Don’t ever underestimate the power of a familiar mug.

What we have here are a couple of pretty cups I once picked up at Starbucks with a birthday gift card; a Van Gogh mug from Jeff on one of our first Christmases; and a souvenir from Strand Book Store in New York City in 2014.

These mugs were carefully wrapped in my socks for the voyage over here.

However, I have now rekindled my love of drinking tea out of bone china mugs and found suitably silly ones (all I could ever find in Canada were chintzy, dainty florals) from which to quaff my beloved darjeeling. I don’t know the chemical whys or wherefores, but tea really does taste better in bone china.

So I’m going to say that with the benefit of hindsight, those mugs are going to sit on the sidelines a lot of the time, and maybe COULD HAVE been left behind. Until we have houseguests, when I’ll be happy to have enough mugs for everyone.