Mmmm ... Chocolate

OK ... maybe I didn't want to know about fat free half-n-half.

Oh well, too late now. Why must I be so inquisitive? Why must I have friends who know all the answers?! (Actually, I love that. I have walking, talking, and just plain nice people who pretty much comprise a whole encyclopedia set from, Ancient Greek mythology to chemistry, knitting, politics, and zoology.)

I needed a walk after lunch, so I briskly made my way to Foodies Urban Market to buy soy milk. Mmmm, soy milk.

Anyway, I needed a little treat, but I'm really close to reaching one of my short-term weight--loss goals (10% of my original weight -- and no, I'm not yet ready to broadcast over the internet what that weight was) so it had to be a smart treat.

A little bit of good chocolate goes a long way to satisfying my cravings, and Foodies has lots of yummy gourmet chocolates, including organic, fair-trade and imported.

Thus, I have discovered: New Tree. Imported from Belgium, New Tree chocolates are a pairing of flavors (although you can get "plain" dark chocolate -- 73% Belgian chocolate goodness) such as dark chocolate and ginger, dark chocolate and black current, dark chocolate and coffee, and a tempting concoction of milk chocolate and cinnamon. Best of all, you can get a little box of mini-bars (each one .3 ozs) and each minibar is only 25 calories and less than 2 grams of fat. Rock on.

Heavenly.

Almost as good as chocolate - maybe better, really -- was the Manu Chao concert I went to Sunday night. Wow. Talk about energy. It was quite the experience. I sang along to songs I knew (or tried to, most of them are in Spanish -- not a language I know well), and jumped around and danced to songs I didn't know.

Who - what - is Manu Chao? His music is eclectic to say the least. "World music" in the sense that he borrows from styles all over the world, mixed with leftist/populist ideology, and spiced with punk. It's one thing to enjoy the albums. It's another experience entirely to be in a crowd of Manu followers. There was crowd surfing, pot smoking, dancing, and lots of jumping. They did 4 encores -- out-doing the last great concert I went to, Sondre Lerche.