Mowing the lawn

I remember growing up that I hated mowing the lawn. My father had hay fever, or so he claimed, and so he couldn't mow the lawn. My mother always had me do it, never my brother, always me. He got to stay inside and watch TV. Even when I was gone for several days on a band trip and came home, the first thing she did was send me outside to mow the lawn. It was so embarrassing. Some of the students were still walking home and right by our house where I was mowing the lawn.

We moved to a different house when I was in high school on 1.6 acres and the previous owners sold their riding lawn mower to us. So I was a bit happier about that. Oddly enough my father's hay fever seemed to clear up and he wanted to mow the lawn now too.

But now that I'm older I can appreciate the benefits of a good work out from mowing the lawn. We did have a riding mower but sold it a couple of years ago thinking the lawn, just under a quarter acre, would be manageable with just the push mower. But in this recent heat and going out to mow the lawn I've been wishing we hadn't sold the ride on mower.

Still its not easy going outside when the temperatures are high and I have to remind myself mowing the lawn is excellent exercise.

And I always brew iced tea so its waiting for me when I come back in the house.

Mowing the lawn is the easy part. Its getting those darned weeds in the flower beds under control....

Tea

My mother came from Scotland and was a big tea drinker. While growing up I was constantly putting a kettle on for her or pouring the boiling water into her old metal tea pot. We didn't have a meal called tea like they do in Britain. But during the times I visited my relatives in England I always enjoyed the later afternoon tea. Not that I liked drinking the hot tea, I just liked all the cakes, cookies, and other snacks that came with the drink. I especially liked going to a restaurant for a cream tea. That snack was crumpets, clotted cream, and strawberries.

Even when iced tea drink crystals came out in the late 60's, early 70's I never was a big fan. We had it in the house but I rarely drank it. By the late 70's and 80's I was buying and drinking iced tea made from the drink crystals on a regular basis, but I rarely drank hot tea. When we went out to restaurants I often ordered iced tea to drink, and that was the presweetened drink that usually came out of the same dispensers as the soda pop.

In the late 80's when I began travelling more often to California and Nevada and ordered iced tea with my meal, it came differently than what I was used to in Canada. It was real brewed tea and it was unsweetened. When it arrived at the table I could add sweetener or sugar to it. I began to prefer this over the pre-sweetened tea I got back home.

In 1994 we were in Arizona one winter and wandered into a shop. I saw an iced tea machine and called Kerry to come over and take a look. "Can you believe people would pay money for this" I asked. "All they have to do is boil water in their kettle, make tea, and then put ice cubes in it or put it in the fridge."

But a few years later I remembered that machine. Because now I'm thinking its a real pain to go through the hassle of making tea and then cooling it down so I can have iced tea. but I could find no such appliance in any of the stores I looked at in the Greater Vancouver Area. So I looked on Ebay and bought a used Mr Coffee Iced Tea machine. And then I was hooked. The machine brews the tea and then spits it out into the pitcher which we've filled with ice cubes. So that's the big secret! We made a lot of iced tea. We tried all kinds of different flavored herbal teas. But after all the use the handle came off the pitcher. Crazy Glue fixed that problem but to be cautious after the tea brewed into iced tea we poured it into a second pitcher.

In 2005 we were down in Washington one weekend and had dinner at Red Lobster. I asked for iced tea and the waiter asked if I wanted regular iced tea or Boston iced tea. I asked what the Boston iced tea is and he said it has cranberry juice. I ordered that and I was hooked. While down on that trip we bought a new Mr Coffee Iced Tea machine. And ever since then I've been stocking up on cranberry-raspberry juice that I add to the iced tea as sweetener. We make iced tea a lot, even through the winter months.

But an odd thing has happened. I've started drinking hot tea too. Not a lot and usually just when I have a sore throat. But maybe that's because its winter and old age is catching up to me....