Today I'm 33. Time to die for the sins of the world. Or time to come out of the desert and start my life's work; I forget which. One of those.

I've had a great day, filled with snuggles from my daughters and GIRL TIME at a clothing exchange party at 3countylaugh's -- and yes, there was boozing and dishing and nekkidness! I had some pomegranate liqueur, which I mixed with blueberry juice and put over ice, and it was sweet and anti-oxidant-errific. There was also wine, soy jerky (not my thing), veggies & dip, and "Smart Puffs," yum.

Those of us who had been through labor ended up (of course) talking about our labors. Other women's labors are a source of endless fascination to me. I met some fab new people, some of whom are about to move closer to me, hooray!

Oh, and did I mention I got fabulous new clothes? And did I mention they were free? I got a fitted leather jacket -- I've never owned a leather jacket before! -- some WICKED pointy black leather strappy boots originally from Nordstrom, a dramatic cape from Italy, a whole bunch of skirts and tops, and a dress that looks like I was poured into it. Rrrrrrrr.

Also today, Andrew made me a Chocolate Cheesecake for my birthday. Wellllllll, honesty compels me to admit that him making me the Chocolate Cheesecake was my idea. And I was the one who went to the store for the ingredients. And I ended up making most of it myself. But he totally gets all the credit for it. :-)

Right now one kid is in bed, the other is almost in bed, and later will be the Eating Of The Chocolate Cheesecake with tatterdamelion and son upstairs for the occasion. And then I'll get to put away all my Fabulous New Clothes and *squeeee* again at the awesomeness of getting rid of old clothes and getting new wonderful clothes, free, from fabulous people who could tell me the story behind some of the things I got.

Yesterday I stepped away from my desk downtown to walk to Pike Place Market and buy Dark Chocolate-Maple-Bacon Truffles at Rose's Chocolate Treasures. A big thanks to dendacien for alerting me to their existence!

I bought 6 truffles to take to Nikki's "Castle Falkenstein" game. So during game, as we sat around the fire (it's been so gloomy here recently that a fire seemed like a great idea), we each had one.

Consensus: Good, but not overwhelmingly good; not addictively good; not even so good that I would buy them again, considering all the other tempting-looking confections in Rose's chocolates case.

Overall, the maple flavor was too strong; the bacon taste was almost an afterthought. It tasted like maple syrup on your bacon. juniperjournal proclaimed it "breakfast in one bite." The chewy bacon inside was a bit weird, too. I think a dark chocolate - bacon flavor combination could be done much better than these.

They were yummy, and I'm going back to Rose's again... and maybe the next time, dendacien can share some of the deliciousness. :-)

Some coworkers and I walked from the office down to Pike Place Market for lunch today. The weather is glorious, and it felt so good to get out of the office!

Nikki, Dafny and I had fish and chips at Jack's Fish Spot -- greasy and salty and delicious. I ate mine while we were waiting for the others to rejoin us. Jen and Megan went to La Vaca, and tatterdamelion got chicken teriyaki somewhere in the neighborhood. It looked fire-engine red, and Jen (who tried a bite) said that it was not really very spicy (although he had asked for spicy), but it was full of flavor.

After we all regrouped and started walking back, we were ensorceled by the beautiful displays of caramel apples in the window of the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. Nikki and I split a plain caramel apple -- a sweet, crispy-yet-not-too-hard green apple, drenched in perfect, sticky-yet-not-too-sticky caramel. They slice it for you there, which makes sharing one much easier.

(A Bacon Maple Bar (really!) would also have been acceptable. But driving to Oregon for dessert seemed a bit ambitious. Also because none of us had a car anywhere nearby.)

Right now my office is treating everyone to impromptu root beer floats! They have orange soda, too, in case you don't like root beer. Orange soda + vanilla ice cream = Creamsicle-y goodness.

And, in case all that was not enough sugar -- tonight is Nikki's "Castle Falkenstein" game, and we are having a brownie-off. tatterdamelion is going to make New Mexico Chile Brownies (having toyed with, but then rejected, the idea of Banana-Rum Brownies), and I have already made Orange-Ginger Brownies -- a little orange oil and some chopped crystallized ginger. Mmmm. I almost made Bacon Brownies, but in the end sanity prevailed.

Andrew took yesterday off work, and aawhitewood and Tom came over last night to babysit so that we could go out and have dinner on our fifth anniversary.

Five years! It seems to have gone by extremely quickly -- probably because of the two Special Projects that have been taking up all our time recently.

This morning's xkcd comic generated many, many links in the comments to various bits of bacon-y goodness. Here are two that look simply astounding:

• Dark Chocolate Bacon Cupcakes (yes! Chocolate, and bacon, and there's coffee in it, too!!! Triple yes!)
• Bacon Apple Pie. After giving the recipe, the blogger writes:
  

  "So how was it?

  I wouldn’t be posting this if it wasn’t absolutely incredible. It wasn’t greasy like I thought it would be. The flavor was a perfect balance of sweet and salty. I served it up with slices of smoked cheddar cheese for a room full of amused but open-minded skeptics, and the entire pie was gone in 10 minutes."

