Tea and stuff

December 16 Tea of the year. I can taste my favorite tea right now. What's yours?

Irish Breakfast Tea from Trader Joe's. What I like best about it is that it's packaged Brit-style, with two attached teabags for making a small pot, and without tags, strings, envelopes or staples. So the bags can go into the compost directly. And when we had guests from India, they got up early, found that tea on their own in the kitchen and loved it.



The reason I have an unopened box is that I'm taking it to the Santa Fe Symposium in January; I've started packing already.

A gift idea (sort of...)

This came by phone:

We gift wrapped my boss's desk while he had the day off. :)

I'm not saying who sent me that, lest the boss in question should discover it in advance. Or later.

Flowers and Packaging

When flowers were delivered, i figured they must be for Holly. No, turns out they were from Holly! They came from Stems, where she used to work. This is the video I made for her to let her know they arrived, and what they looked like. She couldn't see the video I mailed, so I might as well put it here so she can see it. The flower arrangement has been set in four places already. This time, it was on the table where we're working a jigsaw puzzle about cats.

The blue glass vase didn't show very well in that light. Here:



The Best of 2009 Continues:
December 15 Best packaging. Did your headphones come in a sweet case? See a bottle of tea in another country that stood off the shelves?

I love cardboard boxes, I do. There are a couple of things this year that struck me.

One was The Beatles Rock Band box. We got the full set with the special guitars and drums. I wasn't there for the unpacking, but saw the packing materials later. Awesome; efficient; elegant. Then I started to cut the box up (see why below), and was deeply impressed at the quality of its construction and materials. They spared no thought or expense on packaging that in a quality way.

I still have the box lid. I couldn't bring myself to cut a big photo of the Beatles.

The other was the new way Lulu.com is shipping books in bulk. For Moving a Puddle they were stacked up in a box with long sheets of heavy paper in around, or sometimes with sheets of foam stuffed around. I reused all that packing. For The Big Book of Unschooling, there are big boxes, each with four strong, beautiful cardboard boxes within, each with four or five books in it. So in a big box, there are only sixteen to twenty books. I suppose it has to do with weight. I don't mind, because the cover is really beautiful, and this way they come in pristine condition. Then when one is ordered I wrap it in tissue paper and sandwich it between two pieces of cardboard (and I keep getting these shipments of cardboard! ).

When the first batch arrived at the Good Vibrations Conference in San Diego, I was dismayed to see how much cardboard would be sent to recycling. NICE, solid boxes without a mark on them, but we couldn't bring them all home.

I'm going to add photos to this later, so if you love shipping cartons too, check back!

"Best Rush of the year"

December 14 Rush. When did you get your best rush of the year?

Head-rush, she means, I guess? Swooping thrill? Electrifying newness? Mind-opening, conscience-altering moment?

Two-thousand and nine... I could describe moments in which I caught my breath because something was so perfect or unexpected. I can remember things I saw and recall thinking "I want to remember this forever." There were some "Oh, that went well!!" moments.

This has been something of a "yeah, but..." year. Glowing memory, but... my leg didn't work; I was afraid; I wrecked the Saturn; I dropped my laptop; I fell down; I got swine flu; I stole an umbrella (by accident; it got mailed back). Holly left, three times! (She comes back to re-pack and to leave again.)

Sometimes I caught my breath or thought "I wish I had remembered the things before this better."

And yet we're all safe and whole.

Okay. The most unadulterated, exuberant bits of 2009 were some letters I got from people saying that because of my website or my book, their lives were both more peaceful and exciting. A few different people wrote, and said sweet things about how happy and expressive their kids were being, after the parents were able to relax and embrace the wholeness of their lives.

Knowing that I've been able to assist in making some other families' real lives actually happier is a rush.

Some of my quiet, thoughtful, memorable moments were shared on this blog over the past year, and others have no remaining evidence outside my faulty and mortal memory.

Best change to the place I live...

December 13 What's the best change you made to the place you live?

Keith put some solar-powered lit-up stepping stones in front. That's nice.

We consolidated a couple of compost piles into one big new one and that's fun.

We have a guest room! (When Holly's not home we have one, and if necessary we have two guest rooms plus the library!)

Those aren't changes "I made" all by my own self, though.

We got a Roku player. That's a nice addition. For $100 you can watch movies from Netflix and other such things. Rent movies from Amazon onto the TV... But that's not the answer.

Keith made a bottom step under the long stairs (I mean "fire escape") from the deck, and that's nice. It's removable so backing the truck up is still doable.

OH!!! THIS IS IT: The best change I made to the place I live is that I bought three pots of Agapantha / Peter Pan Lilies of the Nile and put them out in three different places not even visible to one another. Yes, that is definitely or possibly the best thing of the year as to the place where I live.



The middle thing, not the sunflowers, and not the mimosa.
More on those.

A Questionable Potato

Best New Food for me in 2009

December 12 New food. You're now in love with Lebanese food and you didn't even know what it was in January of this year.

Not Lebanese. Welsh. Sounded gross, looked gross, did not taste gross; tasted great!

The butcher shop it came from,
which has a reflection of the chip shop across the street
which made this food:
(which I ate and really enjoyed).

Joy (in the middle photo) was my hostess and took me there. Thanks again, Joy! (Photos are clickable or you can see them all large here, but ignore the fish.)

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In other news: The first set is not really food. The second set is really not food.

The door was made of candy:



Tumbleweed. I said I'd find a tumbleweed to take to the Santa Fe Symposium, and this was on Tahiti St., near our house. I asked Marty to leave the jeep in the shot for scale. We cannot take this to Santa Fe. TOOOO big. It's more than one tumbleweed, but they grew together from infancy. Seedlingness. Their whole single-season lives.