Tea!

I got email from McNulty's this morning, saying that now that the apex of the pandemic is over, they are reopening for mail order and in-person pickup, and here are the things they're doing to protect the staff and customers.

This is good news personally, because we're completely out of lapsang souchong, cattitude's tea of choice, and I'm starting to run low on the Golden Assam. It's also a hopeful sign more generally: McNulty's is in New York City, specifically a shop in Greenwich Village.

I ordered a pound of lapsang souchong and two pounds of the Assam, using the website. Usually I order by phone, but email seemed less likely to be an interruption. They don't, or didn't, have a lot of mail-order customers: the person who answers their phone mentioned having a card with my information, and once apologized for "not recognizing your voice" after asking for my name and address. (For standard things, I can get a better price elsewhere, including within walking distance in the Village, but I haven't found an Assam I like as well anywhere else, and it took a little experimenting to find a lapsang souchong that cattitude is happy with.)

ETA: Having now looked at a couple of news sites, I hope they're not taking dangerous risks. They're allowed to be open, as an essential business, but that was true when they were closed last week and the week before, too.

Signal boost: international calls from T-Mobile

I just found out, in online chat, that during the pandemic T-Mobile is offering free international calls to a large number of countries, though not all (and sometimes only to landline numbers). This isn't something T-Mobile bothered to tell us about; I happened to be talking to someone else who lives in the US and has family in Britain. I have emailed my mother to let her know that if she sees my number as incoming, it doesn't mean there's a crisis worth paying $3/minute to call her rather than emailing and asking her to call me (which is cheap).

Their website has a list of countries this offer applies to.

ETA: My informant says that they got a text from T-Mobile saying that they are being billed for their recent call but also will be credited for it, so fingers crossed.