Today's Tea: Kusmichoff Anastasia

 I came downstairs on a break from email and homework and writing and reviewing to make something to eat, and I figured I'd set a pot on to brew while I figured out what I wanted. And then the tea totally stole the show. I made my pot, then, since it was so nice out, I sat on the back porch while I drank the first cup, and the cats sat with me in the sunshine, and we watched lizards and bees. (There's bees here! Big fat fuzzy ones that can only be making honey somewhere secret.)

 I don't usually milk or sugar my tea, but Kusmi is very strong, and it's made for milking and sugaring, and even just a few minutes while I cut an onion for lunch (it's onion-garlic rice, not just an onion), it got too strong and bitter to drink alone. So I threw in maybe three tablespoons of sugar for the whole pot, and a cup or so of the almond milk I had left in the fridge, then put the filter back in so the tea would make up for the mellowing of the milk (it always always always tastes watered down to me unless the tea is also infused in the milk, no matter what milk I use. Well, except for goat milk; that didn't infuse at all, and totally overwhelmed the tea flavor.)

It's the top one in this pic. Anastasia is china black and ceylon tea flavored with bergamot, lemon and orange. I'm pretty sure the three other flavors I have from Kusmi have the same ingredients, but they all somehow taste different. This one tastes citrusy, but not like Earl Grey, and when you milk it with almond milk, it gets a little richer, and the almond smell just blooms, and coordinates perfectly. It's great.

Kusmi is a sort of astringent, high-tannin tea, anyway, and even with the milk, you feel that semi-dryness on your tongue, but the milk eases a lot of that, and it actually comes across as pretty nice. It stops the milkiness and the sugar from getting cloying or from lingering too long in your taste-buds.

Tardis, I haz it.

New shirt!

Posted via email from pirategirljack's posterous

Found in my Groupon ad this morning: What the Function Keys do

F1: Prints
F2: Makes monitor only display color in shades of brown
F3: Forces keyboard to slowly ooze Vaseline for comfort purposes
F4: Prints two copies
F5: Buys rights to domain name "sensualpizza.net"
F6: Replaces desktop image with beautiful photo of a mountain that's on fire
F7: Brings up a bunch of Quaker Oats commercials
F8: Substitutes ".pdf" extension with ".hummus"
F9: Predicts how many biological parents you have
F10: Increases internal computer temperature by one degree
F11: Doesn't do anything
F12: Navigates to a website that compiles photos of puppies that are all now ugly, unlovable adult dogs

River Song by Ally Rhodes

Really? with Seth and Amy: Birth Control

Really? with Seth and Amy: Birth Control

Video! Click it!

27 Rules for Conquering the Gym!

fierce-fit-fabulous:

1. A gym is not designed to make you feel instantly better about yourself. If a gym wanted to make you feel instantly better about yourself, it would be a bar.

2. Give yourself a goal. Maybe you want to lose 10 pounds. Maybe you want to quarterback the New York Jets into the playoffs. But be warned: Losing 10 pounds is hard.

3. Develop a gym routine. Try to go at least three times a week. Do a mix of strength training and cardiovascular conditioning. After the third week, stop carrying around that satchel of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies.

4. No one in the history of gyms has ever lost a pound while reading “The New Yorker” and slowly pedaling a recumbent bicycle. No one.

5. Bring your iPod. Don’t borrow the disgusting gym headphones, or use the sad plastic radio attachment on the treadmill, which always sounds like it’s playing Kenny Loggins from a sewer.

6. Don’t fall for gimmicks. The only tried-and-true method to lose 10 pounds in 48 hours is food poisoning.

7. Yes, every gym has an overenthusiastic spinning instructor who hasn’t bought a record since “Walking on Sunshine.”

8. There’s also the Strange Guy Who is Always at the Gym. Just when you think he isn’t here today…there he is, lurking by the barbells.

9. ”Great job!” is trainer-speak for “It’s not polite for me to laugh at you.”

10. Beware a hip gym with a Wilco step class.

11. Gyms have two types of members: Members who wipe down the machines after using them, and the worst people in the universe.

12. Nope, that’s not a “recovery energy bar with antioxidant dark chocolate.” That’s a chocolate bar.

13. Avoid Unsolicited Advice Guy, who, for the small fee of boring you to death, will explain the proper method for any exercise in 45 minutes or longer.

