Day: July 3, 2015

shedding layers part six: nothing yet

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Good intentions, good intentions. I do need to discard more things but have not done much for a few days. Ideally the intent would be to discard one thing each day. But I have never been much of a hoarder/collector/keeper, so I don’t have a whole lot of things that I don’t use. I may move some furniture around, which will be a good time to go through things that are hidden away.

One of the big long-term plans is to renovate the house and surrounding buildings, which is undoubtedly a much bigger and more involved project than I can even imagine, especially because I don’t have much of an imagination at all when it comes to visualizing and conceptualizing space.

I’ve had some kind of eye discomfort/pain – I thought it was a stye so tried to self-treat but there was never any visible stye and eventually the discomfort got much worse. It seems to have been a tear duct blockage and possibly some kind of irritant got into my eye when I was driving with the windows open for many hours the other day (a lot of dust, dirt, etc. flying about). I suppose this has all been exacerbated by the fact that I spent so much of last weekend actually using the tear ducts – I guess I did shed something after all.

The Art of Iced Tea

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Growing up my mother always made giant jugs of iced tea in summer. It seemed commonplace at the time, nothing remarkable. She’d break out these large plastic jugs in late spring, and we’d never run out until summer did.

Since leaving home, I tried to make iced tea maybe only once. It was difficult because I never had a refrigerator big enough to hold a very large pitcher (and it never seemed worthwhile to make iced tea at all unless I could make a whole lot of it at once).

Suddenly the last few months, I have wanted iced tea badly. Especially when I go to restaurants – and there is no option for pure, plain, unsweetened iced tea anywhere. In the US, of course, it’s pretty much everywhere. What a simple, good but ridiculously cheap thing to drink.

I finally did it – I made two pitchers and they turned out even better than I hoped. I had a glass with lemon, and I am again truly happy with the small things.