For Solstice/Christmas, my mom gave me a box of flowering jasmine tea.

I loooooove jasmine tea, but I didn’t want to waste these talented performers on a regular ceramic teapot. I needed to see the performance.

Armed with the Amazon gift card that my office gave us for getting married, I spent days laboring over the reviews (all mixed/negative) of various glass teapots and ended up going with this one. There were lots of complaints about the teapot’s frailty and tendency to drip, but I decided I didn’t care because I wanted to use my tea already and didn’t want to spend tons on a teapot that was probably going to break anyway. As all my teapots do eventually.

On a glorious January evening, my Amazon box finally arrived. In addition to the teapot, I had made all sorts of fun purchases. In fact, here’s exactly how exciting my shopping cart looked.

It was probably the most boring order to ever pass through the halls (if there are even halls?) of amazon. But I was thrilled when that box finally arrived because it meant I could finally have my tea.

There’s a point to all this rambling about my amazon order.

I started pulling out my catch one by one, taking each item out of its packaging, admiring the brilliance of my everloc chrome dental station, etc.

And then this happened.

WHAT?!

WHAT?!!!!

And so, what could have been the most boring blog post in the world (for everyone except me), just got a little more interesting.

So yeah. Time for some tea!

I made a video. Because I was that excited to spend my evening watching a tea ball unfurl. Please watch it on mute. I sound like I’m 10 and I don’t know why I’m whispering. And I say thing too many times. And the unfurling wasn’t nearly as dramatic as I had anticipated.

We transferred it to the infuser cup a few minutes later. The switch did wonders for aesthetics.

Same teapot, different day, different ball.

In the end, the teapot lasted not much longer than my final ball of performance tea. The glass spontaneously shattered one day, soaking and burning everything around it with boiling hot tea. I guess the excitement of a life well lived finally proved too much.