Northwest Chocolate Festival 2018
For once in my life, I'm not eager to eat some chocolate as soon as I get to work. I'm hoping to sustain this feeling as long as I can, honestly -- I weighed in at 155 lbs yesterday morning, a record high since I started tracking on an app on the last day of July. I was back down to 153.9 this morning, which was both a surprise and a relief after yesterday, the very reason I have zero desire for sweets at the moment: chocolate overload at the Northwest Chocolate Festival. But, I am getting ahead of myself because I should mention Saturday first. I like to go on chronological order when I can. Also it's the first image in today's DLU and that has nothing to do with chocolate.
It does have to do with wine, though, at least a bit, and I think Shobhit is right that when I drink I am almost always up in my weight the next day. I poured out the last of the bottle of red wine Shobhit opened the day before, and brought that for my drink to have during the double feature I had with Laney in the Braeburn Condos on Saturday. As you can plainly see from the photo, which really cracked both of us doing, we watched The Poseidon Adventure and Titanic.
Laney had very little recollection of having watched The Poseidon Adventure with me before, and actually no recollection of having gone to see the remake, Poseidon, with Mac, Barbara, and me in 2006 -- a year which, incidentally, is now twelve years ago. Not only is The Poseidon Adventure an old movie (now 46 years old, it was 34 years old in 2006), even its remake is kind of an old movie now! Although honestly, judging by my solid-B review at the time, I might actually enjoy seeing it again -- although I would probably still feel that the original was far better. Laney and I were both struck, watching it this time around, by one of the biggest heroes of the movie being a fat woman (played by Shellwy Winters) -- in 1972! It was also interesting to learn on iMDB's trivia page for the film that Winters gained 35 lbs (!) for that role and was never able to take it back off again. Incidentally, she was born in 1920, which would make her 52 in this movie, and 86 at the year of her death -- just month before Poseidon was released in 2006.
As it happens, in my review of Poseidon, I make reference to having re-watched The Poseidon Adventure not long before, and I was rather struck by this bit about the thrilling sequence with the cruise ship capsizing: The last time I watched the movie with some friends, we backed up the DVD to watch the entire scene a second time.
That "last time" I referred to there was all of six days before we went to see Poseidon when, on May 7, 2006, Laney hosted a "Disasterthon" at her place, apparently having originally planned on hosting it at Shobhit's and my place but then changing the location due to the timing of Shobhit and me moving to Wallingford from First Hill, a move we made to accommodate his mother's first visit from India so she'd have a room to herself. Anyway, on that day, the double feature was The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. (I guess we re-watched a scene at least once per movie, because I also distinctly remember rewinding to show everyone in the latter movie when Jennifer Jones's Lisolette bounces off the side of the building when she falls.) Charlie and Cavin had also been present for that double feature, but they did not join us later for Poseidon. It's curious to me now that I did not mention re-watching the capsizing scene in my regular LiveJournal entry about it, yet I did in my review of Poseidon.
Anyway! Laney and I have now re-watched both The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure recently this year, but each now as part of other double features. Instead of "Disasterthons" as a broad theme, we made them more specific: first was The Towering Inferno and Die Hard, paired because this year's Skyscraper was a cross between the two movies and inferior to both. And then, probably from discussions about watching The Towering Inferno back in 2006, we decided that would pair well as a "Sinking Ships Double Feature" with Titanic.
And they did go together well. It's now been 21 years since Titanic came out, and it clearly had been many years since Laney last saw it. She mentioned more than once how much more "intense" it was than she remembered it, while the ship is sinking.
I had reserved the Braeburn Condos theatre between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m., and that proved perfect. The Poseidon Adventure is just shy of two hours long and Titanic runs three hours and fifteen minutes. I always pad at least two hours onto the combined run time of the two movies for my theatre reservation because of inevitable delays and breaks; Titanic itself came split into two discs and I had to reboot that damned projector player with all three discs -- but, at least, I managed to get it to work in shorter order each time than I have in the past. I was only able to get the third disc to work once I gave up on having closed captioning on but whatever; in the relatively soundproof theatre there's not nearly as much concern about passing sirens and traffic like in the condo. I also had to pause it for a while when Laney got a call from her daughter Jessica, which of course was also fine and understandable.
In any case, that was pretty much my entire Saturday. I had the large cup full of wine as mentioned before, which amounted to probably two standard amounts of glasses of wine; I also made myself a veggie burger to have for an early lunch as the first movie ran. Once the movies were over and we parted ways, Shobhit was on his way back from volunteering to set up the Northwest Chocolate Festival; I drove the car down to meet him downtown and we then did some weekend shopping at MacPherson's on Beacon Hill. Shobhit complained several times about prices being higher, almost refusing to understand that of course, with winter starting and produce having to be brought in from farther away, of course the prices would go up.
And then we went to the Columbia City PCC, just to take advantage of the latest string of weekly coupons we got in the mail, this one for $5 off $10 spent in the Deli department. We ordered a fresh made Olympic Pizza, which we have both decided is the best pizza PCC makes. We each ate two slices at a small table there at the Deli, which affords Shobhit a point on the next Social Review. Hooray for him!
So that brings us officially to yesterday's Northwest Chocolate Festival -- apparently its tenth anniversary, but this was the first I ever attended. I've heard of it before, and Shobhit had mused about going before, but we never did. He wanted me to find out if PCC was doing any kind of sponsorship and if there were any way I could get tickets that way. I want to say PCC had some kind of indirect association in the past, but I can find no confirmation of that; there certainly wasn't any this year. Besides, that kind of makes sense: we're a retailer, not a manufacturer. We sell tons of chocolate, and we sell a lot of the brands that had booths there, but we don't actually make any of our own.
