The Happy Things

back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore

so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!

this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together

and then in the end you put it together like this!!

and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy

Every time someone in fic makes tea straight in the mug, I cringe. I think, perhaps, fandom has conflated how the boys make tea on tour with how they would make it at home. When you’re on the road, especially in the United States, you can usually get a kettle, but you can’t always depend on a teapot. Therefore, you make a cup of tea in a mug, like an animal.

That isn’t how I make tea at home. I’m a Canadian with an English dad and gran, and, yes, everyone is different. But I offer my experience as a guide. My parents drink coffee in the morning and tea in the evening. My granny likes tea always. I drink it at least once a day.

EQUIPMENT

Tea requires a kettle, a teapot, a tea cosy, a mug, and maybe a spoon.

Your kettle can be electric; I like a stovetop whistling kettle. Pour any leftover water out every time you fill it. Boil as much water as the kettle holds. You’re going to want it.

Every British household has a bulk standard LARGE teapot, then maybe a few fun and fancy ones. You need a workhorse, but you also need something to show off for company. A big brown betty is nice, enough to hold more than a couple of cups of tea.

You must have a tea cosy or else your tea will go cold. A tea cosy is a quilted or knitted cover that goes over top of your pot. If you don’t have a grandmother who makes them, buy one at a craft fair from someone else’s grandmother.

Pour your tea into whatever mug you like. I only use cups with saucers at my granny’s house, and even then that’s only if she’s serving biscuits.

If you like your tea with sugar, you’re going to want a spoon to stir it. A saucer comes in handy here because then you have somewhere to put your dirty spoon.

When I’m making tea for me, I pour the milk directly from the carton in the fridge. But if I’m serving tea for company in the living room, then I’ll put the milk in a little jug. Always milk; never cream.

TEA

Just like Canadians always mean “ice hockey” when we say hockey, Brits always mean “black tea” when we say tea. We never mean green. We never mean peppermint.

Most often, we mean Tetley. Tetley has been my family’s brand of choice my entire life. We collected and sent away boxtops to collect tiny ceramic animal figures that I played with as a child. Tetley tea is sweet, but not sugary. It brews orangey brown

We all know that Louis’s favourite brand is Yorkshire. This is basically the same kind of tea. It’s a black tea, but a little darker, a bit more musty. Not, I must admit, my favourite. Feel free to write the boys teasing him for his sub-standard taste.

Tea comes in boxes of bags, no strings or tags attached. Keep your tea in an airtight and solid container. Glass is no good because the light gets through.

It’s basically impossible to get regular black tea in the United States. I have relatives who travel with tea bags. I usually drink Earl Grey or green when I’m in the States. But you have to know that it’s not the same thing. Most Brits see that as unnecessary fanciness when we just want a cup of tea.

Yes, I drink other kinds of tea. In my cupboard right now, I have some fruit teas I like to drink iced, I have a loose tea blend that’s a little caramel-y, I have some sencha, some jasmine, and a box of Earl Grey. Sometimes I make a cup with loose tea in a tea ball hanging in a mug. But when I want tea, just a cup of tea, I make a pot of Tetley.

[Photos from Wikipedia.]

HOW TO

Wikipedia has a really good step-by-step description. This is pretty much how I do it. My granny is a stickler for warming the pot before you drop in the tea bag, but I learned from my Canadian mom, who never bothered. I do like to rinse my pot, though, because there’s almost always tea in there from the night before, so you might as well use hot tap water.

(A quick note here: don’t wash your teapot. Just rinse it whenever you use it, and you’ll be fine. You want a teapot to be seasoned like a good cast iron pan. Granted, I do wipe down the outside occasionally.)

1. Boil the water. No need for a thermometer here. Just get it to a rolling boil.

2. (optional) Swirl a bit of water in the empty pot to warm it.

3. Toss in 1 or 2 tea bags, depending on the size of your pot. If you plan to drink more than one cup, go with two.

4. Fill the teapot with water. Put the lid on. Put the tea cosy on top.

5. Let it steep at least a minute. I like to pull the tea bags out before five minutes. Some people leave them in to the bitter end.

6. Pour a bit of milk in your mug. Then pour the tea. Some people prefer tea first, then milk, to better judge the amount of milk required. I recognise this as a valid preference. But I’m a milk first person.

7. (optional) Add sugar and stir to dissolve. I like milk first because you don’t have to stir if you don’t take sugar. Fewer dishes.

8. Then drink and enjoy.

9. Want another cup? Of course you do! That’s why I always make a pot of tea, even though I’m just one person.

No matter how big your mug is, you’ll inevitably find yourself wanting more tea. Too much milk? Balance it out with a bit more tea from the pot. Gone cold? Warm it up. That’s why you have a tea cosy.

