The office is clean but ... I moved cartons of books and other stuff into the guest room that I now have to clean out for the house guests coming tomorrow. Oh well. I have a few cubbyholes in the office to hide the ones that don't go to the garage.

I picked up my fishing license with steelhead card today. I need to get my flycasting up to par, uh, since I've had a hiatus of 37 years. I know this as I found my last fishing license dated 1979. The reason for getting my casting back in swing is that I'm going up to the Northwest Territories in August to catch northern pike and lake trout. I normally don't do trips like this but I was invited by a friend. Well, that and it's been a lifelong dream to do this. When I was a kid, I read Field and Stream magazine and there was always an ad in the back for lake trout fishing in the NWT. The ad showed a beaming guy with his thumbs in the gills of the fish and the tail dragging on the ground. Now I'm going to get to be that guy.

When I gallery sit tomorrow, I will put together the program for the chocolate tasting. I'm briefly going to cover the history of chocolate, strains of cacao, and how chocolate is made. I also have some snappy quotes about chocolate to throw in.

While I was procrastinating cleaning the office, I thought I'd check out how the spread of democracy has gone over the last century. Here's a chart I put together showing the findings. Enjoy for what it's worth. I'm gallery-sitting on Friday which is when our house guests arrive. The chocolate tasting is on Sunday so I don't have much time to get organized. We do have LOT'S of chocolate bars to choose from. I'm going to pick a range from Lindt Excellence 72% to Amadei Porcelana. Probably about six different bars with enough chunks for two rounds. There will be a total of ten tasters.

Wish me luck.

This is Monday. The rug is being cleaned in my art studio/office on Wednesday. The problem is that I have close to 400 books piled on the floor and all the shelves are full. So, I've been filtering out the SF books that I'll never read again from those on the shelves. One floor-to-ceiling bookshelf unit has about 3000 SF books in it. We have guests coming on Friday so I can't leave any overflow out in the hall.

I'm listening to a Red Sox game off the web to help make organizing easier. I'm sure glad that there's only twenty-six letters in our alphabet. Makes it easier alphabetizing books ... A-C, D-H, etcetera.

What's all this got to do with chocolate? On Sunday, I'm hosting a chocolate tasting for the first time. Last year we went to Sweden and much to my amazement, the Swedes love chocolate. We stopped in over twenty chocolate shops in Sweden. Found none in Norway. The Dane's like it, too. I came back with about thirty different dark chocolate bars. After we got back, I collected more. We haven't sampled any except the little sample bars from Michel Cluizel.

Last month, we were in San Francisco and visited the Bittersweet Café where one is greeted with racks of chocolate bars ... dark on the left and milk and specialty on the right. Uh, we bought more bars. And had a couple of their chocolate drinks which now make my daily mocha pale in comparison.