Thank you tea friends!

Unless we have chatted on IRC or on Reddit, a lot of my readers may not be aware that I had a surgery in January and was at home recovering throughout January and the entire month of February.  Everything went very well with the surgery, and I am now back to normal life!

The first two weeks or so after surgery I didn't really do much of anything.  I surely didn't drink much tea.  I did not have any dietary restrictions, I just didn't really have the energy or strength to bother with it.  The third and fourth week I started to feel a lot better and began brewing some tea again.  Due to the arrangement of my tea table, it was more comfortable to use my kettle and gaiwan with my left hand even though I'm right handed.  I got pretty good at it after a while!  It felt great to have something as comforting as tea back again.  And in the fifth and sixth weeks I started to feel pretty close to normal.

During this time after surgery I received some amazing gifts, tea gifts, from my tea friends on Reddit's /r/tea and from the IRC Freenode ##tea chat channel.  They have wonderful taste in tea, and a lot of these are teas I've been wanting to try, and some of them are completely new styles for me.  

These teas really have helped make the surgery recovery much easier and about as fun as it could possibly be.  Since I still have many of these teas left, I hope to occasionally review some here, and I'll post them under the label "Tea From Friends."

A friend in IRC was cleaning out his tea storage and decided this hoard was too good to throw away.

Fellow tea blogger The Oolong Drunk wasn't a big fan of the flavor profile of this Dehong Ye Sheng Cha raw puerh and was tempted to throw it away, but I wanted to give it a try first.  He sent some Mandala shou mini tuos along with it.

Gotta love some oriental booty!

Thank you!!!