**WARNING:** Philosophical, pseudo-inspirational words ahead.

I’ve written before about my torrid affair with the Coffee People Black Tiger milkshake. [Last time I mentioned it](https://www.rootsandgrubs.com/2006/07/16/tears-of-the-black-tiger/) was summer 2006, and I was up at 3am, having polished off one of these extremely caffeinated milkshakes about seven hours earlier.

Coffee People, which was one of Portland’s original espresso chains, is now [mostly defunct](http://portland.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2007/01/22/editorial2.html). The brand’s last outpost is a few stands at Portland International Airport.

Sort of.

I was out in Portland today and came across [Jim and Patty’s Coffee](http://jimandpattys.com/). Jim and Patty are the actual coffee people from the Coffee People logo. They’re like the local band that hit it big, drove around in a tour bus for a few years, then went back to playing at the bar down the street. They sell Black Tiger milkshakes and all the other old CP favorites (lemon cheesecake, espresso mocha, Velvet Hammer).

More important, however, they had an exhibition of Road Tour mugs. As the Portland Business Journal put it:

> In this age of Starbucks ubiquity, it’s worth remembering there was a time when the unveiling of Coffee People’s annual “Road Tour” mug was close to a genuine cultural event. Coffee snobs didn’t tote some stainless steel contraption with the Starbucks mermaid logo. The beverage transport device of choice for the coffee elite was the now quaint plastic “Road Tour” mug.

(I tried to get a picture of the display but it was behind very reflective plastic.)

I bought the Road Tour mug annually for several years in the early 90s. It was as important a part of my wardrobe as my Pearl Jam t-shirt. Apparently they were still doing them [as recently as 2006](http://www.vonglitschka.com/2009/08/05/brewing-creativity/).

When I saw the display, which featured maybe five mugs from my coffee-willing heyday, it was a big nostalgia sandwich. I remembered driving around Portland in my little Mazda, spilling coffee (no cupholders), and doing various stupid high school things. Seeing those mugs was great–I still have residual awesome in my veins, hours later.

I had a minor pang about the fact that I’d gotten rid of my (dirty, plastic) road tour mugs. Why hadn’t I held onto them and created my own little shrine?

Then I had a flash of insight. Maybe even an insight sandwich. Here’s what would have happened if I’d kept the mugs. I would have them stashed in my closet. I would know they were there, but they would have stopped bringing me any joy years ago, after they got too gross to drink out of. Periodically I’d waste time moving them from one apartment to another and stashing them in a new closet. Then, today, at Jim and Patty’s, I would have seen the mug display and shrugged at the same old mugs moldering in my closet. They would have been robbed of their awesome.

This, I think, is a part of why I so enjoy getting rid of things–even irreplaceable things of the greatest sentimental value. I didn’t mention this aspect of decluttering in [my recent column on the topic](http://www.mint.com/blog/saving/get-rid-of-useless-crap/), and perhaps the idea sounds deliberately inflammatory, but today is not the first time I’ve gotten considerable and unexpected pleasure out of getting rid of something of sentimental importance. In fact, now I try not to accumulate anything like this at all, stuff that will play my own life back to me until I get bored of it.

(Another hypothesis is that I do this because I’m a guy.)

By the way, I didn’t order the Black Tiger shake, because–call me old-fashioned–I feel like sleeping tonight.

The other day my colleague Maggie Savarino [posted on Twitter](http://twitter.com/wineoffensive/status/6474946956) to complain about poor tea service:

> Tea service in Seattle SUCKS.

So in the spirit of that New York Times blog post about [100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do](http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/one-hundred-things-restaurant-staffers-should-never-do-part-one/), let’s come up with a tea drinker’s bill of rights. I don’t have all of the amendments, so I need you to come to my constitutional convention and help out.

I also recognize that tea service poses some problems. There are many kinds of tea, each with its own brewing parameters, and tea attracts picky customers. But you could say the same about the standard menu of espresso drinks–compared to regular and decaf drip, it seems impossibly expensive and complicated. Why, you’d have to charge $3 for a cup of coffee!

