"For All the Tea in China"

[Hypatia Nachshon]

Recommend book by Sharon Rose. Fascinating story of how in mid-19th Century the British controlling India sent botanists into the unknown "heart" of China to "steal" the finest Chinese tea to transplant in India; revive company fortunes.

Full of local color, a botanist's world, the politics of the era. And more about tea that I ever know could exist!

(idiomatic expression "Not for all the tea in China" = I wouldn't do it no matter what the reward)

I've been drinking "Emperor's Tea" -- top-grade mountain-grown Taiwane$e green tea for years.

What's your favorite?

HB

[Todd]

Hi Higgs,

The wife and I adore Choice Organic Black Tea:

Know a lot of people that adobe green tea. I never could abide it: tastes too much like the inside of a lawn mover bag.

-T

[Todd]

Guess no one else likes tea on the group. Tea is a wonderful indulgence

[songbird]

Todd wrote: ...

i like tea, but don't drink it that often now. before when i was working long hours and coding a lot i would drink quite a bit of it.

in the winter, once in a while, i'll have a mug. either the standard lipton black tea or some oolong.

songbird

[Todd]

Hi Songbird,

I thought I did not like tea, until my wife introduced me to tea other than Lipton. Then I discovered that I adored tea. My wife and I drink it together. When my wife or I ask "would you like a cups of tea?", I do not believe the answer has ever been "no".

Lipton tastes to me like they are trying to do a cross over between coffee and tea. I can see some point to that, if you are going after coffee drinkers. But, we don't drink coffee. Gives us both a belly ache.

Coding? No wonder you love to garden. When I code, it warps my brain for about a half hour after I stop. Maybe I should retire to the garden settle out. (A good cup of Orange Pekoe works really well too.)

This is my wife and my favorite tea.

-T

[songbird]

Todd wrote: ...

i used to have a selection of about 30 teas handy, now i have two. i get too jittery from caffiene, so what caffiene i get comes from chocolate. :)

coding is very easy to me once i can get uninterrupted time (when i was at the university i worked full-time as a programmer and also most of my course work was programming

-- 70-100hr weeks weren't unusual). around here there is very little of that so i don't get very far too often on projects and once i get pulled aside for something it may take me a week or two before i can get back to it.

nothing i'm coding now is paid work or even all that important. i'm at a point where i'm trying to find what i want to do next but haven't found it yet. i might be getting close though with recent thoughts i just have to figure out how to do it and then get on with it. we'll see what happens.

songbird

[Todd]

Coffee gives me a belly ache and makes me jittery weird. Tea and Cocoa, no problem. I even find Tea helps me sleep before bed time. Interesting how all of us vary.

I have to pick a time when the phone is quiet. Otherwise I turn into a real Mr. Cranky Pants.

Been there. Total burn out. Wish I had never done it.

20+ years ago I coded tons in Modula2. Now I mainly code in BASH for myself and sometimes for a customer with a Linux machine. Sometimes I will code in Windows batch for customers (what a nightmare language).

I wrote and maintain a sweet batch rotator for Cobian Backup that I use all the time. Finds backup drives by their label and has the fastest mass directory deleter I have ever seen.

Someday, someday, I will learn Perl.

-T

Just some trivia, if you have ever done any bash programming, this is how to find the revision number of a Windows exe program in Linux:

$ wine FileVer.exe mbam-rules.exe | awk '{print $5}'

2013.3.1.1

[songbird]

vastly OT...

yep. i used to drink about half a cup of coffee every day during the week at work and would have a headache every Sunday. i love the tastes of some of the varieties but a fair number just smell like skunk to me.

...

15 years almost to the day for me. i left right about when the web was getting started. have always done programming since then, but stuff that i've wanted to do for fun.

...

i don't usually do anything with windows these days. the last time i did anything remotely was to use dosemu to run an old spreadsheet program.

bash is fun, i do a fair amount of that for various things. the past few years i've used it to build a testing framework for two C programs that talk back and forth to each other (rogue, rogomatic).

i don't know which language i've written the most in probably either C or Pascal, but as a CS student and with the number of courses i had it wasn't uncommon to learn several new ones in each class.

i have dabbled with python a little but that's about all the past few years. more interested in doing other things than learning yet another version of the same.

songbird

[~misfit~]

Whenever I see the word 'oolong' it makes me think of the fighting machines exalting in Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds.

[Brooklyn1]

Whenever I hear a woman say "kumquat" it evokes salacious thoughts.

[~misfit~]

LOL. Not that us men need an excuse though right? ;)

Speaking of... I have a 'Lime Quat' cutting that's showing a little top growth, I'm just hoping to see roots soon.

[Hypatia Nachshon]

That's because you have been - I conjecture - drinking the stuff sold as supermarket teabags.

REAL green tea is brewed very light -- just a pinch of the leaves - and not steeped very long.

If you ever get a chance to try real mountain-grown Chinese loose tea, you'll see what you have been missing.

HB

[Hypatia Nachshon]

[...]

I'm currently infatuated with Twining's Ginger-Lemon Herbal tea. Incorporates two of my favorite flavors. I don't have a problem with caffeine; I just enjoy the light, refreshing taste of this particular herbal tea.

HB

[T]

I look forward to it!

[alien from planet x]

EBay has a lot of tea listings, with free shipping. English breakfast tea is my favorite, then oolong, and Earl Grey, black tea, and many others.