the plot is narrowing. Threads are wrapping up. Conclusions are being reached. The path ahead is clearer. The pinpoint of light that I can see is inspiring me to write more, but some of the parts left are the harder pieces: Fill in stuff - the stuff that binds the "big" pieces I could see to each other. The minutea that makes it all flow and connect.

July. It took me Dec/Jan/Feb. to get here, plus parts of Nov./Mar, so I'm guessing July is when I finish the draft. I'm shooting for earlier. Not sure how long it will take to make it a manuscript - I will need to read through it, edit it, & then find some poor sap to read through it and provide thoughts. Then its a manuscript and I can start on Project II, already in progress (though on a 10-year commercial break).

BONUS - an interesting post from reason.com on the world after newspapers & an interesting piece on how newspapers are still profitable, just at a more "normal" 10% rate, rather than the 20% to 30% rate they have been. Oh, and 85% of their costs are tied up in paper, ink, trucks etc. In other words, all the "hard copy" stuff. In other words, even on greatly reduced advertising income an online-only paper could pay relatively healthy staff.