You guys are awesome! I am so impressed by the folks staring temptation in the face and walking away!
Hit a watershed moment here: just today I used up the last of my decaf loose tea. So, yay. But then I realized: what do I do when I need decaf tea? This isn't an immediate issue, because I usually make "DIY" decaf by re-using the regular tea a couple of times, and I have some bags of decaf I can still drink. But I do like to have some loose-leaf decaf around for days like today, when I want to make a whole pot in the afternoon and leaves from yesterday are all used-up (because, grr, I forgot and let them steep for like 20 minutes when I got distracted by work). So I am going to have to figure out what that means for my challenge.
I think I am going to come up with specific categories of tea that I want to have around, and when I run out of any specific category, I am allowed to buy one new one (given that the idea is to use up what I have, not deprive myself of teas for a year). But that is a slippery slope, because I have various flavors/varieties of tea, and I don't want to define the categories so narrowly that the exception swallows the rule.* So I am going to need to think this over and figure out what is reasonable (vs. what my tea-craving brain is telling me to do) -- I think I will need to keep the categories very broad for now (maybe green/black/decaf), and then once everything is appropriately used up, I can re-think what categories I want to keep stocked long-term.
*E.g., I like jasmine and peach flavors, in both green and white forms, along with plain green tea. I have very little of the former and a metric shit-ton of the latter, because usually I'm going for jasmine or peach over plain green. So it would be easy to define each of those as a separate category, and restock when I run out of, say, green jasmine. But that would enable me to continue to avoid ever drinking the plain green tea ("oops, out of green jasmine, don't want plain green, so better get some more!"), which would defeat the entire purpose of this effort!