moon_custafer

theengineer @ 04:25 pm: Busy Week
High Culture was the theme of the past few days. Last week I attended the Tightrope Books launch of Best Canadian Poetry 2009, hosted by Myna Wallin. Readings, musical entertainment, and free food. Kudos to all involved in the event, and the Revival is much classier for poetry than the back room of Clinton's.

The next day, Cory Doctorow had a reading at the Merril, the start of his North American book tour for Makers. The place was literally packed, we had people in the hall and sitting under tables. Cory was his usual entertaining and interesting self, I really admire his ability to argue concisely and clearly on the spur of the moment (even on topics not related to copyrights). His big worry right now is Google's plan to scan and make available out-of-copyright books, not because he thinks it's a bad idea, but because Google has so far refused to sign onto any sort of privacy policy regarding people using the service, so they will know what titles you read, how many pages you read, how you linked to the service, where you were at the time (IP address) etc. etc. He also treated us with his parenting tips (rip all your Disney DVD, so when the kid crawls into your lap while you're at the computer, you can open up one of them in a window in the corner to distract her). And free copies of Linux were available from a friend of his. There was a long lineup for autographs, and as Cory likes talking to people, it was running a couple of minutes per person. I don't know what time he ended up getting out of there.

Right after that I caught up with Joel and Melanie for a bit down at the Rivoli, where a band Joe liked (Zeus) was playing. They were good, but I actually preferred one of the warm-up acts, Moby Dick, in full pirate/sailor garb, playing 60s-style stuff, which I think is due for a comeback.

Friday was the Reel Asian Film Festival, and a silent kung-fu film from 1927, Red Heroine. A young woman's village is attacked, grandmother killed, she's take prisoner as a concubine by the local warlord, is rescued by the local hermit called the White Monkey, he trains her, and she returns to save some friends. The film is pretty slow in the middle when our main character completely vanishes (they hadn't perfected the training montage yet), but there was live musical accompaniment thru the whole thing which was just top-notch (playing nonstop for 100 minutes must be a lot of work). I was late trying to get tickets and had to stand in the rush line, but managed to squeeze in.

Saturday got a little more cycling in (you knew that was coming), and dropped down to Bakka for the ChiZine Press event that day. Things with the press are going quite well for kelpqueen and jack_yoniga, which is great to see. Had the Penney's and my brother over in the evening for some dinner (repayment for them having us for Thanksgiving), and we watched the Harlen Ellison bio-doc Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which I can't recommend highly enough.

Sunday did a little necessary clothes shopping, had dinner with Nicolas, Eric, and Gillian, and returned to the Reel Asian Festival for there closing film Breathless, an utterly relentless film about a small time gangster, the demons which pursue him, and the people in his life. It's amazing how a huge disaster film like 2012 can have next to no effect on you, but something personal can keep you up at night. Not the year's feel good film, but an amazing piece of work. I just wish I knew beforehand that there was going to be a 40 minute awards ceremony right before it.

sweetmusic_27 @ 02:29 pm: The Good Things In Life
( Windycon, and other good things. )
Life is... knock on wood, looking pretty nice right now.

moon_custafer, posting in deadwoodfanfic @ 07:24 pm: atheneblue on fanfic.net has rightly pointed out that I made things between Doc/Jewel escalate a bit too quickly for, um, the reader's pleasure; I've therefore begun a sequence of chapters, provisionally titled "Day and Night" to insert between "Voluntary Motion" and "The Pantry." Huzzah for non-linear editing. So far it's less slash and more day-in-the-life stuff. Anyway the first part is here. Doc is having a busy week.

owlfish @ 11:09 am: Suffolk in the Rain
The storm had not abated as of Saturday morning. It was still raining and gusting intermittently, blowing down leaves and toppling occasional limbs. The trees at the top of the nearby tree-covered hill are nearly bare of leaves now.

Despite the weather and warnings against travel, we went out for an afternoon in the Suffolk countryside. The rain was never too hard, but even in our compact car, I could feel the gusts. Later, walking in the drizzle, I could hear trees moaning with the strain of them. We drove through flooded sections of road on single-track lanes. By mid-afternoon, sunshine occasionally shown through the grey until wiped dark by sunset.

