Ladies, I have just submitted my LAST application. And not a moment too soon—for one thing, it’s 2 hours until the deadline, and for another, I’m not so lucid.

So today, I’m going to say it with chocolate.

If you find yourself in Vancouver, get thee to Chocolate Arts, because “Fine Chocolate is an Art”. Amen.

I haven’t been, of course, but my colleague-of-trauma always brings me something back whenever she goes. Sweet!

These are a must:

Because the true magic is in what lies beneath…

Oh, Matcha! I was recently reminded by Kath (thanks!) that a) Matcha and chocolate are a… match-a made in heaven? OUCH. SORRY. But seriously, if you haven’t tried it, it’s life-changing (when done well)! I actually lament the time I’ve spent in Paris for having introduced me to Sadaharu Aoki, for now I dream of the ivoire macha:

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It’s € 10,00 per bar. TEN!! But oh-so-worth it. Although, this is Matcha and white chocolate, so let’s bring this back to the dark side.

Check ça:

I made this lovely opera cake for New Year’s 2008. I was a very different person then, but that brings me to the second thing Kath reminded me of: b) I really love to bake, and in just 12 days, once the LSAT is over, I will bake until tears of joy course down my face.

So here is today’s chocolate bliss: and it’s “Matcha Point” because with the apps now DONE… hello, LSAT, I’m looking at you.

Given that I’ve been hanging out in little Suzy B*itchfaceland lately, I’m happy for my 5-posts-about-chocolate plan. How can anyone be unhappy when there’s chocolate? And while we’re at it, though I’m SO sore today that every movement is *felt* deeply (ouch: yoga), I can’t help repeating yesterday’s mantra with each step.

Now, really, I’m NOT so into the whole spiritual side of yoga. My spirituality is my own thing, and while I like meditating on my own, I don’t FEEL it when I’m in public. I mostly go through the motions for the whole chanting and singing part of yoga, and by that I mean, I am completely silent… which is its own achievement for a little ball of frenetic activity like myself.

But this mantra… it’s GOLD. The instructor says it with her kids ’cause it’s THAT great, and while you can’t see me waving my arms about in the accompanying spasm, say it with me now!:

“This is my LIFE!
MINE to enJOY!
I… feel… GREAT!!!!”

Cute, no? I say it with each footfall and it makes me smile. Sorta like this little number, the reverence for which led me to devote some time to chocolate on my blog:

**cue the crickets**…

I know. It doesn’t look like much, a half-moon wafer on a red file folder in my office, but think of this as the chocolate equivalent of “still waters run deep”.

In its proper form, it looks more like this:

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And their royal gorgeousness can only be procured for £9.98 in the UK.

Can you read what’s on there? INTENSELY dark chocolate! FIERY chilli with COOL lime! And I’m telling you, the lime seals the deal. My colleague got a box of these from his brother-in-law, to whom we have now built a tasteful shrine, and whenever we’re in heated hallway debate about something and the box o’ wafers is produced, the silence descends… and “I… feel… GREAT!!”

(PS: I submitted my completed application to UVic today, which is probably my first choice. Scary. Exhilerating! 2 down, 1 to go!)

What makes you feel GREAT? Will you send me some?

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I have a cousin who is a personal trainer. As I drove back to the Hinterlands after Christmas, I happened to have called my mother and a family do was going on. My cousin answered. I told him about my goals and what I do, and asked his recommendations for how to structure my strength training. He had one thing to say:

“If you’re not doing yoga, everything else is just wasting your time.“

His reasoning was that you become stronger when you address muscle imbalances, to say nothing of the overall genius of full-body conditioning via yoga. So no matter what else you do, if you’re not adding yoga in there to balance it all out, at least some of the time spent training is futile.

I believed him, and in fact even when my medical professionals had told me (when I had bad bad cholesterol levels in 2006) that I should not be doing *any* physical activity that wasn’t cardio, I still thought yoga was only a good idea.

And then I tried it.

And I realised it was only a bad idea. Kidding, kidding, it’s just bloody hard for me.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I have a lot of tone. At rest, doing nothing, adding muscle mass at the gym, I’m ahead of the game in this one. The downfall of this is that stretching feels totally contraindicated, as I’ve mentioned before.

I’ve been trying to do more yoga, as I mentioned in my New Year’s goals post, when Kath briefly made me disgusted with her because she’s mega-bendy. But I got over it, because, oh yeah, I tend to be relatively strong and I have to move soon. I own a lot of books. Strength will be good.

Back when my awesome Norwegian roommate, May Kristin, was here, she went around town and found the best yoga there was. It was at a little studio on my street… in the basement of a union building. It didn’t feel like it had an abundance of feng shui, but we went. This one class that we both liked was good—hard, but good.

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I hadn’t been back without MK. Blah blah blah, I got busy, disintrested, and again re: the feng shui.

Walking around town last week I saw a sign: “Grand Re-Opening at our new location! Come check us out! Free 30-minute yoga classes every 45 minutes!”

That re-opening was on this past Friday night—and what with my craptacular day Thursday, I figured it was a sign from the universe that I go. I ended up chatting too much with everyone to do a class, as they told me “hot yoga! We’ve got hot yoga!” And I said, “well, thanks to Kristen, I know I don’t want that. Plus, I actually thrive in cold weather workouts…” So they showed me which were “sorta hot” (is there such a thing as “tepid yoga”? ), and then they told me about the one-night-only sale… so I made a commitment: 21 classes, $200. FIERCE! $9.52 per class? That’s something like half price what I’d get *anywhere* in Vancouver!!

