It’s coming up on summer, which means everything is getting hotter, and the thought of drinking hot tea is…

 

Well, let’s be honest, it still appeals to me, but I am a freak of nature. And even I don’t want hot tea all the time. Last year, around this time, I told you about one of my great joys of life (sadly no longer available): nitro iced tea in the summers. Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about finding a way to make my own nitro teas. Yes, you can get a keg, but the setup looks hard and I can’t manage. Finally, I found this nitrogen infuser, which was stupidly expensive but also looks like it’s easy enough that I will actually use it, and behold, we are in business.

 

My first nitro tea, in honor of the nitro tea that I can no longer have, came from an iced tea brewed with Allegro Tea’s hibiscus spice. I honestly turn this into iced tea by the liter, and I will drink the entire pitcher in a day by myself (and probably more) when it’s hot out. It’s delicious and wonderful and the perfect thirst quencher.

 

The nitro version of this was extraordinary: the tea itself normally looks to be a deep ruby red, but when shaken up with nitrogen, it turns a frothy, almost grapefruit pink.

The tea itself has a delicious head, like the best kind of foamy beer. The nitrogen infusion transforms the taste from something delicious into something just a little sweeter, a little more velvety. It turns tea that is very tasty into an absolute indulgence.

 

Now I can’t wait to try a nitro pu-erh. Let the experiments commence!

It’s been two years since we converted our front yard into xeric, low water, native plants, and now that it’s June, the space has been taken over by green. Most of all, the native, warm-weather buffalo grass is committed to out-competing everything. Often, when people say “xeric,” I think people hear “mostly rock” or maybe “mostly some kind of mulch, with a few plants stuck in.”

 

Right now, we have rabbit brush and sand sage, showy milkweed for monarch butterflies, blue grama and buffalo grass, golden rod, Apache plumes, spiderwort, a currant bush, lead plant, yarrow, and so, so much more. The yard is shockingly green at this time of year—greener than some of our neighbors with bluegrass, because buffalo grass is a native warm weather grass, one that will root dozens of feet deep. It does not need several inches of water in hot times order to stay green as things grow hot.

 

I’ve been thinking about this in terms of neurodiversity recently. Sometimes, people talk about ADHD as a mental disability, and—just to be clear—I think it absolutely is. I refused that label for myself for a very long time until I had the striking revelation that I literally fail out of college twice, and in general I would say that if you have a mental condition that leads you to fail out of college even though there’s ample evidence you’re otherwise capable, it is in fact a disability.

 

But in some ways, I think it is also an ability. I am good in emergencies in a way that many other people aren’t. When things need to be done—when they’re deeply urgent and the shit is hitting the fan—something turns on in my brain and my executive function just works. Sometimes those moments happen, and I can feel clarity where others don’t, and I think: of course. This is the environment where my brain does best. This is what it is good at.

 

When those moments occur, I try to honor them as much as I can.

 

Even though I recognize that emergencies are something I’m very, very good at—they’re not something I would want to manage every day.

To end, here’s a picture of Pele. Just because.

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