The land was gentle in its slopes and dips, crops and trees, quite likely idyllic in better weather. Bildeston is no longer as coherent a town as it certainly once was. A convenience store is the only business left on the town square. We passed three pubs, one of which doubles as a brewery, so the town is still doing decently well. The church was half-a-mile out of town; in that weather, it wasn't worth the walk.

By the time we made it to Lavenham, it was fully dark. The town is more sheltered and the weather had cleared. Its dense streets of often-whitewashed leaning half-timber buildings were a marvel, with bare-beamed glimpses within comfortable homes within. One was so precise and elegant that I wanted to find its hotel or restaurant name; but it was a house, not a business. The town came of age with the late medieval wool-trade and has one of the best preserved collections of fourteenth and fifteenth century domestic architecture. It's still thriving, or at least, thriving again, with a Co-op grocery store, a good variety of shops, if a little heavy on antique stores and galleries of artwork. At least they were the sorts of antique stores and galleries of artwork which looked accessible and affordable. The church closed at four, with the darkness, so I could only admire its grandeur from a distance.

It was the first time I was back to Lavenham since I was ten, and my family spent Christmas in the Swan Hotel, an enormous rambling conflation of half-timbered buildings. It snowed, and the countryside was beautifully picturesque. And so I have only ever been in Lavenham when daylight hours were scarce.

Tags: travelogue

handful_ofdust @ 12:14 am: In Other News...
Though I really enjoyed last night's CZP pre-launch dinner and absolutely intended to come to tonight's launch, it just didn't happen. Usual shit, with a side-order of not-so-usual: Cal was nuts, I have to get up tomorrow at 6:00 AM, there were a crap-load of pre-op errands to run and my insides still feel like they're on fire after an entire day of similar pain and turmoil. I wouldn't have been great company, is what I'm saying--but it still sucks.

Next up: Sudbury! And surgery.

cristalia @ 10:35 pm: Books and yarn. So, the essentials.
Out this afternoon/evening at the ChiZine Publications double-barrelled two-part book launch -- one at the bookstore, one at The Central on Markham -- wherein I saw a good bucket of people, conversed on subjects from publishing in general to the difference between swear words in Quebecois French and France French to how Lester B. Pearson is a superhero but nobody seems to realize it, and had a nice cup of tea (Tuscany Pear). In between these things was dinner with devils_exercise and Karen and friends of theirs who have the awesomest 13-year-old daughter, and a trip to Romni, where yarn fell into my bag and money fell out. Oops.

(This was technically only half a yarn accident: I had gone specifically for the bamboo stuff I bought and saw Fitted Knits there and had already decided I wanted it, so that was fine. It's the two skeins of Punta Yarns Merisock at $20 a skein that brings the accident into yarn accident. It was really, really blue. I couldn't help it. It just happened.)

Headed home because it was stuffy and I was getting a monster headache, but I seem to actually like and enjoy extended bouts of social these days. Go figure.

And now, going to make some hot chocolate, take something to stave off the headache, and see if I can't squeeze some words out. Stay tuned.

Tags: afternoons/coffeespoons, blank page and a grubby apartment, string theory, tea glorious tea

handful_ofdust @ 09:42 pm: Whacky, Little-Known Facts
...that some fans just never seem to get, or maybe never want to get, part eighty-five-hundredth:

Hey, did you know that there is often a LOT of temporal distance between shooting a TV pilot and starting to shoot a just-greenlit series? Truefax! This may explain why shows often seem to "fall off" after that wonderful pilot you all loved soooo much...because the cast, crew and even the PTB have sometimes had to cobble themselves back together on the sudden quick and dirty, and are struggling to find their feet/rhythm. In the intervening time, it's potentially possible that somebody (that lesbian P.O. on White Collar, for example) may have actually gotten another job, necessitating a change of actress--yes, that really might be it, as opposed to rotten producers somewhere going: "Why, there are far too many good lesbian person-of-color role models on TV as it is! Let us hasten to remove her girl-cooties from our manly-men show, ASAP!"

