I can't complain.

Yesterday, on a whim and the Universe via oakenguy giving me a reminder, I dragged the family out to the New York Chocolate Show. I got a Good Karma micropayment in the form of someone randomly handing us a pair of tickets as we walked in, saving us $58 and an hour's wait in the rain. The show was next to a more general foodie show, which we didn't have tickets for, but from which we somehow managed to sample wheat beer, tea, mini-pancakes made by firemen, and the last few pieces of a little brunch demo piece a restaurant was doing, which consisted of lovely poached eggs and hollandaise sitting in a little cup of ham and placed on a round of white bread.

The show itself was a lot of fun. Most of the vendors were sampling stuff, though most of them were also selling retail, so it didn't have as much of a trade show feel as what I'm used to at these things. The remains of what had held up after the Chocolate Fashion Show were particularly impressive. A Batgirl bodice and giant chocolate wings with "Wham!" and "Pow!" and "Zowie!" all over them in brightly colored couverture particularly struck my fancy. I got to see the folks from TCHO in San Francisco, who make pure bean chocolates with very different characters based on their bean choices, and who still are selling most of their products as prototypes. They're all geeky-sciency and I think I might be in love. I got to try a lot of products with chocolate and chilies, but everyone who had had chocolate bacon at some point in the day was out of it by time I arrived. The only thing we actually purchased was some bars from a Sicilian line of chocolate made with raw sugar, the details of which I didn't quite get due to some combination of language barriers and salespeople talking out of their butts, but the effect of which was something kind of crunchy, while still being well-tempered, crisp, and not at all mealy. The other winner, which is going to go into the "try to reproduce this successfully at home" pile, was a truffle made with a smokey blue cheese, dark chocolate, and almonds, which actually worked together beautifully

Today I dragged the family into the city again and we went to the Brooklyn Flea Market. It's not really a flea market in terms of pricing, but they had a nice mix of vintage clothing and furniture, memorabilia, and cool artisan stuff. I got a set of arm/leg warmers made of the ends of stretchy shirts and sweater arms, serged together coarsely, in lovely browns and tiger prints, which will probably help keep me in the silly habit of wearing long skirts all winter. I also had an awesome pupusa with pork and cheese inside and some kind of relish on top.

Nothing fancy, this weekend. Mostly just enjoying what New York City has to offer, in a straightforward kind of way. But the fact is, I hadn't done quite that in way too long, and I enjoyed it.

Little Blogger

Also, in vaguely boggling news, my just-turned-five year old son is actively blogging. I told him about NaBloPoMo and he decided to do it, so he's agreed to use his new computer to post in his LJ projectmothra every day in November, for a prize of a celebration dinner out anywhere he likes at the end of the month.

He's doing it pretty much entirely by himself. I'm reminding him to do it, and spelling things when he asks me to, and helping him out when he does things like pressing the insert key on the keyboard by mistake. But otherwise, it's all his work. I think he must have gotten the Bloom family writer genes.

Thank you so much to friends who have been commenting on the posts! He really loves to read your comments so much.

(Also, he has somehow gotten strangely obsessed with Mendelian genetics. I guess that comes from my side.)