I would have done the same today, but I haven't gone shopping yet since returning, and I'm out. So I opened a tin of loose tea, Harrod's Special Blend, that Kevin brought back from England for me. I put quite a bit in a tea baller, and put that in my large cobalt blue teapot. I boiled water, poured it into the teapot, steeped the tea, removed the tea baller, so it wouldn't get too dark. I poured myself a cup, wrapped a tea towel around the teapot to keep the rest warm. I added milk and sugar, and enjoyed a really excellent cup of tea. It's almost done; I'll pour myself another soon. The whole thing felt very...civilized.
It's nice, starting the new year out with a pot of tea, rather than a convenient tea-bagged cup. I have a major deadline coming up, and it'd be easy for me to start panicking about it. The lack of convenient tea bags forced me to slow down a little, take a slower, better route. In the long run, doing it this way actually saves time -- I don't have to boil water and wait for steeping for each cup. It's hard to remember that when I'm in a hurry, though.
Over Christmas, I kept telling my mother to slow down. She's over fifty now; she has a right to start taking it easy. I still have plenty of energy myself, and tons of stuff that I want to get done today, this week, in this coming year. But it might be smart to pace myself, just a little.