This same crazy fun-ness may also explain the syndrome in which you can almost always go, given any vaguely procedural setting, from: "Wow, that was...fun, and had potential" to "bwah?" to "buh-HOR-ing" to (occasionally) "Oh holy SHIT, this is the worst thing EVER" on a motherfuckin' dime, yo. See, for example: Fringe 1.02, Supernatural 1.02, Heroes 1.02, Buffy 1.02, X-Files 1.02, repeat repeat repeat.

Hell, some shows may take half an entire season to find their feet. Think back! Is it possible that this may (gasp!) have previously occurred even with stuff you like? The sainted Stargate: SG-1, perhaps? The sainted Farscape? It just might be so, might it not?!? And yet...given enough time...they still managed to salvage themselves.

Whacky, y'all. Whacky-dacky.

P.S.: Also true--no one owes you anything, ever, because you are not actually involved in the making of this product. Sorry.;)

handful_ofdust @ 12:10 pm: How It Starts
...always, is with music. Which means:

A Rope of Thorns Playlist (Take One)
"Blackest Crow", Angi West
"Pharoah", Crooked Still
"Ash", Murder by Death
"I Was a Photograph (Blake’s Song)", Kasey Anderson
"Temazcal", Monsters of Folk
"Cross Bones Style", Cat Power
"Black River Killer", Blitzen Trapper
"The Bachelor", Patrick Wolf
"This Night", Black Lab
"Dust", Augustana
"Coo Coo", Janis Joplin
"The World is Falling", Mirah
"A Forest", Bat for Lashes
"Arma-Goddamn-Motherfuckin’-Geddon", Marilyn Manson
"Howl", Florence and the Machine
"Sin for a Sin", Miranda Lambert
"Noon as Dark as Midnight", Lucero
"From a Shell", Lisa Germano
"Until the Night is Over", Timber Timbre
"Story of Isaac", Suzanne Vega
"For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti", Sufjan Stevens
"Train to Jackson", Jeffrey Foucault
"Big Black Nothing", Connor Oberst & the Mystic Valley Band
"One More Cup of Coffee", Bob Dylan
"Poison Girl", Chris Whitley
"Undone in Sorrow", Crooked Still
"Horse Head Fiddle", 16 Horsepower
"Oh Death", John McCutcheon
"Damned to Hell", John Butler Trio
"The Desert is on Fire", Murder by Death
"I Still Love You, Judas", StillWater
"Sweet Religion", Imogen Heap
"Two Silver Trees", Calexico
"Tiger Mountain Peasant Song", Fleet Foxes
"Troubled Water", Cat Power
"Just the Right Bullets", Tom Waits
"Dirty Hands", Bear McCreary
"Sinister Grains", Anoushka Shankar
"Freedom Fighters (Choir)", Two Steps from Hell
"New Divide", Linkin Park
"Remember Me as a Time of Day", Explosions in the Sky
"Consecration 448t", Wovehand
"And Then You", Greg Laswell

Went back over the last couple of chapters of A Book of Tongues, too, trying to hammer out an accurate profile of where Chess is, exactly, at the end of that whole stagecoach-wreck. I'd vaguely thought about doing a time-jump, say a year in the future, so that we could emerge into a startlingly different world of cults and anti-cults, but...no, I think that'd risk losing momentum, and I need to capitalize on all Chess's immediate vengeance-bent energy, before cutting the legs out from beneath him and showing him how counterproductive it is. Like I said to sovay, a big part of this book has to be about Chess being forced to take responsibility for the fact that all he ever creates is collateral damage, deal with his various Bad Mommy/No Daddy issues, and damn well grow up--in and around the whole "saving the world as we know it" part, of course. As ever.

Also: It's official--Monday (not Tuesday), I go into the hospital. 11:30 AM. Which should be real fun, coming as it does immediately after a day-long trip to Sudbury and back, but fuck it, such is the kingdom. It's in motion, and by this time next week...

Etc.

angrykat @ 10:11 am: Jobs
( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

owlfish @ 08:59 am: Sofa
We've been in the house for a year-and-a-half or so. We bought the sofa in July.

Yesterday, at long last, the sofa came! It's deeper than I remembered and not as long, but it's comfortable and makes the room look bigger. Choosing a pale neutral was wise; it goes very nicely with the other things the room currently has.

