In which Rita admits to having done nothing today.

So I was supposed to make eggrolls for dinner tonight, but died of tired and allergies and decided to go with something easier instead. This recipe isn’t exactly hard, it’s simply labor-intensive. I’m also in the process of switching my music files from Windows Media Player to iTunes and having to do a lot of reorganizing because of this. I have over 60 gigabytes of music in my music folder. I started this process around 11 this morning and as of 5 this evening, I’m halfway through “B”. Ah well. I did take a few breaks to fix windows and do laundry. It takes three loads of laundry to wash our sheets because we each use a king size comforter and then there’s the sheets and pillow cases, so washing the sheets is an all-day thing. And in the summer, it gets complicated.

See, last summer and this summer, I am dealing with allergies from hell. There have been a few days I’ve been okay with not taking anything, but usually I have to take a Reactine once a day (Zyrtec for my American buddies). Lately, on some of my bad days or when I’ve had to be outside for an extended period, I’ve had to take a Reactine as soon as I wake up, a sudafed/chlortrimeton mix every 4-6 hours, 3-4 spoonfuls of local honey (local honey = local pollens), and 3-4 cups of green tea with vitamin C (both known antihistamines). Some days I can be outside with no problem and other days my wife will come in from work and be immediately sent to the shower because I’m sneezing my brains out.

This affects the laundry in that while my wife loves line-dried sheets, if my comforter and pillowcase are line-dried, I die a slow and painful pollen-related death. So half of it goes in the dryer while her half goes out on the line to save a bit of money, at least. So I did manage to get that done. And I helped with the fixing of the windows.

We have the best tenants in the world. No, really, we do. We’ve earned them, but that’s a story for another post. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go into the story about the hellish tenants. But these tenants are the best. They fix things around the house, they take responsibility for their apartment and repairs needed there. They have one child and realize that letting a child rule the home is not a good parenting strategy. They make the effort not to disturb us, and make it easy for us to do the favor. They’re friends of friends and great people. They make it easy for us to be landlords. There are times when I’m in the house and I literally forget that we even have tenants, which is a huge and welcome change. Which isn’t to say we don’t like having tenants, it’s just nice to feel alone in your own home sometimes. The best thing is they’re not afraid to say “Hey, it’s kinda cold down here, could you turn the A/C off?” or ask me to turn the music down, though they have yet to do that. They’re just a very welcome breath of fresh air.

Anyway, this is important because today, the male tenant fixed our screen in our bedroom window, which the cats had torn out. I helped by chatting with him and distracting the child XD. I’m super helpful that way.

So…yeah. I did a whole lot of nothing today. I was going to post the recipe for Zing Me Eggrolls, but maybe tomorrow after I actually make them. Ah, the life of a housewife…isn’t it exciting?

I did ask a question of my steepster friends that I will ask of my friends here. If you could only take five teas with you on a trip, which five would you take and why? Keep in mind that I’ll be going to Nashville…exploring the local tea shops isn’t really an option.

My tea for the day:

Orange Pekoe from DavidsTea

Honeybee from DavidsTea

An introduction of sorts

This is a bit intimidating. Big blank page.

Well, as Maria said, “let’s start at the beginning, a very good place to start…”

We’ll start with the name of my blog, aisling of tea. It’s a play on words in a few ways. You see, my wife majored in Celtic studies at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. As long as we’ve been together, she’s called me her “aisling”, which is Irish for dream. Sweet, right? So when I sign up for a username now, I tend to reach for aislingofDe, as she has recently begun to go by the name “De”. But since tea and my love of it spurred on this blog, I opted for aisling of tea instead. See what I did there?

Okay, it’s not that clever, but I like it. Brings in elements of my relationship with my wife and it also means I’m dreaming of tea, which I always am…well, I like it, and that’s what matters, right?

On to what brought this blog about. A few months ago, a friend and I started a blog titled “Cooking Simplicitea“. We are all about the tea puns here. We posted recipes and had a good time, but it kinda fizzled and died after a while. Too many cooks in the kitchen, one might say. Last week, however, I had two different people ask me if I had a blog. One directed me towards teatra.de, and while I like that site a lot, I prefer wordpress because my blog isn’t just about tea. Well, it won’t be, at least, and if down the road I want to take my blog in a different direction, I would feel more free to do so with wordpress than with a site specifically about tea.

Anyway, I am frequently on Steepster and when I review each tea, I usually have a story to tell along with it. I feel bad, because most of my “reviews” are more me babbling and telling a story than an actual review of the tea, which is entertaining but not really helpful to the person who just wants to know if the tea really does taste like black currants. So decided to make a place of my own for my tea stories and such.

My wife has always believed I would be able to write an interesting blog about being a housewife in the modern world, so that helped me make my decision.

So here it is. Sometimes it will be a blog about certain teas, other times it will be a recipe for my latest creation with tea. It might be a blog about Bella and Pekoe, our cats, and yes, Pekoe is orange. Bella’s full name is Rosabella, never to be confused with that Twilight mess. I also do a lot of low-sodium cooking, so those recipes might appear here and there as well. It’s very simply a blog about me and my life.

Who am I? I’m married to the most wonderful woman in the world, I am the mama to two crazy little cats. I am a landlord for some awesome tenants. I am a happy hooker, by which I mean I crochet, not that other thing. I collect teapots, cards, elephants, and penguins. I don’t keep a spotless house, but I try to keep a clean one. For the last two years I’ve been a housewife unable to work due to immigration paperwork, but now I’m just unemployed, which isn’t nearly as nice. I’m an American living in Canada, a Southern girl in heart but a Yankee girl by birth.

I can be found on:

Steepster

Twitter

Google+

So….welcome to my little corner of the internet! I’ll be moving my recipes over from Cooking Simplicitea, so I apologize in advance!