Lobster Shorts lifestyle

When Shopping Local Is Awesome

FEBRUARY 2021 CHEESE OF THE MONTH

St Marys is small, but it has some shopping gems. One of these gems is the local cheese shop The Towne and Country Cheese Shop of St. Marys. They are a lunch deli and cheese shop that offers gluten free and vegetarian options (I’m unsure if they have vegan options). They now offer something magical and wonderful… Cheese of the month!

The cheese is only available for pick up and you wont be able to find anything out about it online (There is no information on their website, I only found out about it because it was listed in the local paper). The flavours in this month’s box were Wensleydale Creamery Yorkshire Wensleydale Pineapple, Smoked Chipotle, Ford Farm Cheesemakers Wensleydale With Raspberry and White Chocolate Curls, and Coombe Castle Chocolot cheese.

Every month you will get 3-4 different kinds of cheese totaling about 1.5lbs of cheese. They packaged it up beautifully for a boutique experience that was a delight to unbox. The cheese comes with pairing and serving suggestions and information about the cheese. I love love love that there was a heart shaped cheese for the month of Valentine’s Day (there were more flavours of the heart shaped cheese, at the shop).

I’m excited to try new and interesting cheeses each month and plan on staying signed up for awhile.

Lobster Shorts Food, happy mail

Boreal Forest Tea Unboxing and Tasting October 2020

I’ve read tea is loaded with pesticides (I’ll post the article here), so I’m searching for alternatives. I found Boreal Forest Tea, with its wild harvested and organic ingredients. I’m hoping it’s a safer alternative. It’s a Canadian company, located in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Each bag of tea was $16.00 and shipping was $16.00.

The tea is on the pricy side, but really good and there is a lot of tea in the bags. The package also came with a sample of cranberry mint to try. My favourite is the Evergreen. It says caffeine free on the website and packaging, but this is likely a mistake, since it’s green tea. I even called the store, and they said it shouldn’t say caffeine free. So be aware of that. I have ordered 40 Below and Evergreen from this company before. I’ll definitely be ordering from them again. They had lots of other flavours to try, but most of them contained chamomile, and of that I am not a fan. I plan to keep my cupboard stocked with Evergreen and 40 Below. I did like the other two flavours as well, but these were my favourites.

Below, I’ll post a video of the tea unboxing, if you want to see it.

Lobster Shorts card making, crafting, happy mail

Paper Pumpkin September 2020

This month’s Paper Pumpkin was both Fall and Halloween themed. The box costs around $35.00 Canadian, including shipping.

This months ink was a really pretty orange/brown colour. The ink covered the stamp really well, and stamped great. The only Fall/Thanksgiving sentiment was Give Thanks, the rest were Halloweeny.

I was disappointed this month’s box was for candy boxes. Not that I don’t think they aren’t cute, it’s that I don’t have enough people to give these to. I think my friends and family would find it strange if I handed them a candy box and I only have two grandchildren. If Halloween happens this year, these would likely just get trashed in the kids’ candy sacks. As cute as these are, I don’t have enough recipients for them.

They give you a lot of options to decorate the boxes with.

The boxes were double sided so you had a choice of these colours. I went with the decorations pictured on the box. I’ll fill these two boxes with candy and give them to my grand kids. I posted a video below of me opening the kit and putting these two boxes together.

Lobster Shorts card making, crafting, happy mail

A week Of Mail – Sept 14/2020

I managed to save all my mail and Amazon packages for an entire week, to open in one big opening adventure. I get so excited getting mail, that I usually have it open before I get to my front door. There was a lot of craft supplies and pens.

I love watching YouTube videos of people opening their mail. This time I put myself on YouTube opening my own mail. It was a little awkward, but I enjoyed doing it. I’ll post the video below.

This pen set came.

It looked really cool, but I managed to break the tip within the first hour of using it.

I can’t fault the pen for this, I was tapping it on the bottom of the water jar, and I knew I could break it.

The bottles were super messy.

I got ink all over both hands. I STILL have ink stained hands, several hours later. I managed to try every ink before I broke the pen. I also sampled the ink with a dip quill to compare it with the glass pen.

I liked the quill better. In defense of the glass pen, I was probably using it wrong and didn’t have a chance to get the learning curve down. I think I had too much ink on it and most of the smearing in the photo below, is due to me being a left handed side writer. I found the ink bled a lot with the glass pen and not so much with the extra fine nib on the quill. I do believe these inks aren’t the greatest quality, but they did have their charm.

The shimmer in the blue ink was incredible. The others have some shimmer to them as well, but it’s not showing up in the photo. The bottle design could should be different. The ink pooled inside the lids. If you’re going to get a glass pen be very careful with it. Apparently, glass is breakable 😀