ooooooooolong

after we closed the store tonight mark, jay, and i threw ourselves a little tea party.  we garnished ourselves with audacity and broke into the imperial tea collection tins, not once, but twice!  (excuse my explicit tea geekness)  we brewed it fittingly in a cast iron pot, first the jasmine phoenix eye, then qing xiang oolong.  the jasmine eye was damn good, sweeter and lighter than the jasmine pearl.  but then the oolong.. oooooooolong. oh my god. exquisite! the most superior tea i've ever tasted.  i exclaimed a reflex "oh" of delight at first sip.  incredible! formidable! (throw in your own rhyming synonym, reader, please do!)  the flavor has so much depth to it, so many layers, it soaks into your palate.  to describe it frankly, it's so good that i can't put my pajamas on yet because i feel like i should be dressed as nice as it tastes.  (ok, reader, well i may not be dolled up enough to match the flavor, but you get the idea)  

mark and i split the leaves, which will be good for several more brews through tomorrow.  but damn, it's so flippin' good it's practically carnal.  tasting this tea, though it has been previously implied, has cemented me as a tea geek.  i now have two phases of my life: pre-qing xiang and post-qing xiang.  well, maybe that's extreme, but this is some serious shit here.  this tea has the power to sift away all the crap in life; separate my egg whites from the yolks and whip them into a soft fluffy meringue.  something like that.

mmm.. what an ideal situation i find myself in: sitting against my plump, soft pillows, in the dim luminescence of my green-walled bedroom, listening to the subtle whispers of late night npr jazz over the rhythmic snoring of my cat, reveling in my qing xiang.  this is one of those 'shut your eyes and just exist in it' moments.  hell yeah.