Tea Time


Sarah picked me up a new tea maker yesterday. This one is definitely an improvement over my previous model. It has 3-quart capacity (instead of 2), fewer parts, and a lever that lets you pick the strength of the brew (high please!). My old model's pitcher had a number of cracks in it, that made it quite a messy exercise to pour tea.

My tea maker is very important to me, because I use it so much! I pretty much brew a new pitcher every day. Since I've stopped drinking soft drinks (and dropped 30 lbs), I've got to get my caffeine from somewhere! I mix in Splenda into my tea to give it a sugar-like taste. Splenda has 62% of the sweetener market now, according to the Wikipedia entry on it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chess again

This past summer I played in a regular rated chess tournament (a team event) for the first time in 8 years. Last time I took a long break (although not this long), it took me about 9 months to put my game back together. I'm about 5 months in this time and while my results aren't showing it yet, I can tell I'm starting to figure some things out. My confidence is definitely improving, but I don't have any swagger yet. Might take good results to bring that back. After such a long layoff, just remembering to make your moves properly, write down your moves, and hit your clock is a challenge. Some things have definitely changed that I'm adjusting to. The fashions in openings are quite different. A lot of white systems seem to feature a queenside fianchetto (b3), which didn't seem to make many appearances in the past. In my last tournament someone even did that in an open Sicilian. Also games are now played more often with an increment instead of a delay. Going from a...
Read more

Eclipse On My iMac

Image
My new iMac has renewed my interest in doing a little programming in my free time. It's not hard to understand - a slick new computer with a 24" screen and UN IX underneath - what's not to love? I downloaded Eclipse and it seems to work very well. I thought I would try a little application programming in Java. I've dabbled with Java over the years and I figured it was time to re-visit it. I found a library called Chesspresso that is LPGL . I've got a little to show for it so far - although obviously I don't have it picking up piece images very well just yet and the pieces aren't moveable. I'm working on downloading the iPhone SDK so I can play with that. Meanwhile I'm listening to "The Stage Names" and "The Stand Ins" from Okkervil River .
Read more

Uncle Phillip Visits

Image
My brother is back in town to visit for Thanksgiving. Connor got to hang out with him all day and play. Tonight we're continuing our George Lucas movie tour. Connor's already seen all the Star Wars movies and is now working his way through Indiana Jones.
Read more