14. You can take 10 Minute Abs, 20 Minute Abs, and 30 Minute Abs. There is also Stop Eating Pizza and Eating Sheet Cake Abs—but that’s super tough!

15. If you’re motivated to buy an expensive home exercise machine, consider a “wooden coat rack.” It costs $40, uses no electricity and does the exact same thing.

16. There’s the yoga instructor everyone loves, and the yoga instructor everyone hates. Memorize who they are.

17. If you see an indoor rock climbing wall, you’re either in a really cool gym or a romantic comedy starring Kate Hudson.

18. Be cautious about any class with the words “sunrise,” “hell,” or “Moby.”

19. If a gym class is going to be effective, it’s hard. If you’re relaxed and enjoying yourself, you’re at brunch.

20. If you need to bring your children, just let them loose in the silent meditation class. Nobody minds, and kids love candles.

21. Don’t buy $150 sneakers, $100 yoga pants, and $4 water. Muscle shirts are for people with muscles, and rhythm guitarists.

22. Fancy gyms can be seductive, but once you get past the modern couches and fresh flowers and the water with lemon slices, you’re basically paying for a boutique hotel with B.O.

23. Everyone sees you secretly racing the old people in the pool.

24. If you’re at the point where you’ve bought biking shoes for the spinning class, you may as well go ahead and buy an actual bike. It’s way more fun and it doesn’t make you listen to C+C Music Factory.

25. Fact: Thinking about going to the gym burns between 0 and 0 calories.

26. A successful gym membership is like a marriage: If it’s good, you show up committed and ready for hard work. If it’s not good, you show up in sweatpants and watch a lot of bad TV.

27. There is no secret. Exercise and lay off the fries. The end.

Source: fierce-fit-fabulous

Shonogonisms: Things I love the look of

• Fluids flowing together--like milk in tea or coffee, or ink in water
• Bare branches against a clean sky through my bedroom window
• A man's hands with long fingers, gesturing
• Sunlight through my own hair
• A pile of books I haven't read yet
• Sheer curtains with a cat behind them, looking out the window
• Lanterns hanging in a tree
• Tea in a glass, with light shining through it
• Dew on rose petals
• Piles of pillows and blankets with good light and space for me
• Red things on rainy days
• The clean lines of midcentury modern furniture
• Tall, thin men in good suits or pea coats
• The creaminess of a perfect flan
• Diamonds on dark skin
• A half-written page, begging for the rest of the words
• Things that are perfectly made, but much too small or too large
• Tall guys standing next to short girls
• Inside things set up outside as if they aren't outside
• Sterling silver in organic styles

John Cleese Carefully Considers Your Futile Comments

This is how a smart, funny, thoughtful man responds to internet trolls as well as real people.

Also, I hope one day I'm as comfortable before a camera as he is.

Dreary day

Posted via email from pirategirljack's posterous

Ninja, the knicknacks, and the golden apple of chaos.

Posted via email from pirategirljack's posterous

Two cats + one lap = two overextended knees.

Posted via email from pirategirljack's posterous

Interview clothes

Posted via email from pirategirljack's posterous

Digitalization of Memory

Digital Archives of the Personal

Nishant Batsha tries to remember exactly he did exactly one year ago and finds that digital records don’t add up to a complete memory.
02.06.12

I read this article, and I know exactly what he's thinking about--that idea that sometimes occurs, where we realize that brains aren't really all that good at holding a memory the way it is. Facts get distorted. Details blur, or switch out with those of similar events. Emotions color how we see the events to begin with, and our interpretations, which then become memories, probably won't add up with someone else's. And then you get that idea where you want to know what actually happened.

