A quick janitorial-type notice: I changed the number of posts on the main page here...all the blog entries are still available in my archives. Now that I have high-speed, I sometimes forget about people who have to wait for minutes out of their life for a big page to load. Sorry it took me so long to figure that out.

I remember finding a mummified cat.

Actually, I didn't find it . . . my boyfriend at the time, Rob, found it in a mostly empty warehouse that a friend of ours was using as an artist studio/living space. He couldn't wait to show it to me, and to show me where he had found it while poking around behind some boards on one of the abandoned floors. The cat was a normal sized house-cat in the exact same pose as the "Restricted" panther, one paw forward and in low slink mode. All the skin was there but thin, like wasp paper, and shrunken over the bones. Just like the warning growl a living cat gives before attacking, its face was pulled back into a tight grimace. All in all, it looked remarkably life-like. We were fascinated with the cat! What a find!! Naturally Rob put it in a place of honour in his room. How a dead creature could mummify in the moist humidity of the West Coast, I'll never know. I do know it felt like a gift to find it.

I remember drinking tea with my friend, Sheri.

This was back in the early '80's, and Celestial Seasonings was still relatively new to us, and we bought new tea if we liked the picture on the box, or if the quote impressed us. We didn't care if we actually liked the tea inside. We would save the empty boxes and pile them against our walls, arranging and rearranging them into pleasing patterns. The tea made us feel artsy and unique and creative, which is a lot to ask of a little tea bag. I never did like the Red Berry Zinger all that much, but it had a cool box, so I'd just put a lot of honey into the cup and drink it anyway.

This past summer I managed to take a tour of the Celestial Tea factory in Boulder, Colorado. It was more fun than I expected! But I realized as I watched the endless parade of neat and tidy little tea boxes on the assembly line that something like "artsy" and "unique" and "creative" can be used as marketing tools, and that they worked on me for a long time. I don't buy tea anymore unless I think I'll like the flavour. If I want to look at the boxes, I go to the store and look at them.