Global Tea Time

Since next Saturday is Halloween I thought that I would explore some holidays in New Zealand. According to Google, Halloween not celebrated all that much in the past, but has been gaining popularity in the last few years. I found a  calendar  of holidays observed in New Zealand for 2020 online. Halloween is listed there, under the category of "observance". Their labor day is October 26th. I find it interesting that Good Friday, and Easter Monday are national holidays, while holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday are observances. They also have a lot of regional holidays.    New Zealand was a British colony from 1841 to 1907. The culture there is described as being a mixture of European and Maori. Immigrants tended to assimilate to European culture, and Maori culture is said to have suffered greatly during colonization. The Maori were torn between preserving their traditional culture, and the pressure to assimilate to European colonist ways. Hmm, I heard the same thing in...

We've all survived another week of the zombie apocalypse that is 2020. Yet again, I find myself writing something to post on Sunday morning because, well, life. This morning I had an extra reason to not want to get out of bed. I checked my phone, and the weather said rain/snow. SNOW? It's the middle of friggin October!  NO NO NO NO! The news said that this was going to be an exceptionally bad winter as far as cold and snow (don't they say that every year?). I guess mother nature isn't messing around. Maybe this year is mother nature's revenge for the election 4 years ago.  It's not supposed to snow until Halloween night when all the kids are out trick or treating. Of course that's being discouraged this year, so maybe the weather is just as confused as we all are. What day is it? Does it matter what day it is? Which of the 3 outfits I rotate wearing to work should I wear today? Now that we're in the new office, the dress code is even more relaxed. Maybe ...

 Papua New Guinea has been kind of hard to find information on. Per YouTube, they grow coffee and tea there, and there is a picture of a cup of tea that looks like black tea. Given the paucity of information, I decided to check our good old friend Google. There I found an article from the free library that was written shortly before I graduated high school. So far, that article has been the most information I found about the tea industry there, although it is a bit dated. I'm not sure what the status of tea is 22 years later, but it appears that there's not much enthusiasm locally. I did find something maybe more recent (it talks about tea price projections from 2006 - 1015). This is on the Tok Pisin English Dictionary that is apparently a bilingual dictionary/encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea.  Tea was introduced as an experimental crop in the 1950s. A few tea estates were established with the idea that they would provide a market, processing, and technical assistance to smal...

 I've had this whole last week off work, and had writing blog posts as one of the things I wanted to do with my time. Now it's Sunday morning, and here I am with no blog posts written. So goes life. This week off was actually due to COVID, and it was a staycation because of COVID. I work for a hospital, and since there has been a massive budgetary loss due to COVID thanks to a temporary shutdown of elective surgeries, people staying away from the ER and doctor offices in general out of fear of being around sick people, and the fact that the rumored huge payouts by insurance companies for a COVID diagnosis are pure fiction, people working at my pay grade have to take a week off of work without pay, or give back 50 hours of vacation time. The people in the pay grade above me have to double that - 2 weeks off without pay or 100 hours of vacation given back. I actually had a friend post on social media that her uncle died from COVID hours after she had to listen to some whacko ramb...