Feburary 8, 2010

I’ve been sick for about a week – a bad case of the sniffles and a hacking cough. I missed a couple of days of work last week but am starting to feel better now, even though I haven’t shaken it off completely yet. I have decided to cut back on the time I spend at Cracker Barrel – I don’t really want to work more than 2 days in a row without getting some time off. I’ve lost 20 pounds from the work, which is wonderful, but I also have some aches and pains after a couple of days, and it’s not worth that!

Sunday Randy and I went to a local Swap Meet for some fresh vegetables, then drove to the Glendale Chocolate Festival. That’s the same neighborhood that put on the great Christmas light display. The Chocolate Festival is their Valentine celebration. It’s billed as the largest gathering of romance writers, who show up to sign autographs and promote their books. Since I usually read science fiction, I didn’t know any of them, but that’s OK – I was only there for the chocolate! We took a short tour of a local chocolate factory (it was not much of a tour – it was mostly just a way to get people in to buy chocolate), and did a bit of local shopping, where Randy bought a cool hat. We had lunch at a German restaurant which was pretty good, but the food could have been better seasoned.

At the festival there were several booths with a wide variety chocolate – crepes, pizzas, dipped fruit, popcorn, candy bars, etc, and I was really amazed to find a small booth that sold Leonidas chocolate! When I worked in Spain I often visited Belgium, where I discovered several wonderful Belgium chocolates such as Godiva, Callebaut and Leonidas. After spending several months in Europe, I couldn’t bear to eat US chocolate for a long time. Eventually (and unfortunately) I learned to enjoy Hershey’s again, but there is really no comparison between a fine, quality chocolate and the waxy stuff that passes for chocolate in most of the US. All chocolate melts eventually, but an excellent chocolate melts quickly on your tongue and increases in flavor as it does, until the taste is more like a feeling than a flavor. I immediately paid $4 for a 1.7 ounce bar of chocolate, and just barely restrained myself from buying more. After just one nibble of it, I totally lost my appetite for all the rest of what passed for “chocolate” at the rest of the festival – anything else would have been like following a fine wine with generic Kool-Aid.