Wondered where me and my not so little Choogler have been? Perhaps we have taken the past month off to hop on a bus to Mexico City, where I fulfilled my dream of being a flower vendor in a picturesque Mexican street market while Austin simultaneously learned to speak Spanish and play a mean game of soccer..I mean futbol? Perhaps. Did the cats take my computer hostage, demanding better cat food and nicer furniture to scratch up? Perhaps. But perhaps not.

Perhaps this is what happened. About a month or so ago, I was minding my own business on a Wednesday, which not only is the day I have to myself, but it also happened to be the day the Queen Mary 2 pulled into San Francisco. Not equating the previously mentioned event with the next one, I rather nonchalantly opened the door when our doorbell rang. I was expecting Katherine, the women who own the clothing store next to us to be standing there, asking if we had any hot water and handing me some strange flammable vintage piece of clothing destined to go to the boyfriend of the drag queen I work with. What she does with all the hot water she borrows, I do not know. But she often does this, so I have come to expect it to happen.

It was not Katherine. Instead it was a nice English couple, wearing very unflattering yet expensive pant suits with matching hats. The man was wiping his nose on a quality linen hanky and quickly put it away as I opened the door. Apparently they were not able to get a decent tea service on the QE2, so as soon as they could beat if off that floating cow they started going door to door in San Francisco, looking for some tea that would hit their rather English spots.

Now I am not a tea drinker. I am a happy slave to the Dark Horse (which is coffee) and I don't know a good tea from cat crap. But David, a progenitor of the Choogler is rather fond of rare Chinese tea. So we have an awful lot of tea in our house, mostly stored in large dried disks, wrapped in paper on our bookshelf. He has other tea stashed away in small dark corners of our enormous apartment, all of which I encouraged the cats to sleep on whenever possible. I believe it will improve the flavor. Seriously!

I explained my lack of tea knowledge to the couple and they were all set to be yet again disappointed by yet another citizen of the Left Coast when the woman spotted my husband's rather dirty tea tray. Before I could let out another "Cheerio!" the couple pushed past me and started at once to make tea, Chinese style. It involved a lot of small cups, splashing hot water all over our counter and some very un-English slurping of dark smoky purer tea.

After several brewings and some happy chatter about the cute little rabbits that live in their garden over in Devonshire, or Stratfordwaswearinganapron, or wherever they kept their ancestral estate, they promptly got up off the kitchen floor where they were sitting cross legged, thanked me heartily for the tea, shook my hand and let themselves out. Because my life is so exciting, I rather quickly forgot about this incident and carried on with my hip urban lifestyle until about 5pm, when I went to go pick up Austin from the babysitter. I of course hugged and kissed him when I first saw him, a tragic mistake, as you will soon find out.

About 14 hours later, Both Austin and I found ourselves in the ER with the most wicked flu the Lord has ever beset on this Earth. At least that's what it felt like to me and I am sure Austin as well. People, we were infected by rich English people! We barely survived! All because of tea!

We have since be recovering nicely, thank you for asking.