Friday, August 22, 2014

Dark Chocolate, Friends and Red Wine.


I know, I know! I've been remiss of late.  I don't or rather haven't written as I used to.  I could give a million reasons but there's no point.

For those who have been with me for years, the above picture will be familiar.  I have used it on several occasions when writing about a disturbed spirit, depression, an inability to focus, dramas ahead and the like.  In fact, it is one of my favourite pics and one day I fully expect someone to contact me and tell me that I cannot use it as it belongs to him/her.  Bit like the cake! I found a picture on Google of a beautiful cake and used it when writing a humorous piece on how to bake a Christmas cake.  After a couple of years the owner of the picture contacted me asking me to remove it as every time the cake was Googled, the searcher ended up on my page instead of hers. I was mortified, couldn't stop apologizing and could quite understand why she would be pissed off.  Hers  is a serious foodie page - mine a mish-mash of good, evil, fun and sometime in the past when my heart and soul was into blogging,  terribly, terribly serious subjects.

However, I digress - which of course is my wont.

The past three days have seen that black cloud hanging around.  Yesterday morning it had me in tears. (Daughter: "did you take your happy pills?") even though the evening before I attended my first ever Taizé  event after which I was supposed to be uplifted.  That's an entirely different blog.  Not the supposed upliftment,  but the event. And because I copied and pasted Taizé from its site, I now have a white background which I cannot get rid of!

So this morning there I was in my 'second' office when a girlfriend arrived to do some business. She took one look at me and asked me what on earth was wrong. Was it really showing?? I'm normally excellent with the mask that hides the pain.   She didn't wait for an answer (I would have lied anyway!) and said "'You need chocolate. Dark chocolate!". I said if she had some on her I would have a piece to which she said, "if I had some on me, there wouldn't be any". That figures!  I haven't eaten chocolate for weeks, and weeks and weeks........not since an ever-so-slightly-over-the-acceptable bad cholesterol count was discovered. At this point I do not want to see another almond or oat for a long time!

Friend, after talking about a possible sugar drop left, ensuring I was serious when I said I didn't want chocolate. I continued to go through the motions of every day business. It was as though I was on autopilot.

Ten minutes later friend returns smiling,  throws a black bag at me as she says 'never tell me what not to do'.  I took out a bar of Hershey's Special Dark Chocolate and suddenly it was imperative that I ate it.

I did actually hold off for a while - at least until she had gone and then had the first piece. The bar of 190 calories actually lasted  until after lunch.

I am aware that it's said that there are tremendous health benefits in dark chocolate which supposedly include lowering the likelihood of heart attacks/strokes/blood inflammation/diabetes and of all things on an even more positive note, improves the skin. Forget the acne. That was a myth.  Flavonoids found in dark chocolate protect the skin from the sun's UV rays. So they say. 

So all in all, given the pluses of the chocolate and red wine, I should be feeling great.  I'm not.  The cloud is still  there.  Perhaps it really is because I am out of chocolate and only have white wine in the house!

6 comments:

  1. I hate it when days like that swamp me. Thank God they are much fewer. Not wotking was my antidote. Now I just get in the occasional pissy exchange on Facebook when my button gets pushed. Like today. Sometimes I just can't brush it off. I should probably go buy a bag of dark chocolate.

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    Replies
    1. Sometimes it's more than a 'swamp' On many occasions in my case, it's an 'omen'. I know that because I have had too many of them to just write them off. I normally know which ones to write off as 'a mood swing'.I get into many pissy exchanges on FB but have learned to ignore the ones that disturb my spirit. That's sometimes hard when discussing local politics given our situation here. I think it is quite possible that apart from a couple of personal things that momentarily I cannot do anything about, my 'cloud' could well be connected to ISIS, Gaza and Israel although I am thousands of miles away.

      Go buy the red wine too!

      Delete
  2. Barbie, you are so freakin' awesome ... thanks for this!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Takes a bit for the dark chocolate to hit. You need it for a couple days. I have found this out the hard way.

    I have also battled with the white background when I have copied something directly to my blog. Two cures. Or three if you just don't do it again. Easiest is you copy it and leave it in a white block. Making it Italics gives it a reason to be white. Second is you go a couple lines below what you just copied in white but without using the return or the white comes with you and retype what it is you just copied then delete that. Or, and I have done this, you go into html mode and removed all the references of white background just before the font choice. That has to be done at the beginning and end of each paragraph you copied. To be sure you got it all go to preview.

    Or never copy anything again.

    BTW I think people copy my images and use them in their blogs. And every so often I will get three hundred hits on my blog in just one day. Works for me.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hope things get better for you soon. I've been putting a bit of cocoa in my coffee (along with a little extra agave), which gives me the dark chocolate benefits without the fat that would be in a chocolate bar.

    If you want to put something into your blog without having the formatting follow it copy it as usual then paste it into the HTML version of the Blogger writing screen (tab at top left, next to Compose). Then you can manipulate it as you'd like.

    ReplyDelete

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