Friday, 2/6/04 - 20:27
(written months ago and mysteriously never posted)
Muckefuck’s TEA CENSUS:
Why do I find this meme so compelling? Because up until the Thursday before Christmas, I was drinking 5-10 cups of tea per day if you count what went into my thermos in the morning. Now I'm back down to maybe 3.
Of course, I still enjoy a fair amount of coffee, but not at night when the grinder might wake up Ted, and not in the morning when I feel fairly awake and only need a little green tea to keep me going. Coffee is a drink for the mid-afternoon or for teaching. Tea is a drink for seminars, because it still tastes good cold two hours into class, when you need it.
- Peet’s Hubei silver-tipped green tea (loose) – my favorite tea lately, because I keep discovering nuances to the flavor and because it has yet to fuck me up, unlike coffee or black tea.
- Genmai cha from Japan (that’s the kind of green tea with the rice)
- Peet’s Yunnan fancy China black tea
- Red Rose tea – pretty good, what Ted’s dad drinks.
- Lipton’s brisk tea – I had 100 bags of this just a few short weeks ago. I know it’s the sort tea that opens me for mockery from tea snobs, so I hasten to clarify that this is primarily my thermos tea. I’ve found that if I take a thermos to class with me reduces the number of expensive lukewarm mugs of coffee I need to buy each day. It also provides entertainment for sections, as they get to see whether my wild gesticulation will cause the hot tea to spill. But really that’s only half the story. I still like Lipton better than better teas, maybe because it’s what I drank as a child in ice tea form and as a college student in the dorms tackling physics problems with David at 3 AM.
- Twinning’s mint (green) tea -- I like that it's caffeinated, but is it mint enough?
- Twinning’s vanilla (black) and peach (black) teas – gifts yay from my Bruder Chris! The vanilla is excellent; haven't opened the peach yet.
- Yerba matte, from the Queen of Wands, who left it in our care when she went home this summer. Guests to our home seem to enjoy this more than we do.
And then, there are the naturally non-caffeinated teas. I rarely drink these unless my throat hurts (hey, I haven't lost my voice yet this quarter! go me!), so I can’t list them all from memory. Mostly we have remnants of the Queen’s Celestial Seasonings sampler and remnants of my Good Earth sampler, whose caffeinated members are long since gone.
I don’t understand why anyone would name a tea “Sleepy Time,” and given that, I don’t understand why anyone would buy it. Would you name your product after its most deleterious side effect? It’s analogous to marketing Pukey Time beer. Now admittedly a lot of people would buy Pukey Time just for its witty name, and I might be one of them. But I don’t think the folks at Celestial Seasonings have a sense of humor.
Besides herb teas, the major thing missing from the above list is chai. And the reason it’s missing is that I haven’t had any around the house for months. I can’t get more because the grocery workers are on strike, and apparently it's out of stock wherever else I go.
Long live Diaryland!
The five most recent entries:
More Naval Gazing - Saturday, 8/13/05
Anniversary Diving - Friday, 8/12/05
Academic Tip of the Week - Tuesday, May. 17, 2005
How to tell a Midwesterner - Sunday, 4/24/05
Academic Feelings - Thursday, 4/21/05
Ted's most recent entry:
Monday, May 12