I visited family this last week, and I was going to bring tea, but unfortunately somehow I packed my tea set and…no actual tea.

 

Luckily, my sister-in-law had tea. Specifically, she had this.

I visited family this last week, and I was going to bring tea, but unfortunately somehow I packed my tea set and…no actual tea? Whoops.

 

Luckily, my sister-in-law had tea. Specifically, she had this, which she had sent to her from Singapore. The ingredients include dark plum, hawthorn, mint, osmanthus, and tangerine peel.

 

This was a lovely tea: sour and sweet at the same time. The addition of rock sugar makes it especially nice, but perhaps not something I would do on a regular basis because sugar is not my best friend.

 

Nonetheless, it was a tea that was very delicious and gave me something hot and comforting to drink while traveling.

I am consciously sending my newsletter two days late this week. I was visiting family on the first and traveling on the second, and I hadn't done it before I left (because time) and thought about trying to do it while with family and then… I realized that I could just spend time with my family and do it later.

 

Look at me, being somewhat reasonable!

 

I am trying to be reasonable in a few more ways as well. For instance, I am planning a vegetable garden for this spring. My initial garden bed plan had a billion garden beds and approximately ten billion plants. Every time I revisited it, I added another ten billion garden beds. This sounds great to my brain, which thinks that “go big or go home” is the solution to every problem.

 

Luckily, I know myself well enough to know that I have failed at watering plants during the entirety of my last two vegetable gardening attempts. My brain loves to plan go big or go home events, but when it comes to the fifth week of drowning in the implementation of my go-big idea, I remember that I am already home and that continuing to stay there is a lot less work than continuing to go big.

 

So I have been thinking about a smaller garden. One that I can definitely, absolutely, without a doubt take care of. One that won't take all my time to set up and then water and weed, so that I can use my extra time to figure out how to be as lazy as possible so that my vegetables will not all die when I inevitably forget the garden's existence for a week. 

 

So I am trying to channel my go-big energy into going smart, rather than going massive.

 

This means that I am currently knee-deep in reading about different semi-automatic watering systems. (We have water rights on our property, which is an entirely separate story and relatively rare, and so I can't just use standard systems unless I want to ignore our water rights and just use city water. Which I might still end up doing.) 

 

I am very excited about the vegetable garden and can't wait to start plants indoors. So I'm going to try to go medium and get it done.

For the first time since 2019, I am going to be attending events in-person this year: in Salt Lake City, Utah and in Anaheim, California.

 

More details can be found here. I don't know everything yet--there will be book signings attached to both of these, and I'll update my site as soon as I have that info.

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