Hot Chocolate and Another (Undeserved?) Award

My wife came in here about an hour ago and said in a hushed voice, "How about you go into the kitchen and make us some beverages?"

My first thought was alcoholic kinds, but then I remembered we don't have any. Then I paid closer attention and realized the half-whisper meant something more devious... something the kids can't know about... our secret luxury: hot chocolate.

The kids can't know about it because they're gobblers. If it's remotely sweet or tasty in any way, particularly if its sugary and/or expensive, they gobble it. We have no chance. We, in fact, have a whole list of things at the grocery store that everyone in the family enjoys that we cannot purchase because the kids ruin it by pounding it down within hours of becoming aware of it. Hot chocolate, especially if its something that sounds fancy like French vanilla hot chocolate, is pretty near the top of that list. Luckily, I make pretty much everything from scratch, and the kids have already been taught the oh-so-fun lesson about how bad raw cocoa tastes. Heh heh heh.

The problem was that we didn't have a key ingredient in sufficient quantities. We were essentially out of milk, which would also cut into our romantic morning coffee ritual. Enter the good man: our spectacular homemade hot chocolate would be had!

I went to the grocery store at 10:30 at night to fix this problem, and as anyone who has been there knows, the grocery store after about 8:30 pm is a bizarre place. Santa Claus was there, in fact, tonight, but he wasn't in uniform. He was in green flannel with green jeans, and he couldn't work the self-scanning checkout. Weird place, that.

Then I came home and made it -- a little of the premium, organic cocoa mix my lady picked up a few weeks ago, nice unsweetened cocoa powder, some hippy sugar, and a few chocolate chips found their way in this one. L-o-v-e-l-y. Score 10 good-man points... except that she just went to bed without me while I'm typing this (making this shorter as the seconds go by...).

In other news, since I report things like this and folks seem to like it, I won another little award for my blogging efforts, though I don't know that I deserve it, particularly since I don't play by the rules (and should?). This one is again courtesy of The Readhead Riter and notes that I'm apparently a superior scribbler.
As my friend Jordan says... "everyone's got to be good at something." Thanks!