Visual Inventory of Everything I Own

So this is it. Everything I own, minus a digital camera I took the picture with, and a corkscrew that I somehow forgot to put into the picture. And yes, incase you were wondering... I took this picture naked.


And now all my possessions are almost as nice and tidy as I would like :-)

The Best Tea for a Traveler... or for anyone for that matter

I have found the perfect Tea for the traveler. Not just the perfect tea for the traveler, but the perfect tea for everyone. In fact, I have no idea why anyone would get any other type of tea. The tea I am talking about is called Matcha Tea. For a very long time, my girlfriend and I have always had the problem of having multiple types of teas for different places. At home, we would have loose leaf teas with a pot and strainer thinking it was the best way to extract flavor from tea. When traveling or at work, we would have to have tea bags, and have spent way too much money on trendy pyramid shaped tea bags which are supposed to promote proper steeping. But with the powder tea Matcha, there is no overhead. There are no tea bags, no strainers, no special pots required. All you need to do is put the powder in hot water (about 170 Degrees F) and your good to go. And if you find yourself missing the liturgy of the tea process, the measuring and pouring and waiting, then your still in luck, because the amount of tea pr0n and paraphernalia and process for Matcha is enormous.

Also, Matcha has more health benefits than any other tea(from brainready.com):

• 70 times the anti-oxidants of orange juice
• contains "approximately 137 times the amount of EGCG as regular steeped green tea which reduces risks to stroke, heart failure, cancer and diabetes
• vitamin C
• flouride
• chlorophyll
• 9 times the beta carotene of spinach

So there you have it. Buy a water tight .5oz container and toss it into your EDC bag and head out for a new life with a new tea. And don't worry, even the snobbiest of the tea snobs will respect your choice, just remember to get the Japanese stone ground and not the cheap Chinese imitation.

The move to Blogger and a change in focus

So, over the last few weeks, the blog has been acting pretty strange and I have been neglecting my attempts to make semi-regular posts. This is all because of the over-complicated task of moving from wordpress to blogger. First there was a problem releasing the domain from wordpress, then there was the problem of blogger not hosting DNS servers, then the copying and pasting of all posts, etc. So finally I am here.

Now the next question is "why the move?" Well, sadly but honestly, the main reason is one word: Adsense. Having a hobby that takes up your time is one thing, but having a hobby that takes up time and money is quite another, so my first goal is to at least make 15 dollars a year. This will allow me to keep my domain name and add some sustainability and security to the site. On top of that, blogger works better with my slow cell phone connection, and a few other reasons that I probably am just making up at this point.

The next big change is the focus. I am going to try and have much more content, and less whining. I realize that one main reason for starting this blog is to get the word out about how easy it is to live with less and I am not doing that. I am not doing that because I use this blog to b**** a lot, and because no one reads my blog. This will hopefully change with a slight increase in useful content (just a bit), and the increase in posts. Hopefully everything will work out.