The first step is admitting you have a problem.

So. I love tea. No, I mean I really love tea. Here's my current tea collection.

Trish says there should be a support group for people like me who are addicted to hot tea and buying baby blankets (when you know you could get a call to pick up a baby on any given day, why would you not use that excuse to buy really great blankets every chance you get??).

Anyway, back to my tea confessions. Being raised in the south, I didn't even know that people drank tea without ice (or sugar, for that matter) until I was eight years old. My parents took my older brother Jared and me on our first mission trip to Kingston, Jamaica, and our hotel served hot tea with breakfast every morning. At first it just confused me but I quickly came to love it! They served their tea with warm milk and fresh cane sugar. It was heavenly and I was hooked.

Fast foward a few years. I spent the first semester of my junior year of college in Scandicci, Italy (suburb of Florence). Every night at 10:00 was "tea time" at the villa. My friends and I drank peach tea out of cups with little faces on them and ate these awesome cookies and lived in Italy. Again...heavenly.

Perhaps my obsession with tea became a real problem when Trish was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I knew conventional treatments offered us very little hope, so I began researching all different kinds of alternative treatments just in case we should we ever need them. And guess what I found out? Tea is the answer! (Well, maybe not the only answer, though some might disagree...) That's when I started drinking tea for the health benefits and not just because it's totally awesome. I bought several teas that I thought might help Mom manage her post-Whipple/chemo side effects (notice the "eater's digest" and "sleepytime" teas) and several that are thought to be "anti-cancer." Trish, however, is not very compliant with my efforts to make her healthier (at least not since she's started feeling better...I'm glad she's better but it was much easier to make her drink my teas when she couldn't get out of the recliner!). She says my "healthy" tea tastes like dirt and calls it "dirt tea." Sometimes I can get her to drink green tea, though. Sometimes.

So there you have it. I'm a little addicted to tea. I'm pretty sure it's the answer to all of life's problems. Black tea is my favorite (with milk and sugar or some type of sweetener...currently trying out agave nectar). Matcha green tea is my least favorite. If anyone has any secrets about how to make matcha taste awesome, let me hear them. It's so good for you and I'm trying really hard to like it! No luck so far, though.

Okay, I'm going to stop talking about tea now. I promise. One more picture, though...

The bad thing about having a blog is that you're always coming up with these great blog posts in your head (at least I think this one's great...because it's about tea). And then you have the desire to make those blog posts happen. And the next thing you know you're building a tower of tea on your dining room table and photographing it and blogging about it at 2am.

On second thought, maybe this tea thing isn't my only problem...