Picture Carole King singing, “C’mon, c’mon and doooo, the cocoa-motion with me.” This is the still-stalled hot cocoa-inspired shawl of hand-dyed Malabrigo baby merino, waiting its turn in the knitting lineup.  I’ve got the pattern ideas all written up, I just have to finish actually doing it.

And yes, I do like my mug of hot cocoa in the brisk foggy mornings here. No worries about lacking cocoa anti-oxidants.

When my husband was living in France for two years as a missionary, he learned to appreciate blue cheese, Brie, and good European chocolate (not necessarily together), and the waxy Hershey’s type never had the same appeal for him again. Gradually he got me to see the light. And then, after we moved to California, two men decided that their latest start-up venture was going to be collecting antique chocolate manufacturing equipment from Europe a la Sandra Boynton‘s book “Chocolate: the Consuming Passion,” (you have SO got to get that little book, we laughed till we cried, over and over), to research the process, select the best cocoa beans, ferment them in the sun longer than Hershey’s lets theirs do, and to create the best chocolate in the world. Beat Valrhona! Go team go! Yay!

And so they did. Scharffenberger was set up in a building in Berkeley built just before the 1904 earthquake–how it survived that, I’ll never understand. Our friend Tom gathered up I think it was 30 interested people (it wasn’t hard; free samples?  Twist our arms) to carpool up together by appointment one Saturday as an official tour, and they opened the factory doors to us and took us through.

At the time, they had an employee whose job was to wrap every bar by hand: they’d bought a wrapping machine and been unable to fit it through the doors of the old place. Oops. Looking up at the ceiling, it wasn’t flat across, but rather an artsy wavy line in an up-and-down pattern, the likes of which I’ve never seen anywhere else–made entirely of bricks. I just heard everyone in California wince. Yes. Bricks crumble in earthquakes. Watch your head. And this is close to the San Francisco Bay, where the sandier land is more likely to amplify the shakes.

Anyway, I thought I’d never touch a Hershey bar again. But I took the kids on a tour of the Hershey plant in the Central Valley, where you pass by almond orchards on the way there, and I do have to admit that an extremely fresh Hershey almond bar eaten in the context of such an intensity of chocolate fumes is quite good.

I was at Trader Joe’s after Scharffenberger finally got a bar-wrapping machine going and their sales volume was markedly increasing, and a worker was wheeling over cases of the very first-ever Scharffenberger bars they were going to sell in that particular store.  Just as soon as the guy got those boxes open. I stood next to them, waiting (standing guard, if you really want to know) while he ran for a box cutter, and I got the very first bars to come out of the very first box.  Mine!  The guy handed them to me with the biggest grin on his face, watching me: I was like a little kid on Christmas morning. Timed that shopping trip right!

Later, trying to break into the upper-end chocolate market, Hershey’s, after swearing absolutely not to touch Scharffenberger’s way of doing things, bought them out, so I guess my Hershey count is greater than zero after all, not to mention that Sandra Boynton was right again. So far, though, still so good. So very good.  My daily morning mug would be Scharffenberger, too, but I can’t afford it.  Gotta leave some yarn money in the budget.

Blood test results:

Hershey’s: 0 (0%) Normal.

Scharffenberger Dark 7.2 (2.0-8.0) K/uL Normal.

Valrhona: 0 (60-80%) (We’re out, and so was Trader Joe’s) Definitely deficient.

Bergenfield’s Vintage Lacewood Organic Cocoa: 1200 (150-400) K/uL Heh.

I called Frances–five minutes, it turned out, before her scarf arrived in the mail, so she was at the happy anticipation stage. It was wonderful to hear her voice and say thank you more personally than an email can convey. You know how, some people, you meet them and you’re instantly friends? It felt like that. Thank you, Russell, for encouraging me to call, you both totally made my day.

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Time to go get the latest blood test. Hang on just a second, though, I’ve got this post to write first.

I was answering emails from that last post, and one friend back East was reminiscing over going to rodeos in Arizona. My husband had a good friend who grew up in the mountains above Salt Lake City, who rode the professional rodeo circuit for awhile like his dad had done.

Richard met Zane when they were both serving missions for the Mormon Church in France in the 70’s. Imagine being from a town so small I don’t think it had a stoplight, finding yourself in southern France–can you say culture shock?–and finding yourself assigned to work with someone from Washington, DC, whose parents had gone to parties at the Eisenhower White House. Who, it turned out, though, had worked on his grandparents’ ranch several summers growing up–in the next town down from your own. Who knew the places you knew, who knew some of the people you knew, who could swap stories on them with you. Small world.

We were visiting Zane at his folks’ ranch one day back when we were newlyweds. He wanted to show us his dad’s new buffalo. There was a field with a tall wooden fence and a sign on the gate saying that that buffalo could cross that field in X seconds. The owner could cross it in so many, and it was definitely fewer than X. Enter at your own risk.

I tell you, that beat any “Beware of dog” sign I ever saw. I was not at all sure about going in there. I mean, I was REALLY not sure. They had to talk me into it. Zane laughed good-naturedly at my city-slickeredness. I knew my husband actually knew how to milk a cow and rope a calf (he described it as, in his case, pointing the horse at the right one and letting it do most of the work while he hung on for dear life, it was the expert, not him), but it was all very exotic to me; the two men were having a grand time chatting and catching up on old times as we went in.

People! Feeding time! The buffalo way over yonder started ambling happily in our direction. I tell you–I catapulted over that fence faster than I knew I could go, I didn’t even open the gate, I wasn’t going to take a risk with fumbling over that latch, I was out of there! While the guys were cracking up. It just wanted a scratch behind its ears or some such thing, don’tcha know? Zane was calling after me. It’s friendly! Honest!

No, I don’t know thankyouverymuch. Nor was I waiting to find out.

You know, looking back all these years later, I could draw parallels to all sorts of things in life that have happened since then. I think I’ve learned how to wait and scratch behind the ears of things that used to frighten me, and keep on walking across that grassy pasture.