(no subject)

I was paid a nice sum for participating in a focus group on chocolate on Thursday (it sounds like Ghiradelli is going to have a good dark chocolate coming out with Meyer lemon and Valencia orange in it - yum), and spent the same sum on a nice used but in excellent condition Sierra Designs clip flashlight tent yesterday at the Wilderness Exchange swap meet. I'd ended up spending nearly all day at the back-yard memorial service for the husband of a co-worker, so only caught the end of the sale. I picked up a heavier down jacket than my backpacking one, and a new collapsable water jug. It would've been fun to get skiis, but not enough time, also, I didn't go skiing at all last year.

I'm thrilled about my new tent. It's a 2 person, which is to say, the right size for me and my gear. I developed a serious lust for the Sierra Designs Omega tent - they had two brand new ones for sale. It's a beautiful tent, a fabulous clip design, but I can't justify a large tent right now. Still. I fondled its aluminum poles and zipped and unzipped the sky window the way other people fondle clothing fabrics.

My usher bunch saw the Berkeley Rep's "The Secret in the Wings," on Saturday night, and it was marvelous. If you're a Bay Area resident, it's well worth making some effort to see it before it goes. Mary Zimmerman is the creator of my still-all-time-favorite play, Metamorphosis, which, for all I know, is still running on Broadway to critical raves. This is as close to Metamorphosis as anything she's done that I've seen. Last year's "Notebooks" did nothing for me. The storytelling, lighting, and staging are fabulous. It has an unusual structure in that she tells 7? 8? tales, but only the first half of the tales until she gets to the center tale, which is told all the way through, then the last half of the tales are told going out and ending with the first tale told, kind of like a palindrome. Check it out if you can. http://www.berkeleyrep.org/HTML/CurrentSeason/SW_description.html

In other news, why would anyone who cares about a particular party ever donate $1 or more to the presidential campaign through the check box on their income taxes. Don't they realize that when they do that, they are giving $.50 to the OTHER party?

Tent lust:
http://www.sierradesigns.com/cgi-bin/driver.pl?index=3&conf=tent_show_04
http://www.sierradesigns.com/cgi-bin/driver.pl?index=25&conf=tent_show_04

(no subject)

The NY Sunday Times mag had an interesting article about the health benefits of chocolate. The gist of it is that Mars, a privately run company, has been funding genuinely independent medical research on the health effects of cocoa, and has come up with ways to formulate the chocolate to maximize the good stuff, the flavanols. M&Ms and Dove bars have already been reformulated to have more flavanols and a new product, CocoaVia is only available at the website above. What the flavanols do is relax the innards of blood vessels, and increase blood flow to the extremeties and the brain. Flavanols might be a part of the medical arsenal for heart disease, vascular dementia (not Alzheimers), and other circulatory things, like poor circ for diabetics.

Interesting! My chocoholic co-workers and I are going to order some of this CocoaVia stuff. Stay tuned for a later report. http://www.cocoavia.com/default.asp