Coffee lovers and tea blogs

One of the things I like most of all about blogging is the community I’ve found. There are tea experts and aficionados in my teaworld as well as rosy-cheeked newcomers who’re writing about the earliest stages of tea addiction. Tea people read what I write here, and that’s to be expected, but it tickles me that both professed coffee-lovers and even people who don’t like hot drinks at all are reading my chicken-scratchings.

This is a tea blog after all. For the most part, it’s going to be about the processing, selling and drinking of tea, and even though I’m sure I could and am going to delve more deeply into those topics, ultimately the themes here have to expand outward from just tea. That must be why I’m entertaining even non-tea lovers. It’s not really about tea. I’m using tea as a cliff to walk off of. The tea drinking is certainly important to me. I couldn’t read and write and talk about tea so much if I didn’t love it and its related baggage. For some unexplained reason as the topics come to me (and lately they’re coming daily), they stray further and farther from merely tea.

I wrote about Warren G. Harding the other day. Because some people read this blog regularly and some seem to be arriving still, I wanted to give a summary of the most peculiar tangents I’ve been on. My walkabouts seem to be the most entertaining moments thus far.

Early on, I tried a bit of prose. It only seems to confuse people. Even when I include a disclaimer that these specific posts are fiction, I get concerned comments offering me emotional support. Have written from the perspective of an 18th Century German inn owner who bemoans the coming of coffee houses, as well as an Indian-American who didn’t even like tea and was offended that everyone assumed he did.

The most fun I’ve had writing prose here was my tea hobo character and I'm sure you'll see him again. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank those of you who read what I'm writing. The comments I get are fantastic, but what pleases me most of all is someone coming to me at twitter or facebook or even in real life asking me for a recommendation on tea or advice about how to get into tea.

When that happens I smile. I was already smiling, but in those moments I smile more. Like I'm smiling right now.