Tea Tuesday - Harvests, Cattle, and Degrees

Yippee! Today is Tea Tuesday! I am going to focus on some special teas this week. Have you heard of Sip for the Cure? The Republic of Tea has a collection of teas they use to create donation monies for The Susan G Komen Foundation. The funds help breast cancer research. The teas I am offering today are in this collection. Please choose from:

1. Pink Lady Apple Green Tea
2. Pomegranate Vanilla Rooibos Tea
3. Pink Lemonade Green Tea
4. Red Cherry White Tea
5. Pink Grapefruit Green Tea
6. Strawberry Hibiscus Tea

If you aren’t familiar with Tea Tuesday, then let me fill you in. I like to send cards and letters, I also like to drink tea. I combine both of these activities by sharing a hand written note with you, our customers, during these special visits. This week you can submit many different topics to me so I have something to write about. The simple process is this: Please go to our Contact Us page and choose the Community Pursuits radio button. Tell me anything you would like to share, ask a question or comment about the blog. Include your address AND the tea you would like to try from the above collection. I will send you a tea bag, a hand written note and a cool postmark from MMS. No cost. No commitment. No anything but sending your address and comments to me. How simple could that be??

You are probably wondering about the HARVESTS in the subject. Well, you might be aware that we have a company garden. Long time readers will know we have used the extra ground around our building to put in a wonderful company garden. We planned the seeds, harvests and timing of all the items in our garden. We planted, hoed, weeded and Mitch watered our garden. I would like to say WE on the watering, but the reality is that Mitch took good care of us over the summer. Our last garden projects were salsa and chili sauce. On Friday September 23 we sliced and diced and made 302 pints of salsa. These jars are for all the staff and a few special people who came to help. Before our canning season started, each staff member signed up for the jars they wanted. When salsa day arrived we decided it would be a 1 day project. It was! We finished with 302 pint jars!! Tonya, my sister, brought her friend, Cinda, from Salt Lake City for our special day. Jerry, the twinkle in Andee’s eye, came too. We worked hard and we got this whole project finished. WHEW! The following week we made 96 jars of chili sauce.

So, now that you know about our recent harvests, what about the CATTLE? Well, we all live in a rural area. Our office/warehouse building is in the small city of Nibley. Our neighbor had a loose fence post and Saturday morning his cattle came for a buffet breakfast. They had red corn, yellow corn, bi-color corn, watermelon leaves, pumpkin, green beans, and the corn stalks! Our summer garden projects dwindled into a disaster that only huge bovines could create. We found our watermelon plants were hiding 72 watermelons! We would have been lycopene high come watermelon harvest time. Anyway, the only things left to harvest from our garden are hot peppers and zucchini. After all the staff reviewed the garden we harvested one last zucchini, an 11.44 lb monster! I don’t know about you, but zucchini season is the only time of year we truly focus on locking our doors. Your car isn’t even safe at church from a drive-by zucchini deposit! Now we have come to the untimely end of our garden. We’re glad for the harvests we’ve had and the jars of sunshine that will be opened this winter.

So, my last thought of the day is a great foot-in-mouth comment I heard today. The comment was that this person couldn’t bring herself to “working with people who do NOT have a degree.” I don’t know about you, but, my opinion is that a DEGREE does not make an intelligent person. If you are out there reading, making soap, or even pondering our cattle incident, I want you to know that honest, hard-working people are the kings and queens of my world. You might have a degree, you might not, but your core morals and beliefs are far more valuable to me than anything else you possess.

To end on a happy note, I want to give away a few mugs. I will choose two people who comment on this blog post at blog.thesage.com and send them their style mug/cup. Tell me if you are a mug drinker at the computer, a cup drinker at the table, or a mobile drinker in the car, train or subway. I’ll arrange for a special treat to come your way.

Have a great week and a special Tea Tuesday,