Hello again! I decided to open today's chatty and informative hug (of course I'm kidding, it will be all chat) with our resident lilac's spring show, unfortunately lit because it seems I love the lilac more than I do good photography:
I've been doing an art course about how to recognize the colour combinations you like and this is a classic for me apparently. I seem to prefer neutral backgrounds and with a pair of brights in front. If they smell great, so much the better. And lilacs are so, so delicious, aren't they?
Now that the flowers have served their purpose our lilac has gone back to its usual summertime tasks of offering shelter to passing birds, and painting shadows on the deck wall. It does an excellent at both.
But that's not really want I wanted to share today: instead, I want to talk about - well, I'm going to say tea, but not really only tea.
Allow me to explain. There's this wonderful scene at the end of the film The Cat Returns in which the chaotic main character, whose life is always a disorganized rush, appears calmly at the breakfast table, neatly dressed and sipping tea, when her exhausted professional-quilter mother staggers in for caffeine. She offers her mother some of her tea, which she has blended herself, thereby completing her character arc from utter disaster to On Top Of It All.
The scene has stayed in my mind ever since I saw that film ten years ago or so, and yet, it's only occurred to me in the last week or so that
ANYBODY CAN BLEND THEIR OWN TEA!!
Gah. I've been so, so bored with my decaf tea options for months now, only able to get loose Assam, and a blend of Darjeeling and vanilla. The vanilla one is nice, but lacks something, and the Assam is kind of flat. But one day I was looking glumly at the tin holding my current favourite caffeinated tea, knowing I wouldn't be able to handle it, and I suddenly registered the subheading - 'a blend of Assam and Darjeeling teas'.
Did I already say Gah?
Turns out, decaf Assam and Darjeeling with vanilla combine to make a really nice tea. And blending a little full-caffeine Darjeeling with decaf Assam is very manageable and full of flavour. I don't bother pre-mixing any of this. I just put half as much as I normally would of one tea, and and then as much again of the next, into an empty tea bag.
It's official: I can drink tea I blended myself.
(Also, I finished the writing part of my current book project and am on to editing, which I can do in far shorter bursts, allowing me to tidy up the house and catch up on laundry. I'm sure the timing of all these developments is a complete coincidence.)
And now that I've written this down, maybe it won't take me so long to notice simple and obvious solutions to the next of life's tinier challenges. A girl can hope, right?
That's me for today - stay well, and I'll see you again soon!