As I see it, there's some sort of conspiracy happening and I think the Chinese might be behind it.

Teapots. Dribbling teapots. Teapots that dribble tea every time you pour them.

It is sapping my will to live.

We are a morning tea family around here. The morning ritual is Marn studiously ignoring Paul as she slowly wakes up, mutely reading her New Yorker, munching toast coated with peanutbutter and honey, and sipping a cup of tea out of a mug decorated with cats.

Now that winter is approaching, Ed the Gargoyle has joined us at the kitchen table. (Freezing doesn't do a gargoyle a lick of good, but then I'm sure you all knew that anyhow.) We have several other cement gargoyles who normally lurk around the property now scattered about inside our home. Doesn't everyone? But I digress ... I was talking about breakfast.

Like any ritual, my morning ritual is performed to exacting standards, and these standards do NOT include watching a stream of tea dribbling down the spout of the teapot into a pool on the table. Until this year.

Early this year the spousal unit broke our old faithful teapot. The teapot which flawlessly dispensed tea directly from the pot into the cup with no detours to the table. (Marn stops, sobs softly as she relives the magic of the old teapot. Then she pulls herself together with a little mental shrug.)

"No biggie," I thought at the time, little realizing the major catastrophe which had befallen me. "I'll buy another pot." So I moseyed off to the local hardware store and did just that. I checked out all the teapots they had, they all looked pretty much the same, and they were all made in China. So I got a blue one.

Got it home, washed it, and gave it its tea baptism. It promptly began to dribble about as much tea on to the table as it managed to dispense into my cup.

Say what?

I am the Consumer From Heck folks. I hold on to receipts. You sell me something that doesn't work as it should, and I will march back into your store, receipt in hand, and politely ask you to replace your defective merchandise with something that actually works as advertised.

So I got another teapot, brought it home and it did exactly what the blue teapot did. Dribbled. Copiously. Back to the store.

It's about a 20 minute drive for me to go into town. I explained to the saleswoman that I really didn't want to have to do this alot, and asked her if there was a way that we could test the teapots.

She didn't OUTRIGHT ask me if I was crazy, but her expression spoke volumes, eh. I'm sure that if they had a security button in the store she would have pressed it and had the guys with the big butterfly nets come for me, but she was alone in the store with a crazed, teapot obsessed woman.

So off to the ladies' bathroom we went with the other four teapots under our arms. We filled them with water and poured them into the sink. They all dribbled, but one dribbled less than the others. That's the one that lives at my home with me.

I consider it my semi-housebroken teapot.

Whenever I'm in a store that stocks them, I check out the teapots. The ones in the price range I can afford--I am NOT about to spend $75 on a bone china teapot thankyouverymuch--all look to be made in China clones of my dribbling teapot.

It's a conspiracy, I tell you, a conspiracy.

Somewhere out there is a sturdy teapot that costs less than $30 and actually pours tea directly from the pot into the cup without dribbling.

Someday I will find it, I know I will.

If my life was anywhere near as interesting as I would like it to be, this would be the part where Robert Goulet steps out from behind the curtain, flanked by a Greek chorus, and begins singing the theme from The Man of LaMancha.

All together now, let's hum along with him:

"To dream, the impossible dream ..."