Death by Chocolate, or Maybe Lightning

I’m doing some traveling this month and I actually went somewhere that is hotter than where I live.  Crazy, right?  Who in their right mind would do that?  (I think the key there is “right mind” but we’ll set that aside for now.)  This time of year at home in the Pacific Northwest it usually starts raining and the summertime temperatures start to cool down dramatically.  Fall comes quickly, almost as fast as pumpkin spice shows up.  Luckily, where I’m currently located there are wild thunderstorms here every day so I’m not as homesick from missing the PNW rain as I thought I’d be.  Unfortunately, these rain storms don’t cool things off that much.

I’ve found that people here take lightning very, very seriously.  I’ve been advised not to walk around the golf course (in the open or under an umbrella); be near, on, or in any body of water; stand in your yard during the storm; or really, do anything other than stay inside.  I don’t disagree.  Years ago when I was here another time, we were driving on the freeway and a thunderstorm came up.  The biblical-level deluge with raindrops as big as quarters was difficult enough to manage.  But as we drove past an open field alongside the freeway, lightning struck a light pole standing in front of a barn a hundred yards or so from the road.  The flash lit up the interior of the car and the boom nearly deafened us.  It’s hard to keep a car on the road in the middle of something like that.

Speaking of Fall, kids have been back in school for a few weeks, as you can tell from their sunshiny little faces getting on the school bus in the morning.  I have a niece who just started first grade, and she’s trying to get the hang of the whole homework thing.  As her time is split between parental houses, the homework assignments are split as well.  Her dad was “assigned” math homework.  She was asked how that went:  “There was a lot of yelling and erasing.”

I can remember being in first grade, if you can believe it, and I sure don’t remember having homework.  What I do remember is the huge chocolate sheet cake that our class got as a reward for being extra good at something or other.  Maybe for having the least number of kids crying for the greatest number of days, although that may have been for kindergarten.  I watched that monster flat cake being wheeled into the classroom and wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about.  At home, I don’t remember having chocolate cake.  We always had homemade yellow cake with boiled brown sugar icing and it was always round, in two layers.  Not a lot of imagination there, but it was really good.  Come to think of it, we always had sugar cookies, never chocolate chip. I think chocolate was just too exotic for our sedate lives.

All I can say is that when I ate that chocolate cake in first grade, with its nearly inch-thick chocolate fudge icing, I left the family position on chocolate far behind and officially entered the ranks of those who live for chocolate.  You think quitting smoking is hard?  Try giving up chocolate.