Shopping in different countries can sometimes be very different to what you're used to. And then, sometimes you look at a shelf in a supermarket, and the hubbub around you seems to fade, the people around you move in slow motion, the lighting changes subtly to draw your attention to a familiar item as a slow smile of recognition spreads across your face. "Ah!" you sigh, "I know that product!"
New Zealand isn't particularly exotic, in terms of what's in the supermarket. You can buy wine and beer there - except in Invercargill - but other shelves have familiar products under mysterious names. Jif, for example, is a strong cleaning agent here, so you wouldn't eat it like peanut butter. Speaking of which, peanut butter is one of those things that you first have to chew your way through some different brands before you strike an acceptable price-versus-taste tradeoff. Weak minds (not us, of course, we swear!) might fall into the trap of buying vast quantities of things that you used to ship half-way across the world, forgetting, for the moment, that you can buy more whenever you want. (I'm lookin' at you, Tim Tams.) And at other times you completely forget to indulge in other products you used to ship, exactly because you can buy them whenever you want (Lemon-Scented Tea).
Which brings us back to what I started with. We were looking for alternatives to Earl Grey and English Breakfast tea bags and discovered these:
Celestial Seasonings teas! In cutie-pie 10 bag boxes! You know me and my Sleepytime. (Or maybe you don't, but I love me my Sleepytime.) It's particularly fun that Celestial Seasonings were just down the road from us, in Boulder, and we even went on a tour of the factory.
In further harks back to ol' Colorado, our little box of household items has grown: We are now, once more, proud owners of an electric fan heater. Whee!
The story behind this starts a little earlier, when a work colleague of Kristi's loaned us a dehumidifier for a weekend. This is a gadget very much not used in Colorado, where the relative air humidity might reach 30% on a wet day. In our apartment, it's usually 80%, exactly the same as on the beach just outside the front door, since our windows don't insulate. In any case, we fell in love with 50% humidity air, and discovered that moderate temperatures in dry air are tolerable, whereas any temperature in wet air is miserable. We were all keen to run out and buy our own, when Andrew and Kathryn threw up their hands and gave us theirs, which, since they live in a real house, they're not using, on long-term loan.
So now that the air is dry(-er), we just need to heat it up. There is a heatpump in the living room (it's a fridge in reverse) but unless you're sitting right under it, or within minutes of turning it off, it's as though you never ran it. Hence our excitement about the fan heater. "We love," we both say.
