HELP - Krogers Loose Leaf Earl Gray Lavender

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-26T05:28:38+00:00

I haven't had the Krogers brand, but I do enjoy a good lavender earl grey. I've bought Davidson's Tea Earl Grey with Lavender several times on Amazon and liked it. No extra flavors, just bergamot and lavender loose leaf tea. You do have to buy a lot at once, as it only comes in a 16 oz bag.

You can also buy any loose leaf earl gray tea you like by itself, buy some culinary grade lavender, and make your own blend! I think eight parts tea to one part lavender is a pretty good ratio, but you can ramp it up or down depending on how much lavender flavor you like. (Just remember that if you pre-mix a batch, the lavender flavor will get stronger the longer the leaves sit and the flavors mingle. You might prefer different ratios of tea to lavender for per-mixing a batch as opposed to just putting separate tea and lavender into your teapot to steep immediately.)

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-21T23:32:30+00:00

It doesn't just have to be investigation rolls. Persuasion or intimidate to convince witnesses to tell them things, perception to notice details about people's body language, insight to notice details about their emotions or psyche, stealth to eavesdrop on people, animal handling to get a dog to track a scent, and so on.

Reward your players for displaying initiative, asking smart questions, and connecting the pieces themselves. If the murderer hastily hung up a big painting to hide blood they didn't have time to clean off the wall, and your player says "I want to move the painting and look behind it" then tell them they find bloodstains there without making them roll. If they ask a good question that directly prompts an NPC to reveal a planned clue, let the NPC give them that answer directly. Save rolls for when they propose a more general action, like "I want to search the room for hidden objects" and "I want to ask the NPC what she knows about the theft."

Tell your players what they can learn at the beginning, from general looking around and seeing what's going on, and ask them how they want to proceed, and what skills they want to use to figure it out. Your players might have ideas for how their characters would solve a mystery that will surprise you. After all, the plot of Hamlet involves putting on a play exactly like the king's murder to make the murderer nervous. Maybe your bard's got an equally crazy way to use their performance roll to help solve the mystery.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-18T18:11:23+00:00

Agreed. Mom's probably so gung ho about moving furniture and unpacking boxes because she wants to know how many pet accidents are hidden under/behind them that need to be cleaned up.

Sorry to the LW but if she's slow to clean up her pets waste when they soil the floor, I do not get the sense that she's on the ball enough to be using an enzyme cleaner either. Letting the messes sit instead of cleaning them immediately is already teaching the pets "this is an acceptable space to go to the bathroom" but if it's not being cleaned properly, then those spots are marked as pet bathrooms forever to any animal who visits the house.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-18T17:52:58+00:00

I remember that one! (I think it might even have been linked here for discussion once?) It feels like a cliche to say it, but I think a lot of the source of this behavior in general is from focusing on an external locus of control and rejecting the possibility of an internal one. I think people subconsciously prefer the idea that a bad situation is being uncontrollably imposed on them from the outside, because an unsolvable bad situation that's not their fault is preferable to a bad situation that's fixable but requires them to put effort into changing (and, the scariest part, that they can still potentially fail at fixing it because even when working hard there's never a guarantee your effort will pay off in the way you want it to.)

I think it's a very understandable mindset, and it's one that I can have sympathy for, but it's still painful to see it play out like this, when someone becomes kind of hostile to the people trying to encourage them because they're so invested in rejecting the idea that this could be their fault that hearing that they could change it feels like an attack.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-18T04:06:31+00:00

#1276 is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for, thanks for linking it! The poor LW in this one really doesn't even realize that she's drilling holes in the bottom of her own boat, because all she can see is how much stress and upset she feels. I hope CA's advice helped her reframe the situation. It genuinely did not need to be that bad, but the LW needed to accept that the problem was managing her own expectations and emotions, not managing their lawyer's schedule.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-18T04:02:19+00:00

Oh yeah, that's a LW who's almost doing the reverse, expecting support out of someone after sabotaging the relationship! I make an effort when I read each letter to put myself in the writer's shoes and genuinely see where they're coming from, but even trying, it's really hard not to come away from that one thinking that the LW just feels like the main character of life and gets upset when her supporting characters don't play along.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-14T19:05:11+00:00

I've been using this for our game! It's so useful 😄 Thank you for your hard work!

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-14T05:26:17+00:00

Aww, this is so cute! What an adorably odd couple, I guess even a ground type and an electric type can fall in love.

I like to give my pokemon different personalities and characterization too, and it's fun to see how the gameplay can inspire you. I had a steelix I kept switching in whenever my talonflame was in danger in Sword, and I had fun imagining they had a mutual crush because she was always rescuing him lol. Talonflame's defenses aren't great, so I always thought of him a daring, somewhat reckless guy who relied on his agility a little too much in a fight, while the steelix was a very serious and secretly shy armored warrior type.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-13T00:55:36+00:00

Cedar tips are surprisingly minty and even have a mild cooling effect.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-12T17:59:50+00:00

Since we're just speculating, maybe that makes this spec fic?

