Tea, food storage and vegetable gardens - one of these things is not like the other

I am on the lookout for good coffee makers to add to our ever burgeoning tea section of the house. It has started to take over a goodly portion of our counter, as what started out as just one large tin of Madagascar vanilla rooibos tea has transformed into six tins, four jars and one large wooden box of various teas, ranging from rooibos to jasmine to rose hips. Coffee makers are great for making large quantities of loose leaf tea relatively easily and quickly, and thus it will be quietly added to our seemingly heretical collection of tinsanes.

Dantzel warned me that various people will get angry or upset because I am searching for a coffee maker. It does not keep up with Mormon appearances, or, as we lovingly chide our fellow members with this handy phrase, "avoid the appearance of all evil." To that, I scoff, and then point to the fact that two new arrivals have graced my "Points of Interest" link list on the side of this blog.

You may notice there are two new points to be interested in, the blogs "Food Storage Made Easy" and "Everyday Food Storage." Please, do not be distracted by the copious amounts of pastel and pink. While Mormon culture (or at least the Mormon culture I have been around the past few years) has delegated the job of taking care of food storage to the women, let us not forget that food storage is ultimately a manly endeavor! Why, who were the first men who discovered food storage? The men who forgot their wives' admonitions to put the meat back into the ice box and left it out in the sun all day, only to discover...jerky! And thus, the testosterone-laden tradition of food storage was born! Dantzel and I heard a wonderful talk in Sacrament Meeting last week about food storage, and now that we are a brand new independent nuclear Mormon family, decided it was about time to start thinking about food storage, and then to procrastinate it like everyone else.

Ah, just kidding! We decided to start building up a modest food storage so that when the Wasatch Front finally decides to blow its top off, we can live off of beans and lentils and processed meat, which is usually what we end up eating anyway.

To supplement the food storage admonition, the prophet has also instructed us to plant a garden. The past couple of days had been warming up, and so Dantzel and I have been excitedly planning a large vegetable garden to grow. I have begun to poke about teh interwebs, more notably the bloggernacle, to find some recipes on canning fruit and so forth. Perhaps I shall even grow my own cabbage to make my own kimchi for Chusok, which will no doubt earn me extra brownie points with my deceased ancestors that I've tried so valiantly to anger during my teenage years.

But then last night, the winds and snows descended upon us, much like locusts on ancient Egypt, and yea, we wept bitterly. Ashes and sackcloth may have been involved.