O! Happy Day!

My Lady Nicotine waved her magic wand and filled my tobacco jars.

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Just one reason why I love the hobby of pipe smoking: For the price of a carton of cigarettes, I can fill my "cellar" with enough leaf to last me through the year - and sample over a dozen blends.

Sadly, there has been some discussion around the pipe-o-sphere of late about all the blends that are disappearing. Dunhill, for one - Dunhill, the company whose name is synonymous with luxury pipes! - is discontinuing production of their flagship tinned tobaccos. Syrian Latakia tobacco, a key ingredient in so many classic English mixtures, is getting harder and harder to come by, for obvious political reasons. And McClelland recently announced that they are no longer able to procure the Virginia leaf the need for many of their most popular blends.

I hate to say it, but this is a dying industry. And the choices that remain for we loyal few are only going to get narrower as demand falls off.

It's thinking like this that triggers my hoarding instinct. So last week I put in a substantial order, and I've been tapping my feet in impatience ever since. Martin Luther King pushed back delivery one day, and then bad weather threatened to delay it further.

You can imagine my excitement when I heard Mr. Mailman rumbling up the street through the snow. Did he have my box?

Yes!

Let's go in...

Boom!

There's nothing like the smell of a new pipe tobacco delivery. Even through the cellophane it just radiates warm happiness.

I prefer ordering tobacco in bulk, by the ounce, rather than buying tins. It's much cheaper, especially at larger volumes. And I'd rather put it into my own jars than pay double for a bit of metal.

So here's the haul:

About three pounds altogether. A few of my usual stand-bys, and a bunch of stuff I haven't tried before. Some full-bodied English blends, some Virginia flakes, a "bull's-eye" roll, and a couple of lightly aromatic selections.

Pipe tobacco reviews are in the offing, you can be sure.

My only disappointment is those pipe cleaners. I don't know how I ordered "bristle cleaners" by mistake, but here we are. They're supposed to scour out the shank of a pipe but they're almost impossible to force through and they're less absorbent. The real kicker is I've made this mistake before. The web-site should have a warning screen for this product. "I can see you've selected bristle cleaners. Are you sure (y/n)?"

Anyway, time to get these blends into jars and type up some labels.

This is a happy task for someone with obsessive-compulsive tendencies - despite the fact that getting shredded leaves into jars is not as easy as you might think. The stuff tends to fall all over the place. You can't exactly pour it, and stuffing it in a pinch at a time takes forever.

But I've discovered that you can cut the bottom of a cone-shaped coffee filter to make a funnel, and that reduces most of the spills.

So after an hour of obsessive organization, we've got this:

Now my biggest problem is deciding what I'm going to smoke next. And that's my favorite problem.

What are you smoking today?