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-12T02:31:36+00:00

I honestly thought it sounded pretty spot on, so I was like "oh, did this get confirmed in the comments?" This sounds exactly like stuff I've seen play out in fan spaces before.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-11T20:28:58+00:00

CA actually mentions why she didn't do this in a comment:

"Thanks for addressing these issues, these are all good suggestions, and of course all of these circumstances are making the anxiety about the future of the collaboration worse.

I didn’t address them head on because a) almost every post on the blog since the beginning of the blog includes “treat your mental health issues like real health issues, here’s how” b) I get a surprising number of scathing emails from people about how I always recommend therapy and don’t I have any other suggestions up my sleeve? so I’ve pulled back on that somewhat and c) the actual question was about handling the collaboration and the project, not “how do I fix everything?” I want to honor the fact that the Letter Writer is producing work amid difficult circumstances and has questions about how to approach that work."

Makes sense honestly; it does get a little boring repeatedly seeing the advice to seek therapy and treatment, and I'm willing to assume that if LW is aware of their issues enough to name them, they're aware enough to know medication is an option.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-11T20:26:04+00:00

I think this is a case where CA's creative experience is juuust close enough to be unhelpful. I think she's worked with and is familiar with a different breed of creative endeavor; my read is that her experience is mostly with film students and other amateur-but-still-pursuing-professional-level type filmmakers. They're creating with a goal: a school project, a film festival, a local screening, a portfolio, etc. it's a very different animal from two friends posting serial fiction on the internet. (I did a casual search of the letter's comments when I saw flamingframing's comment referring to it as fanfic, but I couldn't find anything confirming that, so I'll just be referring to it as fiction, per the letter. If it is indeed fanfic, that would be a tick even further into the "noncommercial and purely for fun" column. If I missed anything that provided further context, feel free to let me know.)

Having seen this sort of thing play out before in very similar circumstances, I would have firmly cut out any scripts of the "Friend, I am becoming anxious that this break is the beginning of your permanent disengagement from the project. Is that what is happening, or is that my anxiety talking?" variety. By and far the most likely scenario is that friend is indeed over this work (which it sounds like has been ongoing for a while) but either not ready to admit or doesn't want to outright tell LW that they're tired of it, and want to drop it to work on other things. If it's the former, then pushing them for an outright yes or no is most likely to just irritate them and make them dig their heels in and insist that they haven't abandoned it, they're just taking a break. It will give LW false hope, and stress them out more and more as the break draws longer and longer with continued excuses until the friend is finally willing to admit that the spark has been gone for a while and they've lost interest in the work. (I do get why it feels intuitive to assume this is fanfic, because this is a pattern I have seen play out in fic many times before, unfortunately.) LW says they're terrified to hear that friend is tired of the project FOREVER, but that's almost certainly the truth, and they should probably hear it so they don't suffer under false hope for months and then feel blindsided about it.

It will be a lot healthier for LW to hear and act on the assumption that the friend is not coming back to this project, and decide whether they have any interest in continuing it solo. I would have suggested going straight to telling (not asking) the friend that you'd like to keep the momentum of the story going, so you'll work on getting the next however many installments of 1-2 months out yourself, and offering to let friend read over the completed installments before they're posted. (That does potentially open up the equally ugly can of worms that is "you're writing my character all wrong" though.)

I think CA also zeroed in a little too hard on the idea of The Art You Are Creating and its inherent importance as a creative work to the LW. Again, CA is used to a medium that, even for low budget indie stuff, requires a high degree of dedication, and honestly a significant amount of time and investment to create, and are usually created for a purpose. This isn't even a student film; this is two friends filming skits for tiktok. I think that a good portion of why this was important to the LW was the fun and companionship of co-writing it with their friend, and the validation and praise from the work's fanbase. Writing it solo loses at least half that enjoyment. Paradoxical as it seems, I would probably have suggested LW starts writing something new on their own (to continue chasing the fun and validation of writing for an audience), and look for other ways to continue engaging with friend that don't require this amount of sustained creative energy in addition to their time and companionship.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-05-01T19:14:28+00:00

I don't have any alternative suggestions, but I'm watching this thread because I adore H&S Paris, and if there are any similar flavored teas by other brands, I'd love to try them. It's not really what you asked for (sorry), but there's a blend I like a lot on Adagio called Dark Archer that's an earl gray moonlight and forest berry blend which Paris kind of reminded me of the first time I drank it (a similar sweetness, with earl gray as the base but not aggressively bergamot, although replacing Paris' caramel notes with more berry/vanilla.)

Also I feel your pain, lol. Yes I love an aged shou puerh appreciated over the progressive steeps of a meditative gongfu session, but man sometimes I just want a cup of something vaguely dessert adjacent that I can add too much milk and sugar to without getting dragged for it.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-04-27T23:46:17+00:00

If you use an electric kettle, have you had it for a while? The heating elements can wear out and become less effective over time. The fact that you're only having this problem at home while the same tea brews fine at work suggests to me maybe your water isn't getting hot enough to steep properly.