I seriously had way too much chocolate yesterday. It was a cool thing to attend though, even though I can't imagine feeling like it would have been worth paying $25 to get into. I'm not sure I ate $25 worth of samples, to be honest.
Shobhit worked it, though -- literally: setup volunteer work on Friday evening netted him one day pass; working another four-hour volunteer shift on Saturday (thereby missing out on the double feature with Laney) netted him another. So, we both got in for free yesterday. I find this approach of his fascinating, because Shobhit is, quite frankly, not exactly altruistic by nature. And his motivations here were not altruistic at all: he did the volunteer shifts precisely with the aim of getting in on Sunday without having to pay for those tickets. He was even going to scrap the idea of going altogether when he hadn't heard back from organizers about volunteering. At the last minute, however, he did hear back from them. And this is the thing: what difference does it make, really, whether he's volunteering for selfish reasons? He's still volunteering. Far more than I ever have, actually. He's helping out, keeping busy, making connections, however tenuous they might be in the long run. Building community. The net effect is the same -- from the perspective of those he helped, it was still altruistic. His motivations are arguably not even relevant.
We walked downtown first, stopping at the Metro Tunnel so he could add $10 to his Orca Card. We caught a #33 bus on 3rd at Pine, the same stop I sometimes catch that very bus to ride the second half of my way to work. Only this time we took it further up Elliott Ave to get off in the middle of the Magnolia Bridge, something I had never done before, and then walking the pedestrian paths and stairwells down to Pier 91 and then on to Smith Cove Cruise Terminal, where the festival took place. I guess there cruise ships must be done now that summer and early fall are over. They might as well use that building -- which I had never been to before; our Inside Passage Alaska cruise in 2007 launched from south of downtown -- for something.
It did yield a fair amount of useful information for future reference. Such as . . .
*A fantastic brand discovery in Seattle-based Dolcetta Sweets, which had samples of Peanut Butter Crisp Truffles which might very well be the best peanut butter confections I've had in my life. I have to be honest, most of the chocolate we tasted was fine, but not particularly exceptional -- this was exceptional. I even veered into hyperbole in the moment: "That was stunning," I told the lady. I really should take note of the few local retailers that sell their product. Perhaps I'll buy some for Christmas gifts or something.
*Shobhit asked me also to take a photo of the Cacoco Drinking Chocolate booth, he was so enamored with that product -- probably largely because of how not sweet it is. There was also a guy working the booth he'd met the day before whose painted fingernails he wanted me to see. I do recall telling Shobhit we carry that brand at PCC, although he should probably note now that I just looked it up in our system as I was writing this, that they are very expensive: $13.49 for their roughly 11-oz packages. That said, that's actually 50 cents cheaper than they sell on Cacoco's own website, as it happens; and with my 25% discount they would actually retail at $10.12. Which is still a lot.
*There was another booth by an organization called Melt which represents several small, local chocolate makers in Portland, Oregon -- among them a brand called Creo Chocolates, which, apparently much like Seattle's Theo Chocolates, offers tours (albeit much more expensive ones, I see now); they offered us a brochure about them and we've made note of it for our next visit to Portland, which we now have planned for next year for our anniversary. (Our anniversary is June 14, but we need to be in Washington -- specifically Chehalis -- for Britni and David's wedding on the 15th, so Shobhit made the pragmatic suggestion of spending the immediately previous couple of days in Portland. I haven't spent a weekend there with him since 2010 and I also really want to go on their gondola, so this struck me as a win-win.)
Anyway, you can click here for the full photo set of the festival -- a comfortable 40 shots in all, about 10 of those of the very nice views from Pier 91. I edited, uploaded and even captioned them all at home after returning late yesterday afternoon, before working a bit on this year's calendars. I think I'm a tad further behind my usual schedule on those but I think I'll still be all right. I'm doing a couple of things about them rather differently this year, which might somewhat disappoint some, in that the photos are less personalized -- the flips side of that being they are much more calendar-like with natural beauty in them. This being the 12th year I've made these calendars, it's kind time for me to shake things up a little anyway.
. . . And now, I'm just back from lunch with Karen at the Six-Seven Restaurant down at the Edgewater Hotel. Due to both her schedule and the holiday, we had to reschedule both of our November lunches to days other than the usual second and fourth Thursdays of the month. Our next one, since we obviously won't be meeting on the Thursday of Thanksgiving, will be the following Monday, exactly two weeks from now.
November thus far this year has, much like most of October, been astonishingly dry. It's only been within the past week that it has turned noticeably cold, as in seasonal for this time of year. It's a tad warmer again today though, and I had a rather pleasant walk to and from the Edgewater today.
We plit the gyro sandwich as always -- now that they stopped the specials menu, it's pretty much our default every time. So these lunches are literally half the cost of what they used to be. We had pleasant conversation as always. I told her about yesterday's Northwest Chocolate Factory and we discussed 2019 travel plans.
It's looking like I'll be closing out 2018 without having flown in a plane anywhere at all -- something that has not occurred for me since 2007. (I had assumed it would be earlier, but it's 2007: we did go to Alaska, but that major trip was on a cruise ship.) The hope, if everything goes as planned, is that in 2019 I'll fly to three different destinations: accompanying Danielle to a wedding in upstate New York in June; another trip with Danielle to Las Vegas some other time of the year; and a trip to Shobhit to visit Sara W from work in her reclaimed home of Denver, as I promised her we would visit. All of these trips are unconfirmed at the moment, but they are the hope and plan for now.
[posted 1:18 pm]