Exactly. So along with these rights, I’d like to offer a couple of rights to cafes: the right to charge as much for a cup of tea as you charge for a latte; the right to make customers wait until the tea has properly brewed; and the right to serve a streamlined menu of teas. My favorite teahouse, [Remedy Teas](http://remedyteas.com), serves 150 teas. Your coffee place doesn’t have to. For that matter, there’s no reason a cafe can’t serve good tea and cheap teabags, drinker’s choice.

TEA DRINKER’S BILL OF RIGHTS (Beta)

1. The right to filtered water at the proper temperature. Especially for green tea, which needs much cooler water than black or oolong tea.

2. The right to fresh, loose-leaf tea. I carry teabags with me when I travel, and it’s certainly possible to find good tea in bags. (A shout-out to [MyGreenTea](http://www.mygreentea.com/) and [Sugimoto USA](http://www.sugimotousa.com/).) But the best tea doesn’t come in bags, and they’re kind of janky in a way that jars with the cafe experience.

3. The right to not be responsible for determining how long to brew the tea. If you’re having tea to stay, the cafe can furnish you with a digital timer. If you’re having it to go, they should time it for you, because you have…

4. The right to take tea to go without a teabag in it. Otherwise you get oversteeped tea, unless you take the lid off and drop the teabag into a trash can on the street and splash hot tea on your wrist and cry in public.

What else? Please weigh in.

The other day I was at Uwajimaya buying ingredients for homemade kimchi, about which more later. Near the chef demo counter, they had a big display of shincha tea.

This struck me as odd, because shincha is first-harvest tea, lauded for its fresh, clean flavor (and priced to match). The first harvest for tea is in the spring. And this shincha was only $8. Was Uwajimaya trying to snooker people with leftover spring tea markdowns?

No such subterfuge. This tea was from a place where it’s spring now: Brazil. It’s made by Yamamotoyama, a large Japanese tea brand, grown on their Brazilian plantation. Here’s the package:

The tea looks and smells like deep-steamed sencha. And I’d love it if the punchline of the story was that it was just as good as the shincha I paid $25 for last spring. Unfortunately, it’s pretty mediocre. I’m not sure if this is because it’s from Brazil or because all of Yamamotoyama’s cheap tea is mediocre.

Anyway, interesting experiment, and presumably we’ll all be drinking Brazilian tea from a box next year.

I’ve already [waxed drippily](https://www.rootsandgrubs.com/2009/10/06/b-love/) about the series of short books on Japanese food by Kentaro Kobayashi. Last night I threw together a noodle dish based on a recipe from his book [Noodle Comfort](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1934287571/?tag=mamstesgrubshack), which includes a big section of Italian pasta dishes. This is not one of them.

Dice a couple of big shiitake mushroom caps and about 1/4 pound boneless pork loin (or some cooked pork or Chinese BBQ pork). Stir together a sauce: 2 tablespoons sake, 1.5 tablespoons red miso, 1 tablespoon mirin, 1.5 teaspoons sugar, and 2 tablespoons ground black sesame seeds. Cook two blocks of frozen udon noodles, drain, and rinse. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a skillet. Brown the pork (if raw) and 1 bunch sliced scallions (white and light green parts). Remove and brown the mushrooms. Add 1 teaspoon minced garlic and 1 teaspoon grated ginger and cook until fragrant. Add the sauce, then the reserved pork, scallions, and noodles. Stir in 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil and serve.

(Thanks to my friend vimes for the title joke.)

Warning, before we begin: this is a long story about dishwasher repair. It has nothing to do with Japan and nothing to do with food, and Iris doesn’t appear in it at all. But I found the outcome completely fascinating, and I figure I must have a couple of readers geeky enough to feel the same way. Consider this the kitchen appliance equivalent of the Diagnosis column from the New York Times Magazine, and see if you can figure out the surprise ending before we get there. (I certainly didn’t.)

