As we all know it’s a very cold January in the Northeast. Last week was Maria’s birthday, and I suddenly remember something I saw on a trip to London when I was working at CBS News: a tea and coffee warmer.
The British are crazy for tea and Maria and I are both great tea drinkers, especially on frigid days. But it’s so cold up here the tea was cold by the time Maria got to her studio, or when I got to my study.
I went online and found the perfect tea and coffee warmer for us – it works with a gravity sensor that turns on automatically when a cup of tee or coffee is on it and turns off when the cup is removed. They don’t get hot, just warm.
I ordered one for Maria as a birthday present and then woke up and ordered one myself.
They both came last week and we give thanks for them every day, especially this week. Sitting here writing this, I leaned over and took my mug off the warmer and had a nice warm cuppa, as the Brits would say. This warmed my fingers and me.
It is not fun in -14 degree weather to start the workday with a cold cup of tea.
I squawk about technology a lot, but sometimes it really does make life better.
Bless you, Jon, a tea warmers is exactly what I need in my studio. I, too, live in cold weather, it’s 6 above zero at the moment, Fahrenheit . My studio is an add-on, thus there is a crawl space beneath it and a baseboard electric heater was installed to supply the heat. Problem is, it’s on a wall where my desk and work table is and I can’t reach it, so have portable heaters in the room which means the heat is not evenly distributed. Thus, I also find, bringing my tea into the room, it cools off so quickly I end up with a half a mug of tea sitting here all the time. So thanks, I didn’t know such things existed. I will look into this today, on Amazon, along with coyote urine, I’m having a terrible time with coyotes coming up to the house, sometimes in the daytime, always at night I see their tracks in the snow the next day. My dogs are barking at them at night, waking me up, too. The reviews on coyote urine are not great but I don’t know what else to do. Trapping them is impossible, I’m told, they are too smart for live traps, nooses are the only answer and I can’t get into the intricacies of that. Like you, I am privileged to live in the country and nature is all around me, wonderfully so, but those coyotes are a problem around here.
You do share such good ideas with your readers.
Sandy Proudfoot, north of Toronto. Canada.
Sandra, thanks for the note and good luck with coyotes. That’s why I got donkeys, no coyote has ever set food on the farm or in the pasture. If you have room, think about a donkey, they are easy to care for, hardy and very vigilant..We’ve never lost a sheep to a coyote..and I see them up in the hills drooling all the time..
For years I have used pottery cup lids, some cups and mugs come with them–in Germany anyway. Now Amazon sells them in pairs but these are for fairly narrow-mouthed mugs. I have neither space nor an outlet to use a plugin-in warming plate so I am mentioning them to some of your readers in the same situation as myself.
Insulated metal mugs with Plexi lids keep my tea or coffee hot for over an hour
Very, very many years ago a relative of mine in England had a “Tea’s made.’ It had a clock and at whatever the set time it would boil water and pour it on the tea leaves (not bags, oh no, no, no!) So the tea was ready when the household came awake.