I got this tea from the Nepal Tea Collective sometime late last year (unfortunately, they don’t seem to have any up on their site any longer). I’ve talked about GABA oolong before—last time, it was a tea from Taiwan. This is a tea that is processed in a way that maximizes the amount of gamma-amino butyric acid, a neurotransmitter that helps calmness.

 

This is a lovely, calming tea. The roast is just heavy enough that it leaves a faint caramelization on the tongue, and drinking the tea itself leaves a sense of bliss.

 

It’s hard to tell if it’s the tea or something else, because I’m actually pretty happy today. It’s been a long time since November 4th, 2024. A year, some would say, but it feels like nine hundred years.

This tea comes from the Nepal Tea Collective. I couldn’t find it on their site, and it’s one of their reserve teas, meaning they don’t make it every year. They do have a Himalayan Oolong listed this year, and I’ve enjoyed every tea they’ve made, so that might be a good cognate.

I missed last week’s newsletter, because I was busy doing a project, and it has taken up all my non-writing time for…uh, six weeks. This project was something I volunteered for. Not as in, someone asked me and I agreed. It was more like “oh, I’d like to learn to use a laser cutter, I bet I could do some cool Romancing the Vote stuff with a laser cutter” followed by “oh cool there’s a maker space near my house” followed by “you know, I just had this fun idea to learn to use a laser cutter by making the awards for my husband’s running group, that would be a good introduction” and then just badgering the person in charge until she said “fine, you can do it.”

 

Anyway I made something that is about 497% more complicated than anything I can ever imagine making with a laser cutter again.

 

The spindrifts are there to serve as weights, by the way. So many clamps. So much weighting. So much gluing.

 

 

Behold: here is a topographical contour map of a 20 km x 20 km section of the Colorado Front Range (name of award winner obscured to protect the guilty) which contains a course that his group runs for fun. (It’s not a race. It’s just…a thing…they do because…). I made five of these awards. There was laser cutting. There was a need to develop a whole entire process so I wouldn’t lose the 1,432 tiny islands that made up the peaks. I learned to apply sub-millimeter pieces with tweezers. There was more gluing than you can possibly imagine. It was a Thing.

There was a lot of wrangling with software and fussing around because I had to get enough definition so that you could see, for instance, that Bear and South Boulder peak were distinct and also SoBo is bigger than Bear, oh, and also get the little Nebelhorn peak in there, too. There was some added 3d printing to make incredibly tiny sharks (in real life; in reality, using the X-Y scale of the piece, they’re actually about 400 feet long which is Way Too Big) and a stegosaurus and some dodos—none of those actually make sense for the environment, obviously, but I’m not making a contour map and NOT putting stegosauruses on there.

 

I thought it would take me like 10 hours in total and ha ha ha ha ha whoops.

 

Anyway. That’s why I missed the newsletter last week. There was no room in my head for anything except this.

I am happy about the results of last night’s US election. There are many aspects to this, but let me talk about the ones that are local (and or semi-local) to me.

 

First, in our city council election, we had one guy whose entire platform was (mild paraphrase) “we should hire an army of police officers to solve the homeless problem in Old Town. No more compassion, just solutions.” 

 

For context, I go to Old Town quite a bit—it’s very close to me—and the Old Town homeless “problem” is a handful of people who access services, including housing assistance, at a church nearby, and it’s only a problem if you cannot stand to be presented with people who need assistance in your daily lives. I’ve never been harassed or bothered by homeless people in the area, and I live close enough that I walk to restaurants in Old Town and walk home at night, in the dark.

 

(Not really sure what police officers would or should do about law abiding people whose offense is not having housing, but if you talk to them—and I advocate for talking to human beings—you’d realize that the dehumanizing caricatures are deeply unfair and undeserved.)

 

He was running against a very reasonable and normal person who wanted to help strengthen the community with compassion and had a list of thoughtful issue-based discussions.

 

The homeless hating jerk lost 30/70, and that makes me happy because it hurt my heart to think that a substantial number of my neighbors would vote to spend tons of money we don’t have to exacerbate a problem in the cruelest way we possibly could.

 

I also note that every conservative council member in former conservative stronghold, Aurora, Colorado lost, when they had been predicted to remain in control just one day earlier. Aurora has received unfair scrutiny when one of the (now) ousted council members claimed that it was afflicted by “roving gangs” from Venezuela. The people who live in Aurora—which is a vibrant, diverse city with amazing food—got rid of the council member who made those horrible claims last night. Even though she had a war chest that was 5x her nearest opponent, she’s been replaced by actual progressives who want affordable housing and police reform and who talk about the diversity of Aurora as a positive rather than a brand of infamy.

 

More than anything, looking over what happened last night, this is what I see: that there is an opportunity for us to build a broad coalition over the increasing affordability crisis in this country. People should be able to afford to live in a decent place, send their kids to schools that teach them what they need to know, to eat good, nourishing food, to be able to access health care that provides for their needs without bankrupting them, and to do so without working themselves to the bone.

 

I do not think that we will have the exact same kinds of people elected in New York as we will in Arizona, but just about every person out there wants to be able to live with dignity in exchange for an honest day’s work.

 

I see a lot of opportunity, and today, I have hope and happiness, because I believe that we can build bridges and a coalition that can defeat fascism.

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