{ The 39 Steeps tea blog's stately progression }  

Hi, all!

It's been awhile since last I wrote here, and awhile before that, and so on. I'm regularly irregular, it seems.

I've been teaching at Valeo Academy, and over the last year my students—including, surprisingly, a number of high school boys—have taken an interest in the tea I have been drinking.

So last term, they drank, and drank, and drank my tea, sampling and discovering why the Good Stuff is, in fact, the good stuff. And they drank my tea until I completely ran through my dragon's hoard of Camellia sinensis leaves. Fie!

And a few of the students came up with the wise idea to actually cough up some money to help me buy more tea. Thus, The 39 Steeps Tea Club is born. Though anyone at Valeo can sample the tea, the kids who added some money to the till get bragging rights as founding members, and they get to drink anything I have, until I run out of tea again.

Our first tranche of tea has been generously provided for us by Cinnabar (Virginia Wright), the author of Gongfu Girl and numerous other writing outlets; and Brett Boynton of Black Dragon Tea Bar blog. Together they are the proprietors of Phoenix Tea Shop, which has been around for about five years at this writing, since 2010. When I contacted Cinnabar via Facebook, I told her my budget and asked her to come up with an unflavored tea care package for my students. And wow, did she and Brett provide.

In the days to come, I'll begin showcasing tea again on the blog, hurray and heaven be praised! I know I take a circuitous route to writing here, so we'll see how this goes. Thank you for your patronage. And thank you, Phoenix Tea Shop, for providing my students and me some delicious teas.

Nightmarish Teabag Adverts Are Stalking Me

I am being stalked by Google's advertising preferences with heinous ads like the following:

{ Now, that's just wrong. }

It's the peril of blogging. I use an an image of ugly teabags in the previous post, "Just Slow Down Already," and now every page is covered in stomach-turning caricatures of the royal family.

Note to everyone: I am from the United States. I am a damned Yankee. I do not follow the daily meanderings of the British aristocracy. I also do not use teabags unless I'm under duress. I'm certainly not willing to shell out $14.99 on joke teabags celebrating (or burying) the current silly batch of royals so I can stare at them while I drink their undoubtedly horrible tea.

Google Adwords apparently does not understand irony nor sarcasm. If I mention or take a picture of, say, Kim Kardashian or Lady Gaga, should I expect to see them on every web page I browse for the next few months?

Dear readers, please, PLEASE do not send me these tea bags as a joke gift. Because then I will be forced to send them to "Cinnabar Gongfu" over at Phoenix Tea, like a fruitcake no one knows what to do with. (I would venture to say, however, that it's somewhat unlikely that they have a full set of British Royals teabags in stock, so maybe I'll be helping them meet a demographic that has been ill served.)

I won't even break the seal on the packaging. No, I mean it.