On Monday, it’s 4 months until I move: that means 12 weeks of 1 class per week, and 4 weeks with 2. Hello, cardigan? You’ll be mine soon! (and if you’re counting, I’m at only 13 workouts, but have been steadily accelerating since I started.)

Well, this morning, I went for my first class in the new space. It was Vinyasa. Not my beloved Ashtanga, but I’ll cope. Or SO I THOUGHT!

There was a temperature malfunction in the new space. By the end of the class, it was 29°C. Now, if you want that, and if you’re not cheek-to-jowl with a SMELLY MAN, then that’s FAB! And it’s cool by hot yoga standards. But I ended up so nauseated that the “Bird of Paradise” nearly did me in.

(source—the “Bird of Paradise asana…)

(source—I got this far into it before I thought I might die)

I was almost in tears. They assured me it wouldn’t be like that normally, and that I’d acclimatise anyway, if I kept coming back.

So now, I have my reservations. But I’m committed, and at the very least, it won’t kill me.

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It’ll probably make me stronger. Go figure.

A small crisis at my house Thursday night.

I had drinks at my house with a colleague I hadn’t spoken to in yonks. We had work stuff to do, but also wanted to be informal. I served guac, she brought tortillas, there was some tequila. As it turned out, she’d been up all night the night before with a sick kid… and thought she was OK. She wasn’t. I’ll spare you the gory details, but remember how I’m an emetophobe? THERE WAS VOMIT. IN MY HOUSE. Sure, not mine and all in the bathroom, but I was in agony.

I exhibit some symptoms of shock when faced with the phobia: my heart races, there’s anxiety, and I don’t really know what happens during the time. At some point after she left, I realised I needed to clean. Everything. So I could prevent this from spreading to me…

So I cleaned, I guess. The evidence suggests it, but I don’t altogether recall it.

After I cleaned, well… as per usual with these sorts of things, a nap resets and then I’m fine. It’s just a shame that I ended up napping while my enviro cloths were boiling away on the stove top.

I didn’t wake up until the smoke alarm was going and the air was thick with white, toxic smoke. Great. The pot had run dry and was burning… how do I *do* these things?!? I put the pot on my back porch (burning a hole into the rubber coating on top of the stairs), after taking in enough smoke to fell a horse, and opened the doors and windows, as I fanned the smoke alarm to MAKE. IT. SHUT. UP!!!! I’d like to show you the damage of 2 enviro cloths reduced to nothing but black matter adhered to the bottom of my pot, but, oh yeah, I broke my camera this morning.

Seriously: there was nothing left of the cloths. What are we up to? Fail #3? Well, let’s add #4: the pot is wrecked. The intense fusion of cloth-to-metal will not be coaxed free. Damn.

I called my friend and told her what happened. She said, “you know that response isn’t normal, right?” I said “Yes. And in the 18 years we’ve been friends, I would have thought you’d grown out of expecting that of me.” And then she said “just buy a new pot. They’re practically disposable these days.” And I said “no, I think this is the universe helping me to move. I am sentimental and have trouble letting go, but now I won’t have to: destruction is doing it for me.”

I got up the next morning and it was as if all was forgotten, aside from the lingering stench of burning in my house.

And that’s when I turned to the good:

Welcome to:

the Fudgy Chocolate Protein Waffle

You need:

™ 1/3 cup oatmeal, pulverised into powder (with a blender of some sort)
™ 2 Tbsp darkest unsweetened cocoa powder ALIVE
™ 1 Tbsp psyllium husks
™ 2 Tbsp ground flaxseed
™ 1 egg
™ 1/4 cup unsweetened chocolate almond milk
™ 1/2 scoop chocolate whey protein powder
™ 1/4 cup cottage cheese

You must:

≈ whisk the pulverised oatmeal, cocoa powder, psyllium, and flaxseed in a medium-sized bowl, and set aside.
≈ blend cottage cheese until smooth, and add protein powder, egg and almond milk. Blend again.
≈ mix wet and dry ingredients. It’ll be a pretty dense batter, but if it’s too dense, add more almond milk, 1 Tbsp at a time. (You really shouldn’t need more than another 2, max).
≈ spoon onto a prepared waffle iron—yields two.

Now, these are the definition of unsweet. I love that about them—they’re just deeply chocolatey, especially if you use good-quality and the darkest cocoa you can find (like Callebaut). If you like things sweeter, you’ll want to add 2 Tbsp of sugar / maple syrup to the wet ingredients.

And as the voice of experience, today I tried making them with a paler (Dagoba) cocoa powder and 1/2 cup of egg whites instead of the egg… and they were pale and horribly dry. So using the real egg is key, and: dark, dark, dark.

I served them with a dollop of unsweetened vanilla yogurt cheese dusted with more cocoa powder, but… choose your own adventure.

These made my heart sing. Bye bye bad, hello…. goodness!

Rejoice, dear blogosphere, for I am absorbing the negative energy of the universe and allowing you to frolic.

And in light of this, I must focus on the positive. That’s chocolate. So, after a post about yoga, I’m devoting the next 5 posts to chocolate, in all its forms. Hold on, kids, it’ll be a wild ride.