Now if only there was running water this morning.... 12:40 pm and running water is back!

Tags: house

cristalia @ 12:34 am: It's a different world; they left you to this.
November 12, 2009 Progress Notes:

"When Your Number Isn't Up"

Words today: 200.
Words total: 200.
Reason for stopping: This is slippery. I've been beating my head on it for two days now, and that's notable progress. And I have to go to bed.

Darling du Jour: The thick tendon that held Niklas's jaw to his broad, flat Slavic face twitched like a Mexican jumping bean. "Jake," he said, scuffed red cap in one hand. "You better come."

Mean Things: Anxiety triggers, attempted suicide, love at first sight.
Research Roundup: Nerve pills/patent medicines/anxiety medications, pillboxes, 1940s porter uniforms, former habitats of the American chestnut, 1940s ambulances and whether they had sirens, St. James son of Alphaeus, Slavic male photo references, The Maltese Falcon, film noir, hardboiled prose samples. I have no idea why I keep doing this to myself with the period pieces.

Books in progress: Nicole Kornher-Stace, Desideria.
The glamour: Not much tonight aside from putting my head between the vise blocks and squeezing. For some reason I fell into Wikipedia and read all about female serial killers too. Not sure what that was about.

---

It's probably premature to take this as any indication that my head has words in it again. I'm actually pretty sure it doesn't, and the responsible thing to do would be to stop this right now and read ten more books at least.

Thing is, I just got bored of not writing.

(Yes, folks, there is only so much Ghost Hunters a girl can legitimately watch, and only so much slacking a girl can do before the urge to chew one's own skin off just for something to do gets to be more than background noise.)

So while this is being kind of terrifically slow and awful and plot construction is proving laborious and I'm pretty much of the opinion that every other sentence I've got was hit in the face with an ugly stick every Sunday while growing up? At this point, I'll pretty much go until I stop.

Tags: blank page and a grubby apartment, metrics

theengineer @ 11:44 am: Basic Instructions does it again!
The webcomic Basic Instructions nails both fandom (again), and The Prisoner.

theengineer @ 05:02 pm: V - Where Genre Actors Live Again!
Still not quite sure if I like V or not, so I'll finish watching the first four (and then we find out if we're getting any more). But boy, it's a second (or third) home for genre actors.

We've got Inana and Wash from Firefly (both playing Visitors), Juliet from Lost (FBI mom), Supergirl from Smallville (blond teen hot Visitor), Tom from The 4400 (the priest), and last night Tori from Battlestar Galactica (another FBI agent). Am I missing anyone?

So we need some guest spots from Star Trek and Stargate actors, and now that Dollhouse has been cancelled we can throw in a few from there as well.

cristalia @ 01:48 pm: On and off, this year, I've been reading about WWI and the effects of it into the 1920s: memoirs, letters, social histories, more theoretical and thesis-driven histories, poetry. Photographs. Mostly memoirs, which tell me with a more limited amount of self-censorship what people saw and thought and felt. I paid a visit to the War Museum a few weeks ago and stood in the room they've done up like a trench, eyes half-closed, ignoring everyone else in there and trying to soak it in down to the bone.

This is for a book. It won't even be about the First World War as it happened, not really. I'm reading for the emotions, and to find what I need to change to make my idea work.

Thing is, wading sleeves-rolled into a topic does things to how you think.

I have caught myself unaccountably angry this year when someone uses lightly the phrase "in the trenches"; as in, "for those strikers in the trenches, that's not good enough." I want to shake that person: Really? They're in the trenches? Are they eighteen years old, sleeping with the rats in churned up mud, and under consistent artillery assault? No? So shut your face. Yes, it's a colloquialism of our language as spoken. I know. I have caught myself passing my first pair of hand-knit socks over and over through my hands, thinking about how they took me three months to knit up, how women must have done it better and faster and with so much more practice to be able to send socks for entire navy ships. What it was like when they thought about where their socks went. What it would feel like if what I do for a hobby was one of my only mechanisms of control over something terrifying.

This year, I read the articles and hear the speeches and see the photographs and I cry. Yeah, it's a trite thing to say. But there you go. I cry.