(Please don’t microwave tea. Just make another pot. It’s cheap.)

Tea isn’t coffee. It’s not the kind of thing you make in the morning just to be conscious. You don’t throw it in a mug as you’re headed out the door. It’s tradition and comfort, meant to be held in your hands for warmth. It’s why we make tea whenever something bad happens, whenever we feel sad, and even when we don’t know how to feel. A cup of tea makes us feel better.

Additionally: black tea does not want a rolling boil. You are scorching your tea. (Though, if you’re drinking TETLEY, there’s no reasonable tea there to scorch, so maybe it makes no difference.) Officially, black tea should be brewed in water at 205F/96C, which is just before a full boil. This makes a big difference and I’m a bit ashamed to say so because I realize how hipster that sounds. But it’s true. I learned this by being very impatient and pouring water as it was approaching a boil instead of waiting for the roll. Not letting the kettle come to a full boil just makes a better cup of tea. I accepted this as a fact and then got a temperature controlled kettle which does mechanically what I did out of impatience, which is how I learned that I was not the first person to discover that tea is scorched by boiling water.

Which is also how I know that Yorkshire is a superior tea. Because I have a mouth and tastebuds.

As an Actual Brit living in Actual Britain amongst other Actual Brits, let me tell you this: we stick the tea bag (usually a supermarket red label brand, because Tetleys is the same thing but expensive and Yorkshire has a complex flavour beyond our “oh god I need a cuppa” requirements–but tastes do vary) in a mug, pour on water from our electric kettle, mash it against the side of a mug with a tea spoon because we’re sure as hell not going to wait for it to steep, are you mad? we want our tea NOW! add milk and sugar as required, then drink immediately whilst saying “oh god, I needed that”. It is ABSOLUTELY a wake-you-up drink and very few people can be bothered to faff about with a teapot.

Obviously, there are Actual British people who use teapots, and no-one’s criticising their use. But a sizeable majority make their tea as described above. Do remember that not all Actual Brits spend our days lounging in our country house clutching our teddy bear with a pot of tea on tap. We work in offices, on building sites, on service desks; most of us don’t have the time or inclination for a teapot. We’re not all Tom Hiddleston. Insisting that a teapot is The One True British Way is not only laughably inaccurate, but pretty classist.

I DO NOT KNOW A SINGLE PERSON IN MY LIFE WHO WOULD MAKE A TEAPOT EVERY TIME THEY WANT TEA. Teapots are for company (because they’re usually huge, even the personal ones are 2-3 cups in my experience and what if I just want one cup, huh? What then???) or if you’re feeling fancy, or if you’re drinking loose leaf or some other ‘special’ tea.

first response on a catholic forum:

I also think that most people can relate to a small, helpless creature trying to get from one place to another and there's a FUCKIN WALL in the way.

But to come back to point 1- Citizen Science fills a hole in the soul that wanted to go out on adventures and discover things when we were younger, but the study of it was hard or we didn't have the money or our schools were garbage. But you don't have to have a degree to do things like... press a button or download and use an app, or count or transcribe notes.

Anyways- here's some Citizen Science links if the Fish Doorbell makes you feel happy and you yearn for more ways to help scientists do stuff:

Foldit (folding proteins)

Fathomverse (sea animals)

Project Monarch (butterflies)

Bioblitz, an event where citizens identify as many species in an area within a period of time

Species Watch (animal species)

BOINC’s Compute for Science

Zooniverse is a website that hosts information on many citizen science projects

Label trees in aerial photos

Count cells in fossils and modern leaves

Digitize Atmospheric Data

Count penguins

US-based Citizen Science Database

eBird (bird identification)

Merlin (bird identification by sound)

iNaturalist (nature identification)

MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data)

"How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it" GREAT question.

To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear's Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that's about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.

And it's only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits...

(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)

...that they decided to drown it. Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be "driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out. You will concede that's rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world...

...and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck...

...only for the ropes to snap...

...and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.

(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)

Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.

Or at least the wrecking ball.

But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.

Still, I feel it's criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)

Wait NO-

Well, that was uncalled for. Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.

Or at least, given that buried it wasn't...

...to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat...

...and be fueled up.

"be fueled up", pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.

Look at that thing, you say.

Let's be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that's not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.

And again, you are right.

The battery was disconnected.

Sorted that, tho

"You can't be serious." Oh darling I sure can! "Well the presenters can't then" no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It's at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!

VIGGO MORTENSEN as ARAGORN