Tea for Tuesday

I don't know if it's the weather, but I have been so lacking in energy lately. Living in a Northern country, one does get a lack of Vitamin D. But I'm not also getting the quiet time I need to recharge as an introvert, and I broke open one of these babies!

Specifically, the tea pot one. I had bought a puzzle back at the beginning of December featuring balls of yarn. I'm not a big puzzle person, but for some reason, I really enjoyed putting together that first puzzle. Let me remind you that 1000 pieces is a lot of pieces though, especially when they are all black, red, purple, green and blue!. The teapots and teacups should be more straightforward.

I went back to the store during their Boxing Day sale and just couldn't decide which one to buy, so I bought both! By the time spring comes around, I should have both of them done :-)

Tea for Tuesday

So when I went back to school, I took a class on material culture without really knowing what it was about - I just needed to fill three credits somewhere. In a nutshell, it's the relationships between people and objects. There's some objects that are universal...such as cups, and I added yet another one to my collection. I had no willpower when it came to purchasing a Keep Cup from the indie coffee kiosk at the farmers market. I had been wanting one for some time, but the colours were just horrible, mostly grey, peach, blue and green. Nothing bright and vibrant that shouted to the world "This is Jill's cup, hands off!" (see, material culture, right there!).

As it happened, the coffee kiosk had just gotten a new shipment of cups and I went nuts digging through a box that the supplier left. "He said that all these colours sold well in Australia, but Australians have terrible taste, because none of these are selling," the clerk said as she helped me.

I nodded as I mixed and matched the cups and lids. I loved a dark purple and green combo, but realized it looked a little too much like it belonged to kid. Ahem! Navy blue definitely had a more grown up flair. And speaking of kids, the Keep Cup was inspired by the sippy cup the inventor gave to her daughter. You can be forgiven for thinking that it does indeed look like an adult sippy cup.

The best part is the well designed lid and the plug for the sippy hole. Many a reusable mug has left me splashed and disappointed. It's not rocket science - maybe it's just that most cups are not designed and tested by actual coffee lovers. Oh, and if drinking out of a plastic cup leaves you aghast, your drink will not taste like plastic in this cup at all either.

Happy New Year! Have A Cold!

I didn't plan on spending the first seven days of the new year with a cold, but it was pretty bad. I bailed on Mom's birthday party, stared at the ceiling, chugged Emergen C and nipped at Nyquil. But this was a doozy of a cold. The sad thing is, if I had just listened to my Dad, I might have gotten over it sooner. When you come from an immigrant family, it's a constant struggle between old ways and new ways, and when repeated doses of Nyquil left my mouth more arid than the Sahara, I finally gave in. Time to pull out of big guns.

Garlic.

Lots of garlic.

Now, the way a cold works is that one doesn't get better until it passes on to someone else. As I roamed the shopping centre, the virus awakened and I searched for healthy young bodies to sneeze and cough on. People avoided me, especially after my left eye spontaneously teared up and couldn't stay open. The bags under my eyes were brutal, and I looked every bit of a virus vampire as I felt. I came to my senses, paid 63 cents for a bulb and hurried on out.

Image courtesy of Grant Cochrane / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Once home, I found my little used garlic press and crushed a fresh clove on a slice of toast. Here goes nothing! I like garlic, but usually it's cooked and accompanied by other flavours. It's an accent, not the main course. Each bite was intense and took a lot of willpower to choke down.

A few hours later, another slice of garlic toast. My sinuses felt better, but soon I smelled worse. I was already banished to the spare bedroom anyway, so it couldn't hurt to have more garlic. That night, I could literally feel my whole body fight the cold. I was flush from head to toe and needed no covers at all. The strange, warm glowy feeling lasted the next day, and topped up with one final slice of toast. Four cloves and I couldn't take any more. By the end of the second day, I was breathing through both nostrils again. Ah! Talk about fast relief! It sure beat waking up with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, thanks to Nyquil.

Huh, it is true then, all this stuff about garlic being a wonder food with anti-microbial and anti-fungal properties. It even, ahem, has a laxative effect, which so many websites fail to mention (but no doubt falls under "and many more benefits"). The moment I realized that I was morphing from a virus vampire to a pungent poltergeist was when I knew I had to stop right there and have a shower instead of more toast. Now I'm back to my normal self...until the next cold!

70s Saturday Sci-Fi Scans

As one year ends and a new one begins, people struggle to define the past within the present and the future. Ten years from now, 2013 will seem like a faraway place. Thirty years from now, the teens will seem weird (heh, I guess teens always will be) but time is actually a continuum, which may surprise children of the 80s that one of their favourite series had roots in the 70s. Maybe it's more appropriate that the first book was called...

The Cave of Time

You are the hero of your own adventure

This is a book you'll love reading. You will read it differently from any other book you have read before, because in this book you will decide how the story comes out. You'll get to choose exactly where you - the hero - will go along the way. Like this:

What happens next in the story? It all depends on the choices you make. How does the story end? Only you can find out! And the best part is you can keep reading and rereading until you've had not one, but many incredibly daring experiences!





It's so quaint that they had to try so hard to explain the concept in 1979. We play Choose Your Own Adventure every time we play a game or surf the Web (especially Wikipedia), but, for legions of kids, this was the closest they would get to hypertext or the burgeoning interactive fiction genre. My brother and I read them as fast as the library could get them, and the original series spawned dozens of titles. We used a deck of cards to mark our places should we need to retrace our steps. And even though the covers and illustrations mostly featured boys, the text was gender neutral enough to appeal to girls. My brother was always a reluctant reader, and since comics were a no-no in our house, these were perfect for him. My favourites ended up being Be An Interplanetary Spy and Which Way books, which had more of a science fiction/weird horror bent.

It was fun to pick up The Cave of Time and remember why the series was so successful - kids often don't have much choice in their lives (or, at least, I didn't) and the books were literally all about you - just about every sentence starts with the word. You are the hero! You are the genius! You are anything you can be in the CYA universe!