Mr. Nishi-san never sells his tea at the auction and is one of the pioneers of organic tea farming in Japan. Rishi Tea has a private contract growing relationship with Mr. Nishi-san and together we established a USDA-NOP Organic Certified tea project in Kagoshima, Japan. Nishi-san’s teas are exquisite due to his masterful expertise in cultivation and aracha processing. Nishi-san’s farm takes great care to nurture Yabukita and other premier tea varietals ensuring that Rishi Organic Sencha is superb year after year. Our First Flush Sencha from Nishi-san is a light-steamed type (asamushi) from the first harvest of spring when the highest quality tea is produced. It’s refreshing and brisk with a pleasant bitter-sweetness, deep umami flavor and a greenish-golden infusion color. Its unique flavor comes from a special blend of unique Japanese tea bush varietals cultivated for us according to strict EU and USDA-NOP organic certified standards.

Rush-hour traffic seems better too.  People go on vacation, or change the time they drive into work since their kids are home for the summer or something… whatever causes the decrease in traffic snarls, I love it!  The television networks are between seasons on all of their big shows, and the only major professional sport that’s going is Major League Baseball.

In a month or so football will be gearing up, families will be returning home from the beach or the mountains or wherever they’ve been all summer.  School supplies will go on sale… the whole thing winds back up to full speed and starts the cycle all over again.  But for now, I’m enjoying the lazy days of summer.

The first thing I did was to get a Tempur-Pedic pillow, which really has helped a lot.  But while my neck pain seems to be less frequent, it still manages to annoy me from time to time.

Well, today I think I’ve figured it out.  It has to do with the way I sit at my desk at work.  My dual monitors are so low on my desk that I end up slouching down to get to a comfortable level for my eyes, but at the expense of the rest of my body.  No wonder I get neck and headaches all the time…  I am slouching down in my chair and bending my neck forward to get in line with my monitors.  So, I am sitting up straight by locking my chair in position and I am going to boost my displays up a few inches.  Let’s hope this works.

This has caused me to think about posture in general… and how Americans are a bunch of hunched-over fat blobs.  I am trying to keep my neck, shoulder blades, hips and knees in the same plane, but it’s harder than I thought it would be.  In order to make this natural you have to strengthen your abs and the rhomboid muscles in your back.  This improved posture requires extra self-awareness for me because I am 6’5″ tall so I tend to naturally slump over to be on more of a level of friends and family and coworkers as I interact with them.  Imagine what it would be like if all of the slumped over people you see every day at the grocery store, gym or the mall were paying attention to their posture…  if you pay attention when you’re out and about in public you will be surprised at how many of us struggle with this!

When I got home from work that evening I realized he wasn’t there.  He would never be there again.  I had never greeted Dierker at the door like I do my wife or son or even our stupid dog, Lucy.  But the fact that Dierker was not physically there still got to me and  I began to reflect on our life together.  I adopted Dierker in the fall of 1999 while I was beginning my junior year of college.  While roommates came and went, and friends moved on to other cities and new lives, Dierker and I were still together.

A friend of mine pointed out to me last week that Dierker lived a full life and got to taste a little bit of everything along the way.  He had some wild times in college, then moved on to the more serious life of the working man.  He settled down with me when Rachel and I were married, and even got to experience a new addition to our family when Brantley was born.

In all, Dierker and I spent a few months shy of 10 years together.  That’s one third of my life up to this point.  When I look back it doesn’t seem like that long, but I am left feeling like I took Dierker for granted as part of my life that was always there.  When I picked his remains up at the vet’s office yesterday and was driving home, I felt this morbid parallel to the first time I brought Dierker home from the SPCA when I had adopted him.  He managed to claw his way out of his little cardboard carrier that day and was under my feed and climbing up in my lap while I tried to drive somewhat safely along the freeway with my new companion.  Dierker would not be escaping his box this time around, and that cold reality still doesn’t sit all that well.  Farewell, old friend…

Same goes for Sarah Palin.  She has done nothing but travel to national events in order to keep her face in the public eye so she can supposedly lead her party in 2012.  Did she forget that she was elected to serve the people of her home state of Alaska first and foremost?  Did she not get the hint that the American people sent her when they overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic ticket in the 2008 presidential race?  Enough already.  Go be a governor for a while and then worry about your personal ambitions.  If I were an Alaskan I’d be asking Sarah “what have you done for me lately Madam Governor?”

John McCain unwittingly did his country a great disservice by unleashing these two clowns on the American public.

Hamas may be launching rockets into Southern Israel “picking” a fight with the IDF, but since when is it ok to retaliate by bombing a UN-sanctioned school?  Or high-density residential areas?  Or mosques?  Simply stating that Hamas was supposedly using the aforementioned school as a staging site for rocket attacks is not a good enough reason.  Even if that is a totally true statement, you’re telling me that there is no way to root out the few individuals they seek without killing a bunch of innocent kids and teachers?

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict reminds me of junior high.  One kid picks on another kid and pokes him and punches him.  Then, when that kid finally flips out and punches the first kid they BOTH get sent to the principle’s office, and blame each other for what happened.  They both say they will stop fighting and get along, and are sent back to class.  Then fifteen minutes later the whole scenario repeats itself.

The book was first published on the heels of the counter-cultural energy of the 1960′s, and I first encountered it in 7th or 8th grade in an English class. What I discovered just recently is that “The Lorax” is currently enjoying a new surge in popularity thanks to the environmental consciousness that is being reborn in the American population. Parents are buying the book for their children at a record pace.

A recent L.A. Times article sums up the plot nicely:

The book tells the story of the Once-ler, a greedy businessman, who, literally, can’t see the forest for the trees. The Once-ler builds a huge factory and chops down lush Truffula trees to feed the demand for his product (a frivolous item called a thneed).

In spite of repeated warnings from a creature called the Lorax, who speaks for the trees (but also for the creatures), the Once-ler continues to raze the forest. Eventually, the wildlife become deathly ill before finally moving away in order to survive. After polishing off the last Truffula tree, the Once-ler finds himself alone and out of business, surrounded by a wasteland of his own making.

With hindsight, the Once-ler learns his lesson, but is it too late?

The same could be asked of all of us, the grown-ups who push the buttons in the real world. What is it about taking care of the earth that we don’t understand? If anything, environmental conditions have gotten worse since “The Lorax” came out all those years ago. With the rollback of environmental regulations and the slashing of EPA budgets, President Bush has been a veritable Once-ler in chief for the last eight years.

If you’ve never heard of “The Lorax” I would highly recommend it. I had totally forgotten about the book until I stumbled on this article earlier this week.

“America has lost her footing, lost her elegance,” says 87-year-old Audrey Geisel, widow of the late Dr. Seuss. (He was born Theodor Seuss Geisel and died in 1991 at age 87.) “Globally speaking, it’s not good, and it’s getting less good all the time. We didn’t learn from ‘The Lorax.’ We’re paying a price, and we don’t seem to know it.”