S05E085, It works! Andy B Minute Video
Much like the Trinity, a decent mug of tea requires 3 elements – tea, boiling water and milk. You can disagree about the milk and whether it comes first or not (it always comes first by the way) but those three parts make a decent ‘brew’.
We had a fancy kettle that had stopped working, only it hadn’t totally stopped working. It still took water and made it hot, only not hot enough - despite the little icon on the screen telling you your water was at 100 degrees Celsius/212 degrees Fahrenheit.
Warm water makes weak twa. Tea left brewing too long becomes unsightly and unpleasant.
There is an optimum temperature – boiling water, and an optimum time (there really are instructions for how long to leave a tea bag in for the best flavour).
Sometimes when something breaks it is easy to spot. If your kettle didn’t switch on at all, we’d know it was broken. But, since it was only not working quite right, it took us ages to spot there was an issue.
Life is the same way isn’t it. When we have a broken leg we can spot that and get medical help. If you’re suffering mental or emotional damage it may not be so apparent, to anyone – including ourselves. Even a broken bone can be hard to spot as being broken if it is a hairline break, and your leg isn’t bending in too many places!
Where do you need to take another look at something in your life, where that ‘something’ just isn’t working quite right
It can be hard to discern. Thankfully, we have the designer of the entire universe on permanent speed dial should we desire to seek His wisdom. And His wisdom is always good!
Just a thought...
Andy B
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Transcript
[00:00:00] So another Andy B Two Minute Video, and it will come with no surprise that, as an Englishman, I like a cup of tea. But there are certain rules about making cups of tea, and one of them is you need boiling water!
[00:00:20] If it's warm water, it doesn't really brew very well. If you leave it brewing for too long, it tastes a bit horrible. A perfect cup of tea, for me, involves a teabag, a mug, some boiling water and then some milk. Milk always added last, by the way. Just saying!
[00:00:37] Now we had a really cool kettle. You could turn this dial how many milliliters of water you wanted. It would then filter the water. There's a tank in the thing. It would suck down the water it wanted the millimeter that you asked for, in four was it 20 millimeter, whatever it was, it would get you the right amount of water, then it would boil it. And then when you were ready, it would pour it when you press the button. Absolutely brilliant.[00:01:00]
[00:01:00] Until it stopped working. Because what would happen is all that happened brilliantly, but it was not getting boiling. And every time we made a cup of tea, we would think, this just doesn't taste right. It's not right. There's something off.
[00:01:12] So we've actually got a meat thermometer, a probe. We actually put it in a, in a kettle one at the, the water and it was like 70 degrees, 75 degrees Celsius.
[00:01:21] A hundred degrees is when it boils. This is 70, it's 30 degrees, 20 degrees, sometimes less. It's not a good cup of tea!
[00:01:29] We now have a working kettle because it was under warranty, it broke, the manufacturer said, choose a new kettle. We did. They've sent us a kettle and it was a real shock. When I put some water in the kettle, I pressed the button and it switched on, and it heated the water to boiling and then switched off. Really simple. But a bit like sliced, sliced bread when you first have it, you think, oh, this is great. I haven't gotta cut it.
[00:01:48] In our case, for the last five months, we boil the kettle, it pours the water out, not to boiling, and then we put it in a stove, on the gas stove, on on a, in a saucepan and we boil it the rest of the way so we can [00:02:00] make a cup of tea.
[00:02:00] It's a bit of a faff, but you do what you gotta do to get the job done. And if you want a cup of tea, it's gotta be boiling. So we boil the water now we have a working kettle.
[00:02:08] Which got me thinking about this really simply. Where are you struggling? Cuz something isn't working. Maybe you need to take a probe and actually shove it in the thing to see what the temperature is. Because you know what, you may be getting nothing wrong. There may be a problem somewhere else. And, in our case, the kettle was not getting up to temperature, even though the little doll said 100 degrees. It was not.
[00:02:28] So where do you need to assess in your life something that isn't working right? It may have nothing to do with you that it's broken, but it's worth checking and, in our case, meat probe into the water, having been cleaned and we knew that the water was too cool.
[00:02:40] Now it's rectified. I can have a cup of tea, which is what I'm gonna do next.
[00:02:44] Just a thought.
Andy B, 07/06/2023