T-t-t-tea!

"Teas, where small talk dies in agonies."
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

"When the end of the world is near, drink tea."
Anonymous

(and if you want to see more tea-quotes, go to Wikiquote)

I distress, sometimes I'm a mess, but I have to agree with the saying that drinking tea will help you in many situations. Oh, don't get me wrong, I like lots of other beverages, but there is a ... simple joy to be found in the fact that tea actually will make you feel better. (Said the addict to her teapot). My stomach has been a bit upset since yesterday (nothing terrible, but I have no idea why), so I've been drinking tea to calm it down.

Tea is great that way: since it's sour (pH between 4-6), and the milk (if you take it with milk) helps to buffer it (cow milk balances it to the higher pH, close to 6), your stomach's pH will actually get a bit higher (from it's pH of 1-3) and thus make you feel a bit better. Not so acidic. It's the same when you eat lutefisk (sw. lutfisk): it's so basic it'll won't make you feel like you're stuffed from eating a LOT of it. Two things tea WILL do to you, no matter how you take it, is make your teeth feel slightly furry and increase your need to pee. Hence:

• you want to brush your teeth if you drink a lot of it, like you do when you drink a lot of orange juice;
• and since the antidiuretic effect makes you thirsty, you want to drink more. And it makes you think about the nephrons and vasopressin. Aaah, animal physiology lessons... *remembers*

But yes, tea creates a vicious circle. But then again, so does alcohol. And coffee too. And Star Trek. And even my favorite Star Trek (NG) character, Jean Luc Picard (what's it with me and bald men?), drinks tea.

 *sigh*

My tea-implementing things:
water kettle (red, of course),
tea pots (as you see, I have three),
honey, milk and tools for loose tea.

Sometimes, I just don't get the way some people fuss about how the whole tea-making process: all the way from how it's picked, dried, stored, blended, steeped and finally how it's in it's finished form and what to blend it with. I like both green and black tea, in both honey-sweetened and unsweetened form, and I like berry infusions. Yes, I do consider them to be teas, even if they don't have any tea-leaves in them. I know, from personal experience working the whole summer of 2006 in a lab with a project about how green/black tea produces hydrogen-peroxide that the water you use to make the tea really affects the outcome. It taught me e.g. that the higher the pH, the darker the tea will get.

Yeah, the cup IS my favorite, and -yes- it's from IKEA's "365+"series.
I pimped it, a little. The wine glass marker on the ear is
also my idea of "how to pimp your tea cup".
I don't consider this "IKEA hacking".

I like big tea cups - can't for the life of me understand cafés where you get tea in coffee cups. Tea is -not- coffee, tea does not make you feel the same way as coffee (hyped in the head and sour in the stomach), so why serve it in coffee cups? A good tea cup is at least 3 times the size of a regular coffee cup. I guess you have to drink tea to understand serving tea...

So... if you wonder what happened to nr 1... well, I broke it.
I'm an expert at breaking delicate things made from glass and porcelain.

Anyway, the thing I'm still lacking in the "tea department", is a TEA COSY! Damn it! Not that I need one for my smaller black pot (it serves only two cups, and I think it's one of the best things I've ever bought at a second hand store for the price of just 3 euros), but the larger violet one really should have one. The porcelain it's made out of gets terribly hot, and you burn you hands on it.

But, that's another blog post.