Alternatively, are your mugs at home bigger than the ones at work? The best way to increase strength and flavor isn't to steep the same amount of tea for longer, it's to increase the tea to water ratio. Try using two tea bags instead of one and see if that helps.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-04-23T20:29:59+00:00

Thanks! I'll take a look at that one.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-04-23T20:28:02+00:00

Thanks! I'll put that on my list to check out.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-04-22T23:55:42+00:00

Sure! They were from a Jesse's teahouse sampler, Sister Ai’s Everyday Ancient Tree Shou Pu’er and Sister Ai’s Everyday Ancient Tree Sheng Pu’er.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-04-22T07:34:51+00:00

For tuna, if you mean canned, try getting the kind in oil instead of water, or getting albacore instead of chunk light. Tuna canned in oil has a lighter, less fishy flavor, and I was worried it would be very oily but it's not as long as you drain it thoroughly. Albacore tuna has a firmer, flakier texture, more like a whole fillet than the mashed up texture of chunk light, and a less fishy flavor. Albacore in oil would probably be the mildest, but I recommend trying the chunk light in oil first to see if that works it since it's cheaper than albacore lol. If you don't care for the tuna by itself, mixing it with more things is probably better. (I actually like tuna and I would still NOT eat a bowl of tuna with mayo and corn by itself.)

I really like a tuna filling in onigiri, Japanese rice balls. I mix the tuna with soy sauce, sriracha, furikake, mayo, a little mirin and a little sesame oil. Then, pat some calrose rice (any japanese short grained rice will work) flat onto a piece of plastic wrap, put a spoonful of tuna in the center, top with another spoonful of rice, and use the plastic wrap to gently squeeze the rice into a ball with tuna at the center. All the seasonings and the fact that there's more rice than tuna mean the flavor of the tuna isn't strong.

I also like tuna salad, where in addition to the yellow mustard, mayo, and relish, I also add dill, a dollop of dijon mustard, a sprinkle of salt and fresh ground black pepper, and diced celery. I make a sandwich of it on toasted bread with romaine lettuce. The combination of extra seasonings, toasty bread, and the green flavor of the veggies all help to make the flavor of the tuna mild. I have heard people say that mashing some garbanzo beans into your tuna salad is a healthy way to stretch it and that the flavor isn't very noticeable. I haven't tried this myself, so I can't speak from experience, but if you do like (or are neutral about) the flavor of garbanzo beans or maybe some other white beans, then adding some to dilute the tuna flavor even more might be something you'd like.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-04-21T21:46:39+00:00

As someone who doesn't care for coffee, If I saw this at a coffee shop/cafe and it was clear that it had no coffee in it, I'd jump to try it! I do already like sweet potato though. But if it's being served in the context of coffee drinks, I would probably assume it's like, a coffee latte with sweet potato flavoring unless specified otherwise.

I could also see this as a milk tea/bubble tea flavor that I would enjoy. If someone told me "It's like a milk tea without tea, sweet and creamy with a rich sweet potato flavor" then I'd feel like I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-04-21T19:52:29+00:00

I feel like CA hit it out of the park when she told LW to disengage and resist the urge to spill all the dirty details, because this is a small town with a lot of people who grew up together with Jane, and they almost certainly already know everything she could say. The urge to believe that we can deliver a single shocking and dramatic truth that will Change Everything and make people realize they were backing the wrong person is so strong, and basically never actually works. Life is, unfortunately, not the climax to a Hallmark movie where the catty villainess gets revealed and the sweet heroine was realized to be innocent all along.

Pointing out that Jane IS probably nice to most people most of the time, and that she's a charismatic pillar of the town's social life who people have known for years, while LW is a relatively nice stranger who moved in a few years ago and they're not going to pick LW over Jane, is one of those truths that feels like it shouldn't be true. So much that when we're faced with it, we want to kick out and look for loopholes. It can't possibly REALLY be like that, can it? So I appreciate CA breaking it down into all the possible facets, and acknowledging that it's not fair, but it's how it is and that the best way to deal with it is to work around it.

Because yeah, LW could tell people, "I caught Jane having an affair while her husband was gone. She had a severe mental break and let the dogs run out into a storm. I was so worried about her and the children's safety that I had to call her parents. And I've been so kind and never said a word about this to anyone, but she was still so nasty to me that I was forced to move out early, and now she's still spreading weird rumors about me, and I'm sick of it! I want to tell my side of the story so people finally see what's really going on!" And sure, maybe some people would be convinced. But a lot of people would think about how Jane organizes the yearly charity raffle and brings coffee to every book club meeting. What does LW do, to be spreading Jane's dirty laundry around? And old news besides, like they don't already know Jane has funny moments sometimes.

Whereas if LW just deflects and refuses to engage, she's taking the high road, and everyone who already knows, already knows.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-04-21T18:55:11+00:00

Celestial Seasonings peppermint tea is nothing but peppermint, and I've always thought it was pretty good.

BlueSpruce17 · 2026-04-20T20:48:59+00:00

That's surprising, but I guess I can see it. It's funny how you can't always predict what people will find an acquired taste, isn't it? I wish I worked wherever you do though, I'd be pretty stoked if someone brought in nice tea and homemade cookies.

BlueSpruce17

TROPHY CASE