I'm not even halfway into the kind of research I'll need to do to get this right. Tip of the iceberg, kids. Tip of the iceberg.

---

Today is strange. Today's a bit of a paradox for me right now. Sometimes you think you know what a thing means until you start doing your reading, and you realize the edges of what it means. We all know poppies. We all know In Flanders Fields the poppies grow between the crosses row on row, mostly heard internally as the kind of singsong recitation kids do when they've been made to memorize. Remembrance Day is most definitely those things, and wreath-layings, and these kindly aging people, fewer and fewer of them each year, who come out in uniforms that seem so anachronistic on them. And I wonder what we're actually remembering. If those things haven't, in some ways, become not just the means but the ends of the whole affair.

The connections between symbols and referents inherently get loose, with time; it happens to words too. With words it's called semantic bleaching, when a thing stops meaning what it means and drifts toward a general good or bad. It's a human tendency: People's ideas of a thing, through repetition, start to spin and drift, and all symbols need to be redefined, be personalized, be ultimately co-opted in a million million little ways to stay at all socially relevant. It's the peril of traditions. After a while, you do a thing because you do, not because of whatever started it. Not because you don't care or are a bad person or something, but because that's the human tendency. That's semantic bleaching: that's what happens. We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here.

When I've started the research; when I've looked at the photographs and read the letters and tried to immerse myself in it, tried to think about what I'm not seeing and will never see, that upsets the hell out of me.

(And no, I am not expressing this right to get it clear across. I've rewritten in three times, and half the logic's still in my head and not on the page here. But I'm all dragged down in my own symbols and referents too, and it's unfortunately the best I can do.)

Tags: the enchanted generation

handful_ofdust @ 01:16 pm: Headful O'Lint
That's what I feel like I have right now--things drift in and out, pinging vaguely, but not a lot sticks. Tonight is my last BodyCombat for at least three months; by this time next week, I'll be out of surgery and possibly even home already, probably feeling like I've been run over with a truck. And...I guess I don't really know how to feel, about any of it.

One "good" thing, certainly, is that I sure won't be in any sort of shape to rack up yet more expenses we can't actually afford, the way I've been doing thus far. Which is why I had to pay Steve/the house back $200.00 out of the absolute tail-end of my emergency savings, because when I get bored and/or scared I tend to grab stuff I don't need and pay for it with money we don't have. But then again, if Steve would just pay the damn bills when he says he'll pay them, there wouldn't have been any money in that account for me to spend recklessly on useless shit, now, would there? Etc.

Otherwise, I'm alternately trying to make my way a bit further through "History's Crust" and thinking about A Rope of Thorns, which has already changed distinctly since the last time I looked at it in any fine detail--as I knew it would, because stuff always does, alchemically, in the journey from sketch to realization. And yet. I worry I'm going to have to bring in lots of new characters. I worry I don't know exactly what to do with the old ones. I know where things "have to" go, but not exactly why. None of this is new, exactly, but it's definitely scarier than usual, because there's just a whole lot more riding on it.

So, yeah: Same old same old, plus Remembrance Day. How's by you?

Amended to add: And speaking of the latter...

STORY OF ISAAC--Leonard Cohen

The door it opened slowly,
my father he came in,
I was nine years old.
And he stood so tall above me,
his blue eyes they were shining
and his voice was very cold.
He said, 'I've had a vision
and you know I'm strong and holy,
I must do what I've been told.'
So he started up the mountain,
I was running, he was walking,
and his axe was made of gold.

Well, the trees they got much smaller,
the lake a lady's mirror,
we stopped to drink some wine.
Then he threw the bottle over.
Broke a minute later
and he put his hand on mine.
Thought I saw an eagle
but it might have been a vulture,
I never could decide.
Then my father built an altar,
he looked once behind his shoulder,
he knew I would not hide.

You who build these altars now
to sacrifice these children,
you must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision
and you never have been tempted
by a demon or a god.
You who stand above them now,
your hatchets blunt and bloody,
you were not there before,
when I lay upon a mountain
and my father's hand was trembling
with the beauty of the word.

