Well, forget
sleeping. Truly I had no intention of starting a session at 8pm. The plan was to spend an hour going through my Puerh drawer, seeing what I still had some of. Not my Puerh closet which is where I store my now overly large (and mostly worthless) whole cakes, but just a little peeking, a little sniffing of the small mason jars, and then I opened the jar of
Tea-Sides HongTaiChang 2006 loose shou and got all 'entranced-like.' Ya know? Like when you've been drinking, looking at, delving into nothing but rolled oolongs for what seems like weeks, and then you stop and smell a shou? And it just kind-of takes over your senses?
Like
that.
I only did three steeps, I swear to god, but by the first steep, after initial rinse it was so richly colored, so dark I knew just a couple hits of this was going to do me in. I chose my smallest gaiwan at 70 ml, and used four grams of leaves, big chunky, sticky, twiggy loose shou pieces, lovely as hell, and now it's 10pm and I am wide awake.
"Ten pm?" you ask, "That's so early!" Well, not for Buddha-Mom it ain't.
Shee-it children, I get up at 4 am, eat some cookies, read a bit and go back to bed....til 6 am when I get up to mainly do nothing until 8:15 when I take the kids to school. I'm on old-lady-time, me and the dog both, sleeping lightly at night, deep napping during the day, the kind of naps you take for twenty minutes yet wake up groggy from, pillow drooled upon, having to pee like hell because you drank all that......SHOU!
Well, who cares? It's worth it. And although many of the amazing things for sale at Tea-Side are beyond my means, this nice loose shou is not one of them, its a bargain is what it is, and to the man who makes those decisions, I bow deeply in gratitude. (Now where did I put those emergency Zanax?)
