I find myself in possession of a tea ball. It is pretty awesome

I love tea, and I have a couple containers of loose-leaf lying around somewhere, but I generally forget to drink it because we don't have a teapot, so it's very fussy to boil water in a pot and then pour it into a glass to steep, and then do that again once the single mug is gone.

But uh. Apparently we have a tea ball, which I found in box of post-its, and it is so much easier to use, frankly it makes me happy to a ridiculous level :)

(It just occurred to me that I could have used the hot water dispenser with the loose-leaf, but!)


SO ANYWAY. I have a stomach full of warm tea, a list of things to do, and a calm, relaxed sense of well being. Tea is awesome.



My grandpa wanted to spend some time out of the city, so we (grandpa, me, cousin, aunt) went to Subic over the weekend. Sadly it rained, which meant we had to forego a lot of the things we wanted to do, so the weekend was boring, but it was boring in a stress-free chill kind of way. That's okay. (In fact, that's very okay)

Also okay: we found a restaurant that serves an excellent fried shrimp dish with salt and pepper. Excellent I say :)

Ummmm. I did get to drape my arm over a tiger, though, so uh yay? It was two years old and kinda big but mostly it ignored us. So I wasn't terrified, but there was no way I was going to move my hand off of where the trainer put it.


Oh! And I borrowed my brother's camera, which beats my crappy phone camera, so theoretically should have been able to get decent shots. Unfortunately, I didn't really know how to compensate for blurring under low light conditions. I had to immediately throw away two-thirds of my shots because they were blurry; that leaves me some 250-odd to go through for quality. Still better than my old record which is taking two shots early in the day, then forgetting to get any later on.


Cameras are fun! Having been able to take photos on this trip makes me want to splurge on a phone with a better camera. I mean it won't be any kind of DSLR, but it should get me to near enough point-and-shoot that I'll be able to take photos on a whim (currently, whims are broken by the fact that the camera on my phone takes forever to load and doesn't really take good pics besides). Bonus: with the right app, I can just upload and share the pics as I take them, rather than having to remember to sync from the camera and organize and etc (...currently Flickr crashes on my phone when I try to upload. Another point for getting a new phone)

Currently my options are the iPhone 4S, and, well, the iPhone 4S. I've thought about trying out Android, but honestly I can't be bothered to wade into the ios-vs-android religious wars long enough to find a review that'll influence my decision either way.


Also, speaking of DSLRs, it turns out that if you turn the zoom level way up, that can aggravate blurriness in low-light, especially if you accidentally turn off image stabilization. Even the very best technology can't help a person who's determined to shoot themselves in the foot /o\



Also, also, I am tempted to tweak the default Tags module location so it's the first thing that comes after the entry, rather than the icon, but maybe that's too big a change now. Hm.