Why you can't tell a tea by it's colour?

I have a couple of tea strainer/infusers that I use to brew whole leaf tea. I recently spent part of a lunch hour searching for one that which would be slim enough to fit inside my REI travel mug. I discovered the Luci Loose Tea Infuser which is just narrow enough to fit inside the mug and looks like a gnome is sitting inside the mug. While at the tea store I decided to buy some British tea which is hard to find Earl Grey -- Taylors of Harrogate." Once back at the office it was time to test the new infuser and tea. I loaded up the infuser with tea and put milk in my mug and waited for the kettle to boil. The infuser sat in the mug steeping for four minutes and the tea looked white. I like my tea to have a bit of a brown color. I opened up the infuser and poured in another teaspoon of tea and waited. The tea still looked white. I was getting a little desperate so I grabbed a tea bag and plopped it into the mug and now I have brown tea. It was a highly caffeinated brew and much stronger than I'm use to. The moral of the story is just because your tea has a neutral colour after brewing doesn't mean it won't have a punch of caffeine.

Calendar recycling

I normally buy my wall calendar in the second week of January as by this point they are usually 50% off. This year I decided to try something different. I have a really nice hiking calendar in my office showing people hiking in various locales around the world. Rather than buy a new one, I decided to staple a 2010 calendar page over each month of the year. The benefit of this is that I could pick the picture that I wanted displayed for a given month. In February, I decided to have a pick of a folks hiking in a spring-like setting rather suggested picture of folks hiking next to a frozen glacier. In the peak of the summer heat, I'll switch to the arctic pictures to prep me for the colder months. The benefit is that I saved some cash on a new calendar and can now pick the scenery that I want for a given month.

Why you should bag your oranges?

Tonight, I ran to the swimming pool for a workout and stopped by the grocery stores to buy some food for dinner. I grabbed some pita, meat, and dried cherries and headed over to the self-checkout area and waited for my turn. There was an older couple just ahead of me having some trouble. The norm is for folks to put all their oranges in a bag when selecting them from the boxes. This couple didn't know this so they were trying to place all their oranges on the scale but they kept on rolling off and landing on the floor. The eventually decided on the divide and conquer approach which is place as many oranges as can fit on the scale and then to weigh them before weighing the next batch. The machine didn't like this as they forgot a little detail which is that you have to tell the scale in advance what it is weighing before it will weigh it. They eventually got it sorted out but it was comical as they would have a handful of oranges on the scale and then one would fall off and the machine would start beeping and saying that they should see the attendant. The moral of the story is to put all your oranges in one bag and to place them on the scale together.