I've been getting Timehop in my inbox. You link it to your twitter account, and it then sends you an email every morning that tells you all your tweets from the same day the previous year. Since Twitter doesn't show anything older than a month anymore, I find it pretty amazing, and since I've been getting the emails (which are always really positive and cheerful), I've been paying a little more attention to what I tweet so that next year, better tweets come through the 'Hop. But it occurs to me after reading this article, that it's getting easier and easier for the internet to remember exactly what we were doing. Batsha talks about Gmail as an archive, and searching bank records and cellphone details. I would add comments on Facebook, Twitter updates, pictures on Instagram (or Dailybooth or Facebook or Twitpic) of what we're eating or who we're hanging out with or what we're wearing. Getglue tells us what we were watching, and sometimes what we thought of it. Foursquare tells us everywhere we weren't too embarrassed or too distracted about and checked into. Foodspotting shows us what we ate, Livestrong shows us how much we exercised, Endomondo shows us what exercises we did and how far we went.

We might not be able, exactly, to reconstruct a whole thought pattern, but we have more and more points that outline that pattern. The problem is getting it all in line in one place, and that's where things like Memolane come in handy--they try their best to be so open-ended that you can plug anything into them, and they'll collect all the info up in a timeline, each day strung along a meta-timeline showing you your whole digital life.

Some people say it's the death of memory. I think it's more like the evolution of scrapbooking. Make it all digital so it no longer has to pile up in boxes (which is what I used to do, and do much, much less since I got an internet-capable phone). It saves the things that help us remember, and links them all in the objective way that brains can't, so that we can see what we were like, for good and for bad. We can be archaeologists of ourselves.

I'm hoping it helps people understand themselves better. That it helps memories stay stronger, longer. I'm hoping that when we finally upload our memories entirely to the internet, it's built on things like this, so we can go back and see them all again.

This came in an email from Mark Morford

Don't know who that is? Look him up, he's fab--a writer and yoga instructor who does these great, irreverent, always slightly naughty columns that always amuse me.

Anyway:

"Hi again Sami! 

I know! So many MM newsletters in so little time! Hope it's not too annoying. But really, what else are you gonna do right now, work?

I'll be brief. I need your help. Need your input.

Here's the gist: I have a new iPhone app coming out soon. See it right there? It's called Mark Morford's Apothecary. Big strange wonderful compendium of curated columns, a quote generator, a recommendation engine, that sort of thing. Totally fun, thoroughly awesome, completely vainglorious in all the right ways. And I could use your help filling part of it.

The app's personal recommendation engine (called Rx) is divided into five categories. Moan. Devour. Listen. Obey. Imbibe. I'll let you guess what each one contains.

Imbibe is where you come in. Imbibe is all about cocktails and related delights. And it needs recipes. YOUR recipes, is what I'm thinking.

I have a few fave drinks of my own, but not nearly enough to do this section proper justice. I could simply scour various cocktail blogs and hot bar-tending books and fill it that way, but what fun is that?

So. Do you have a favorite cocktail or two that you love to make, that you make really well -- or at least really, really enthusiastically? Do you have a favorite way, time, person, attitude, mood, location, music, emotional state in which to enjoy it? Want to be included in the Apothecary, with your name attached to said concoction? Awesome.

Then do this. Click here and send me an email. Include the following:

1. Name of your cocktail (can be traditional, or something you made up)
2. Ingredients (include measures and maybe brand names. IE; 1/2 oz rye whisky, 2oz Hangar One Kaffir Lime, shot of pickle juice, three ice cubes, two angel tears, etc)
3. Procedure/technique for whipping it up  
4. Type of glass/mug/container best sipped from 
5. And special instructions or tips for enjoying (use your imagination)  
6. Your name (if you want it included; I'll use first names and last initials, as in Mark M). Oh hey! If you have a PHOTO of said concoction, send it along (keep it small). I'll see if I can stick that in, too.  

That's it! I'll curate and choose the best for inclusion in the app. Be irreverent. Be strange. Be dirty, funny, or be totally profound and serious. I want it all (but be brief). Hot and cold drinks. Punch. Hangover cures. Virgin cocktails for you AA fans. Whatever.

NOTE: "Real" drinks only. No Red Bull/vodka nastiness. Then again, if it makes the world a better place, I'm open. If you have beautiful, profound way of enjoying a single shot of whisky (for example), that might work, too.

What do you get in return for sharing your divine good taste? My unconditional love. Appreciation. The endless gratitude of anyone who gets the app and makes your drink. Isn't that enough? What else you gonna do right now, work?

Come on. Show me your cocktail. You know you want to."

Now to decide what drinks I'll send him...