I also belong to the LJ community bacon_lovers, so I get the inside scoop on all things bacon-related.

Mmmm, bacon.

Both girls are in their rooms, and are being quiet -- at the same time, even.

Knowing that I've survived another day and at the end, they are fed, clean, safe, warm, and reasonably happy.

A cup of genmaicha -- a Japanese green tea mixed with toasted brown rice. I love the little white specks of popped rice against the green and brown of the rest of the loose tea, and the finished product is nutty and mellow.

tatterdamelion brought me some of his White Chocolate-Cranberry Cookies. Mmm. I suppose I only need one. OK, two.  ;-)

And, of course, the internet offers me its own simple pleasures.

I am still working my way through the interesting articles gathered in GetRichSlowly's Carnival of Personal Finance post. Wow, what a treasure trove he's assembled here! I have been clicking through and reading an article or journal entry, and usually finding other things to link to from there. Tabbed browsing is definitely my friend.

A link from a link led me to an article from the Dallas Morning News, which pointed me to La Paletera, a new Mexican fresh fruit and smoothie franchise down in Texas, Arizona, and places like that -- none here in Seattle so far. "Fruit in a cup" sounds boring, but apparently it's traditional in Mexico to dust fresh fruit with salt, chile powder, and lime-flavored powder for a "kick." They have other kinds of Mexican street food, too. Obviously this would work best where there's a higher proportion of Hispanics; I doubt it would work all that well in Seattle. Then again...

The thought of Hazelnut Espresso Vodka makes me happy. I wonder if I could make it myself. Six or seven years ago I made coffee-infused vodka to give to friends for Christmas... Mmmmm, coffee-flavored vodka. I bet I could do that again and just add some hazelnut syrup... IDEA!

Here's a blog with a very overtly Christian-woman vibe. If that's not a turn-off to you, check out the adorable tiny sugared Christmas tree decorations she put on cupcakes for her son's preschool class. Summary: Pine sprigs (or rosemary). Strip lower needles off. Spray with Pam. Roll in red sugar crystals or powdered sugar. Stick on top of cupcake. If you like that, then Like Merchant Ships offers more posts of a similar nature.

... back in the real world, my tea is cold and it's 10:17 PM. How did that happen? Curse you and your witching ways, internet vixen! Curse you!

This thread in the Seattle community is tres amusing. Guy pretended to be totally clueless and got tons of people falling all over themselves -- and each other -- to try to take him down a peg. Good fun.

In other news, I made cookies last night -- cookies make many things better. Was out of chocolate chips (!), so cut up some bittersweet baking chocolate into chunks and used that instead. MMMMMMMMMM.

(No, it's not a new version of "Rock, Paper, Scissors...")

Last night I ate a bowl of chili WITH BEANS IN IT. The sheer stupidity of doing this boggles my mind even now. WHAT was I THINKING?? The gassy bits of the beans are no problem for me, with my grown-up system, but they pass directly through my milk to the wren. Who proceeded to wake up, crying in pain, EVERY HOUR last night.

Andrew's going to have to eat the rest of that chili. It's good, but not worth waking up at 11. And 12. And 1:30, and 2:30, and 3:30, and 4:00, and 5:00, and 6:00. I actually started crying at 6 AM as I realized I had to get up for work in half an hour anyway...

So at work today I was a walking zombie, despite vast amounts of caffeine. Nikki and Jen convinced me to stop staring at my screen with dead eyes and actually leave the office to have lunch in the International District. We ate at the Uwajimaya Food Court, and Nikki bought a green coconut and some weird lychee-like fruits, and Pocky. There was much, much Pocky bought -- "Men's Pocky," chocolate mousse Pocky (huh?), almond-coated Pocky, dark chocolate Pocky.

Mmmm. Pocky.

(Side note: I saw a purse in an International District shop window with the Pocky logo as its pattern. I don't have the type of wardrobe that would make such a purse work... nevertheless, I so wanted it!!!)

And tomorrow, we're going to pack up the girls and go to the Japanese Gardens at the Seattle Arboretum (affectionately nicknamed "The Arb"), again with Nikki and Jen. I'm really looking forward to it. I was at the Japanese Gardens once, I think, just after we moved to Seattle, but I was by myself and lonely at the time. It will be great to go again with two daughters and a husband and a couple of friends. Definitely won't be lonely this time.

And now... to bed.

A bit closer to Christmastime, I'm going to turn to polytrypos and demand that he buy me several of these exotic chocolate bars to put in my stocking. (August is a little bit too far in advance to store foodstuffs.)

Before I die, I must experience at least a few of these taste combinations:

• Black Pearl Exotic Candy Bar: ginger + wasabi + black sesame seeds + dark chocolate
• Calindia Exotic Candy Bar: Indian green cardamom + organic California walnuts + dried plums + Venezuelan dark chocolate
• Oaxaca Exotic Candy Bar: Oaxacan guajillo y pasilla chillies + Tanzanian bittersweet chocolate
• Red Fire Exotic Candy Bar: Mexican ancho and chipotle chili peppers + Ceylon cinnamon + dark chocolate
• Bacon Exotic Candy Bar: Applewood smoked bacon (I am not making this up!) + Alder smoked salt + deep milk chocolate

My dad discovered a new yummy ice cream treat... Haagen-Dazs Reserve Pomegranate & Dark Chocolate bars.

