"You are never selfish with your advice or your help".

That is my Chinese fortune cookie fortune. I seem to have collected a bunch of them in the time I was living in the US, going from buffet to buffet on the weekends. Buffets are great, so much to choose from, as long as the salad bar is fresh. Oddly, there are far more buffets in the US than in Canada. I think I'll miss them, but they do let you get out of control in how much you eat.

Anyway, other things I found different were more processed food rather than fresh and no where could I really find good coffee. I think those were the big things that struck me in a food related way. Even the Starbucks coffee is different once it crosses the border. I don't know why that would be. I do understand the whole diet Coke thing. Canadians tend to like pop that isn't so sweet. You could taste the difference between Canadian and US diet Coke. I substituted with WalMart's Sams diet cola, it was good. Its called Value something or other up here in the Great White North.

I've decided the processed food versus fresh food could be a geographic thing. Not so much a US/ Canada thing but a midwest/ coast thing. I've found that people in bigger cities tend to like fresh produce more than people in small towns. Just my own uncontrolled experiment so don't blow a gasket if you violently disagree or feel offended. Do your own experiment and let me know what you come up with.

For now, I'm glad to be back here. There is more yogurt, better coffee, Smarties and since its summer I can drive along the highways and byways and pick up all the fresh fruit and vegetables at the roadside stands. This weekend I bought fresh mushrooms, broccoli, green peppers, corn, tomatoes and potatoes. Cooked up with fresh dill, beets, carrots and beans from the garden... we're feasting on summer produce!

I'm hungry. Sometimes I get a headache when I haven't eaten, tonight I'm just that growly hungry. I'll probably go downstairs and pour a bowl of Shreddies so I don't lie awake thinking about being hungry when I finally go to bed.

But, if I had my choice, I would have something decadent, soft, warm and chocolate. With nuts, with caramel centres or with a sidecar of vanilla ice cream, chocolate, real chocolate is still my favourite.

You don't get real chocolate often. Chocolate bars aren't real chocolate. I'm not sure what the process is and how much actual chocolate they have to contain to be able to label those things chocolate. But, I know real chocolate when I feel it, smell it and taste it; that's not it.

So, here for your sensory pleasure (unless you are one of those pesky vanilla only types) are chocolate recipes from BackWash. Makes you want to just dive right in to a vat of melted, warm luscious chocolate. Well... maybe not quite that far, but I'd love to smell a vat of warm, melted chocolate.

Two of the best examples of a house I'd love to live in have been in movies. Not so strange, eh? They have huge cash budgets and the staff to do all the work, planning and dreaming.

First, that house they used in the Caspar movie and second that house they used in Practical Magic. Both were gothic looking with lots of nooks, crannies and old stuff. I love old houses, especially those sad looking, run down ones you sometimes pass on an out of the way country road.

I love the old gingerbread trim, the old hardware (I found an antique key still in the lock of one house I explored) the spiral stairs, the wood work, iron work too. All of it makes me want to discover more and restore.

I am not someone who does home restoration projects. Don't get the idea I have sandpaper in one hand, a level in the other while I balance on a saw horse. Although, I would be a great fan of anyone who does all this work, I'm mostly content to watch and admire. I can appreciate the refinished furniture without inhaling the varnish and paint remover. Maybe I will get daring and make some of that rustic furniture I admire, not a lot of chemicals in that.

Anyway, for now I will keep looking at pictures and see if my next husband might be the woodworking, fix-it man of my fantasies.

I wrote a whole newsletter and somehow it has been taken by aliens, I guess. Not nice aliens like the kind I used to be, but nasty lurking aliens who make trouble for nice women like me.

Anyway, the newsletter was about attics and kids and how those books about adventures in mysterious attics never live up to the reality. It was a great column. I babbled on for at least four paragraphs, even called myself a mad scientist at one point. But, I didn't think I needed to save it in another file so its all lost, completely and forever. Where does all the lost stuff go?

Here are the links, they seem stable.

I drove the old Ford truck today. These days it looks more like something you would leave out in the back 40 acres for picking up hay bales now and then. It does seem to run ok, I didn't have any trouble with it. I thought I might when I got my first real look at it. I hadn't seen it since Todd and I drove around in it while we were still dating. I guess that is 3 years ago, or more. Poor old truck, I felt sorry for it.

It was "interesting" to drive. I can't pick another word. Not challenging exactly, I didn't have any real problems. It was exciting. All that horse power (all 8 or so of them) and the hugeness of the truck itself. When I stood outside the truck it was taller than I am. Just to get in I had to half climb up to the seat. Rufus, as I began to call him, could easily drive right over most of those other cars on the road and I would have just thought it was roadkill.

Driving Rufus was fun, if a little too exciting, around some of those corners. Rufus just has so much power, one tap on the gas and he wants to fly off the handle. At one tight corner I thought the whole truck was going to tip over and tumble down into the ditch.

On the deserted backroad, well paved but no cars or houses, I let Rufus have his head. I could tell he wanted to all day, he was just holding back. Just a bit of pressure on the gas and Rufus surged forward with a roar. I took it up to just over 120 K. Rufus is old but I could tell he would have liked me to let him race and hit that 140 K mark where the speedometer ends and its just Rufus and the bare roadway ahead. But I held him back, images of small animals and pedestrians pushing themselves into my mind.

I'd definitely take Rufus out on another date. Beat up as he is, he had a powerful, masterly style. I told him, if he was a real man I'd go for him, all the way.