Happy New Year! Tea Resolutions

A bit late to post this on my blog, but to all my readers out there Happy New Year!  While an otherwise great 2013 fizzled out with out much ado, 2014 started off rather incredibly, and yes tea was involved. But before I get on to the tea, I want to share something I am still thrilled about, on a 5k Race I ran New Years Morning, I won my age group!  While for about 99 out of 100 5k races my time would not win my age group, heck if I do *place* I'd often be fighting closely for 3rd.   Call it weather, or luck of the field this race, but my time of 22:21 was enough to put me on top of my age group!  I am still a bit amazed at how far I have come with running since I set out to try and make it a habit to improve my fitness, a year ago I struggled to run a single mile significantly under 9 minutes per mile, let alone 3.1 of them at an average of 7:13 minutes per mile.

So now for the tea resolutions!  I am going to continue with my "return to practice for tea brewing" which has already helped me focus on tea in ways I have nearly forgotten I could use to brew tea effectively.  For those of you that like my tea videos, I am going to commit myself to one new one a month, and really try for two new videos each month.  In a rather odd twist for a resolution, I am going to declare 2014 "the year of the return customer"  by that I mean I am really not going to seek out many new vendors, but rather focus on getting my tea purchases from tea vendors whose products I have liked in the past, and have earned in a certain sense a great deal of trust from myself that they will continue to source and sell quality products.

My very first tea purchase for 2014 was with a vendor of which I am quite fond.  Charaku Tea out of the Seattle area,  fitting into the theme of the return customer, at least with their sencha, I have always been thrilled with the qualities of their tea especially given their prices.  This included a some Matcha, and a tea resolution I hope to keep up with as often as  I have matcha  in stock, would be on social networking sites, try and start a #MatchaMonday theme, in which I will post a picture of the matcha I enjoy each Monday.

Also,  I am not sure my readers have fully appreciated this, but I am quite fond of making others happy when ever possible/ feasible.  So if there is something that you want to see more of in 2014 please don't hesitate to comment, and let me know what you want to see.