A few months ago, our 21-year-old dishwasher started behaving strangely. It was leaking slightly and leaving a weird residue on dishes. Our apartment manager, figuring it wasn’t worth it to repair a 21-year-old dishwasher, kindly got us a new one, a GE/Hotpoint.

It worked fine for a couple of weeks. Then, one day, I opened it after the cycle was finished and found two inches of water on the bottom that hadn’t drained at the end of the cycle. I ran it again and it did the same thing.

The building maintenance guy came over. He looked at it and said, “Oh, the guy who installed this put in the hoses wrong.” He did some hose reconfiguration, cranked the dial on the front of the dishwasher, and showed me that it was now draining well.

After he left, I ran a full cycle. It finished with two inches of water on the bottom.

The maintenance guy came back. He disassembled the bottom of the dishwasher and speculated that maybe the drain was just partially occluded, and this was causing the solenoid to overheat partway through the cycle. He reconfigured the hoses again in an attempt to ensure that the dishwasher wasn’t working so hard to drain water. To replace the solenoid, however, we’d have to have GE come in. So he left it disassembled. I spent a couple of weeks hand-washing and drying all the dishes. Have you ever wondered if your life would be better if you got rid of all your modern conveniences and went back to the way Granny did things? Well, it sucks.

A couple weeks later, a guy from GE came over. He carried an indestructible Toughbook laptop, which I drooled over in a geeky way. He took a look and had some harsh words for the maintenance guy (I remembered this now from my tech support days: part of the job is always observing that the person before you was an idiot. Exceptionally polite tech support/maintenance people say it in their heads, not aloud, but this is rare.) He replaced the solenoid and said the problem was with a part I didn’t entirely understand: something about how a ball had to be sitting in a socket in order for the drain to work, and the ball was in the wrong place. He cranked the dial and showed me that it was draining well.

I was not surprised when, next time I ran the dishwasher, the problem was still there. This time, however, I decided that if the GE guy can twist a dial, so can I. So, immediately after the cycle ended, I turned the dial back around until I heard the water gurgling into the sink drain, which sounds a lot like Iris when she is really thirsty. It drained completely. This was my procedure for the next two weeks: catch the dishwasher at the end of the wash cycle; turn the dial to drain manually; turn the dial to the dry cycle. I also noticed that the amount of water left on the floor of the appliance varied quite a bit from cycle to cycle: sometimes it was nearly full, sometimes nearly empty, but never completely empty.

The GE guy came back, and he was perplexed and a little sheepish that he hadn’t fixed it last time. He filled and drained the dishwasher many times and observed aloud that it was draining well. He speculated that maybe I had a small clog in the downspout, and pressure was building up and water backing up over the course of the cycle. He asked if I’d ever noticed water backing up into the sink when running the sink faucet. I said no.

This was, in case you’ve lost count, the fourth repair visit. Four times, I’d complained that there was something wrong with the drain (or the outflow mechanism, at least) and four times someone had come out to fix the drain.

The GE guy called a colleague, who I imagined as a retired *éminence grise* of appliance repair. They spoke for a few minutes, and I wasn’t really paying attention, but when he got off the phone, he was grinning. He looked like the detective who’d just solved the case–because he had. I’ve probably made this face before after solving a pesky computer problem, but I’ve never seen it in such a pure form on someone else.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the drain,” said the GE guy. “The problem only happens at the end of the cycle, right?” I nodded. “Well, there’s no water level sensor in there. It just drains for a certain amount of time and then stops. If it’s not empty, it’ll just go on to the dry cycle, oblivious.”

“So you mean the little dial thingy is just running too fast at the end of the cycle?”

“Right, the timer.”

There’s nothing wrong with the patient’s intestines: it’s his brain!

“I have a new timer unit in my truck,” said the guy. He came back and installed it, a little $75 plastic part. The problem is now completely solved.

I don’t think GE made any profit on this dishwasher, but I called them to commend their Holmesian technician and his (presumably) grizzled mentor.