And if you call me brother now,
forgive me if I inquire,
'Just according to whose plan?'
When it all comes down to dust
I will kill you if I must,
I will help you if I can.
When it all comes down to dust
I will help you if I must,
I will kill you if I can.
And mercy on our uniform,
man of peace or man of war,
the peacock spreads his fan.

agincourtgirl @ 01:49 pm: In Which I Become An Official Londoner
Well, I have joined the decade - which one was that? - in which everyone has a cell phone. I got one this morning, am still learning to use it but it's my telefonino and is easy enough to use. Not sure about the ringtone as no one has called me (yet) but if you want my number, please let me know and I'll send it to you (and you can give me yours)!

Oxfam tomorrow, Tinies drop-by on Friday, job applications on the go and more to come. Meanwhile I have reached the end of the 50s at http://musicsoundsbetterwithtwo.blogspot.com and the bright and cheery 60s are around the corner.

I wish I had a poem to post here but if you visit my friend benet you'll find a great one. As I commented, Canadians write the best war poems.

But really as a Mennonite, I wish war poems could just stop being written. Alas, alas...

benet @ 06:12 am: Lord Kitchener's mustache
Ypres 1915
Alden Nowlan

The age of trumpets is passed, the banners hang
like dead crows, battered and black,
rotting into nothingness on cathedral walls.
In the crypt of St. Paul’s I had all the wrong thoughts,
wondered if there was anything left of Nelson
or Wellington, and even wished
I could pry open their tombs and look,
then was ashamed
of such morbid childishness, and almost afraid.

I know the picture is as much a forgery
as the Protocols of Zion, yet it outdistances
more plausible fictions: newsreels, regimental histories,
biographies of Earl Haig.

( It is always morning... )

Oh, I know they were mercenaries
in a war that hardly concerned us.
I know all that.

Sometimes I’m not even sure that I have a country.

But I know that they stood there at Ypres
the first time the Germans used gas,
that they were almost the only troops
in that section of the front
who did not break and run,
who held the line.

Perhaps they were too scared to run.
Perhaps they didn’t know any better
– that is possible, they were so innocent,
those farmboys and mechanics, you only have to look
at old pictures and see how they smiled.

Perhaps they were too shy
to walk out on anybody, even Death.
Perhaps their only motivation
was a stubborn disinclination.

Private McNally thinking:
You squareheaded sons of bitches,
you want this God damn trench
you’re going to have to take it away
from Billy McNally
of the South End of Saint John, New Brunswick.

And that’s ridiculous, too, and nothing on which to found a country.
Still
It makes me feel good, knowing
that in some obscure, conclusive way
they were connected with me
and me with them.

sweetmusic_27 @ 08:09 pm: My mom is out of the hospital!

Why yes, this does neatly clear up any possibility the low probability that I might not make Windycon because of Yet Another Family Emergency!

Now, all I have to do is figure out where I'm sleeping. . .

cristalia @ 09:54 pm: Tea, the casual social drink!
This was one of those afternoons/evenings where I was an Awesome Freelancer. This is what we call those days where, if I was this productive and sharp and motivated and clever all the time, I'd actually be able to go freelance and not starve and it'd be fun and not just stressful. I get about four weeks' worth of those days in any given calendar year.

So I will just share with you that today I finished another mini-project for the Great OWW Home Reno (a self-directed site-updating production by Yours Truly), shovelled non-insignificant amounts of workshop support mail, dispatched a whole bunch of Ideomancer second reads to their various dooms, managed to get back in touch with two authors I'd lost touch with about their stories, wrote a book review for the December issue, tidied my apartment a bit, and blocked out my schedule for this week, since I appear to actually have a social calendar going this month.

There are five actionable e-mails left in my inbox, and two of them are easy. Mwaha.

The other thing I have to do tonight is this post.

