My England mug is full of tea. It’s not a British mug; it’s a Starbucks mug that says England on it. I think the reason it didn’t go for fifty bucks on eBay is that the nutjobs that A) think eBay is a treasure trove of bargains and B) collect shit like Starbucks mugs on purpose because they think they’ll be worth something one day or even stickier and more covert reasons think it’s a forgery, a sham, a counterfeit. Those things usually have city names, not country names.
Here’s how it came into my possession; eBay. Nobody bid over my eight bucks. Here’s why I wanted it; of all the coffee mugs in these house, both the damned and the blessed, not a one held more than eight ozs. Eight ounces would be a giant demi-tasse; otherwise it’s the caffeine equivalent of trying to make a full meal from samples at a grocery store. So I’ve been slowly collecting real sized coffee mugs. And sure, my legs work fine, and I would pour ten two ounce cups from a thermos. I have a keurig. I don’t know what the small setting is; it comes to the very edge of an eight ounce mug and though I’m ok with pouring twenty one ounce cups, I am not ok with standing sideways in front of a coffee machine and delicately sucking the top half inch off a hot cup of coffee.
I lean towards Starbucks mugs because they tend to list their capacity, because you have to wade through a lot of novelty mugs and flowery mugs to get to a mug that won’t make you gag and even so could be anywhere from six to sixty ounces as far as the description is concerned, and because of some other reason I’m sure I think is valid. I will not pay more for a Starbucks mug, including shipping, than it would cost to go to a fucking starfucks and buy one new. It’s damn near 2014 and eBay is still full of jerk offs who charge more than retail and dumbfucks dying to pay more than retail. The latter would make sense for shut ins or people who could only get the one web page and then have to take a dog sled to the mailbox. It does not account for the huge business eBay does in ordinary every day in retail shit.
I don’t think of retail as the standard by which all value and worth is measured either.
Although this sounds like a rant, I am enjoying twining’s earl gray k-cup version in my large Country not City mug. I brewed oolong in it yesterday. I can be a tea snob. Twining’s k-cup Earl Gray tastes just like Twining’s in a tea bag, and probably a lot like twining’s loose leaf, though I don’t recall ever having Twining loose leaf.
Before the Hawthorne District in SE Portland became too fancy for it’s britches, there was a little store called the Hawthorne Coffee merchant (as far as I know there still is, but it’s no longer on Hawthorne). They would roast their own coffee beans and dry and blend their own teas. They used to make my favorite Earl Gray; the bergamot was sublime and the black tea was black as an overcast moonless midnight. It was better than twining’s but not very accessible to the world at large. They had other teas, a lot of other teas, I figure earl gray is common enough to make a standard. It’d be silly to compare Russian Caravans or gunpowder green teas, the latter tastes a whole lot like hot water with flavorless bits of stuff floating in it. To me. No offense if either your palate is sensitive enough or your placebo tolerance is lower than mine. My father who has forgotten how to make instant coffee and refuses to even consider the keurig even for the ten seconds he retains stuff, had taken to microwaving hot water and would either drink it or find a cold cup already in the microwave when he went to make a fresh one. I’m sure some cups of water were nuked several times at whatever random amount of time he pushed (often the least would be eleven minutes eleven seconds, the most ninety nine minutes and ninety nine second, because the microwave only takes four digits.).
He no longer does that. The damn bread box either sparks or makes an annoying dinging noise. Yes, I’ve run out of things to say. What is this, 21st century? Yeah I’ve been out of things to say all millennium. To be fair it’s been a short millennium.
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