Tea Tuesday, and some Tagging

Another Tea Swapper Melanie was showing her many different English ways of serving tea. Go and see, it is a lovely collection of photos from 2008, with fresh strawberries and all! My tea culture has influences from east and west, and my blog friends in Britain might be shocked to see the way we make tea. My modern way of drinking tea is this:






A mug (Arabia/Iittala Teema, special edition in red, a Christmas present), a coaster from Melanie, and black tea with nothing in it: no sugar, honey or raspberry jam (the Russian way), and for God's sake no milk. Therefore no spoon needed. This is a mid-morning cup, therefore nothing to eat either.


On Saturday we visited my mother, 92, still living alone at home. There was a lot of snow on the trees, so it was not easy to see the lake. You can get a peek in the middle of the picture, above the snow covered rock. The white area is the lake, and the dark area above the straight horizontal line is an island. You can click all my images to enlarge.




Mother had started putting together a 1,000 pcs jigsaw puzzle my youngest sister had given her for Christmas. The picture will be of an old Dutch painting with 12 persons and a dog, but also some dark corners is brown and black.

I have been tagged by Miri. I'm not very good at these things, but let's try.

Here are the rules of the game:
1. When you are tagged you are asked to list eight random facts about yourself and post them on your blog for visitors to enjoy.
2. Tag eight of your blogging friends and leave them a comment that they have been tagged and to join in the fun if they have the opportunity. (If not, that's okay. They can still enjoy the random facts everyone shares :) Be sure to list a link to your eight friends in your posting.

Here are my eight random facts:

1. My "name day" (a smaller celebration than birthday, all names have a day in the calendar, and variations of a name celebrate on the same day) is on my father's birthday. It was a special day for my mother as a teenager when she was already in love with him, and she wanted to call one of her daughters Ulla for this reason.

2. I drink black tea three to four times a day.

3. When I drink coffee, it is latte (1/8 coffee, 7/8 steamed milk) or cafe au lait.

4. I sort everything that needs to be thrown away. In addition to the one real waste bin I have two small containers for problem waste (batteries and medicins), 4 bins for recycling: compost, glass, metal, and packaging materials, and we take fluid cartons and newspapers to their separate recycling places. It goes without saying that we recycle all bottles to be reused, and get our money back (0.40 € for a big soft drink bottle).

5. Fabrics that other people need to throw away I turn into quilts and Unicef dolls. This doesn't happen very quickly!

6. I like old things.

7. I read a little in bed before going to sleep.

8. I have read all Agatha Christie's detective stories.

Here comes the difficult part. I have many blogging friends, and even more blogs I follow more or less regularly, but I don't really know which of them don't like to be tagged. Therefore I leave the choice to you, my reader. If you want to play this game, leave a comment with a link to your blog and copy the rules from above. In this way we can all come and learn a little more about you.