---

A while back, a gentleman from Golden Moon Tea dropped me an e-mail asking if he could have a link on the website (yes, sadly neglected right now; I'll get to it, I promise). I don't make a habit of linking things on the personal website that I don't actually, well, like and use; longtime denizens of here will probably have picked up that I am not really hot on advertising in general and prefer to have it blocked from my life whenever possible, never mind not being huge on being a conduit for it. Also, having been a bookseller for four years and change, I'm...in some ways a touch sensitive about my credibility when it comes to taste and recommendations: when your taste in something is being used as a barometer, positively or negatively, for people to decide which books they're going to buy, you get really hardcore about giving honest, unbiased evaluations of things and not recommending something unless you mean it, so as to not lose that customer's trust. I told the nice gentleman this, and he offered to mail me some samples.

Okay, thought I, mulling over whether this constituted selling out or not, and when they arrived, I brought them to work to share with ginny_t, who is among other things my Dayjob Partner in Fancy Tea Snobbery. We drank the tea over the past few weeks and Had Opinions on the matter.

Therefore, this is my tea review.

Sugar Caramel Oolong

This was okay -- not too sweet, not too tannic -- but really, really, really light. ginny_t noted she is not an oolong drinker habitually for just this reason; I have it sometimes, but also tend to prefer something stronger. I'm a Russian Caravan kind of girl. This is really light. So, kind of struck out on grounds of personal taste.

Honey Pear black tea

Okay, now this one was really awesome. Gutsy and sweet and sort of smooth, the way things involving honey are, and smelled and tasted distinctly like real pears. The balance was really good -- not too sweet -- and all elements were in there as advertised. I would have this one again. Nom.

Coconut Pouchong

I was feeling a little sicky the day I had this one, which may have spoiled my objectivity on the matter. What I do recall here was that the predominant taste was young coconut: if you've ever had coconut water or juice, it had that same strong, sharp mid-tongue kind of flavour. This decidedly did not taste like fake coconut, but it tasted a lot like coconut and in some ways not enough like tea?

I do like nice long pouchong leaves though. Pretty!

Nepalese Afternoon Tea

Advertised with "notes of honey, lotus, and fragrant sandalwood." While obviously a good-quality black tea, it didn't really strike me as fancy or awesome among black teas. It was there. It was there nicely enough, but mostly it was just there.

Tippy Earl Grey

This, though, was nice. There is a certain degree to which earl grey is earl grey is earl grey, but you can tell the good stuff from the mediocre stuff very easily, and it's to do with the balance of bergamot flavour to black tea ballsiness to other. This one apparently has lavender in it, and you can spot it there both in the nose and when you taste it. It really added something, and it was subtly different enough to make the whole thing interesting without taking this out of the subgenre of earl grey. Bergamot was light and not cloying and tasted oddly fresh. I'd possibly go back for seconds on this if I had to get specifically earl grey (not my favourite, although I'll drink it).

I split this one with a different coworker; ginny_t doesn't like earl grey and Other Coworker needed tea badly that morning, and knows my desk is where it lives. He gave good report.


So, general verdict?

1) I'll probably buy some of that Honey Pear sometime.
2) I probably won't actually link this tea place on my website, since I can only vouch for one unqualified win here out of five; otherwise, while it was good-quality stuff, I wasn't head over heels. That's maybe not enough to place an ongoing recommendation on the wider internets.
3) I find myself not opposed to people sending me free tea. I suspect it's not hurting my popularity at the office either.

This has been your first and hopefully not only Tea Review. Good night and good luck.

Tags: afternoons/coffeespoons, dayjobbery, editor smash!, tea glorious tea

theengineer @ 04:12 pm: Great weekend!
Wonderful warm, sunny weather on the weekend, so of course I got some cycling in. Saturday went up the Humber River valley, across the top of the city, and down the Don River. Sunday rode down to Oakville for brunch with marinav and ionelv. I'm still amazed with such perfect weather at this time of year.

Last week attended a great lecture at U of T, one of their regular public astronomy talks. This one was actually given by a particle physicist, and was on how modern cosmology can help out particle physics. Testing current theories requires experiments conducted at extremely high energies, so you need very expensive installations like the Large Hadron Collider. But string theories and the like require such vast energies to test we may never be able to do it. However, the very early state of the Universe (according to Big Bang theory) was in such a high energy state, and we are beginning to be able to test some of these theories by predicting what they would mean to the development of the Universe, and comparing these predictions to observations. Inflation theory has gotten a big boost from this work. it was a really good talk by a very animated speaker.