As the box says, "This unique Mediterranean Pomegranate brings a balance of sweet and tart notes and is perfectly paired with a dark chocolate coating."

For once, I completely agree with a piece of marketing copy. Yummy!

Chocolate covered strawberries.

YUM.

(The first few paragraphs from http://www.meatlessmonday.com/site/PageServer?pagename=news3)

Chocolate Purists Alarmed by Proposal to Fudge Standards

by Michael S. Rosenwald

(News Observer) - Rarely do documents making their way through federal agencies cause chocolate lovers to totally melt down. Then came Appendix C.

Accompanying a 35-page petition signed by a diverse set of culinary groups -- juice producers, meat canners and the chocolate lobby -- the appendix charts proposed changes to food standard definitions set by the Food and Drug Administration, including this one: "use a vegetable fat in place of another vegetable fat named in the standard (e.g., cacao fat)."

Chocolate lovers read that as a direct assault on their palates. That's because the current FDA standard for chocolate says it must contain cacao fat -- a.k.a. cocoa butter -- and this proposal would make it possible to call something chocolate even if it had vegetable oil instead of that defining ingredient. Whoppers malted milk balls, for instance, do not have cocoa butter.

Chocolate purists, of which there are apparently many, have undertaken a grassroots letter-writing campaign to the FDA to inform the agency that such a change to the standards is just not okay with them. More than 225 comments to the petition have been processed so far by the agency, and chocolate bloggers are pressing for more. In the annals of bureaucratic Washington battles, this is a sweet one.

"If this puts a smile on people's faces even though it's a serious matter, that's what chocolate is meant to do," said California chocolate maker and traditionalist Gary Guittard, whose Web site, http://dontmesswithourchocolate.com/, has led the counterassault."

. . .  (and the article goes on from there.)

Opinion piece from the Huffington Post on the issue (hint: they're against the change!)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kerry-trueman/like-oil-for-chocolate_b_46693.html


Of course, all this just makes me think  --- mmm, chocolate!

My company bought a bunch of snack-y type things for us today, to celebrate a truly stellar April. Lunchmeats, cheeses, chips, hummus, beer, that kind of thing. (Yes, they give us beer. No, I didn't have any... darnit!)

There were some little chocolate-covered pretzels, and since I love sweet / salty combinations, I happily took one.

Only to find when I bit into it that it was actually a chocolate-covered GUMMY pretzel. It had a very unsettling Gummi-Bear texture that sprang back against my teeth.

What a waste of good chocolate! It was even dark chocolate, too!

Who would perpetrate such a travesty of confectionary??

I got to use the electronic voting machine today for the first time. It was neat. First, I ran around the building following Vivian while Andrew voted. Then he ran around after her while I voted. She's getting very good at going up and down steps without holding on to anything.

No one was waiting to use it; there was only the attendant, a 40-something cowboy-looking guy with a spiky red crest of hair down the center of his head, surrounded by brown hair. He checked my piece of paper and handed me a little plastic card to insert in the voting machine... and away we went.

First I had to choose my preferred language. English, please! Why is there no Latin on this machine!? Me vexat pede! :-)

Then it was time to vote. Proposition, proposition, proposition, candidates 1 through, like, 37, judges, initiatives 1 through, like, 23. Honestly, voting is so confusing to someone, like me, who really doesn't follow things. Thank goodness I had the little voter's guide pamphlet with little notes in it, or I would have had to stand there reading all the verbiage about the propositions and initiatives all over again to remind myself which one was which.

When I was done, it printed up a cute little receipt with everything I'd voted for; the receipt scrolled past in a covered plastic box so that I could check it to make sure it was all correct. When I verified that it was and pressed the little Done button, it was whisked away. I withdrew the plastic card and handed it back to Red Mohawk guy.

In addition to Election Day, today is also National Bittersweet Chocolate with Almonds Day. I think they could increase voter turnout if they gave away chocolates at the polls... guaranteed!

This morning I made Chocolate Waffles. I seemed to remember reading a recipe for such a thing some time ago, but could not find it again in my cookbooks. So I made it up.

I substituted a quarter cup of cocoa powder for part of the dry ingredients, mixed thoroughly, and at the end dropped in some chocolate chips. (You have to be careful to stir up the batter with each ladle, because the chips sink right to the bottom.)

The waffles were good, but very delicate. They were soft and easily tearable. One had to be careful when extracting them from the waffle iron.

For lunch, I'm making pork chops, potatoes (not sure what I'll do with them yet... I want to fry them but that's soooo bad for us...). And applesauce from a jar. Mmmmm, applesauce.

We're having 12 or so people over tonight for another game, and I'm making a big, BIG pot of beef stew. Here's the recipe: