Day 355. Hot Chocolate Memories (Not Available)

Thursday night at work there was an offering of hot chocolate to visitors.    I wasn't a visitor, but I took a shot of that hot chocolate in a day-old, used Starbucks paper cup.  I took a sip, and... Oh no!  Waaaaay too sweet!  My friend, Cindy, is a pure sugar girl as is my husband.  I like sweetness, but things, subtly sweet, not overly!  Let me put it this way, I'd rather eat a fig than a scoop of cake frosting, see?

O.k., so anyway, I filled the rest of my cup with hot water from a dispenser to dilute it.  I also had added a squirt of coffee, too...just trying to lay out the details here for the following, time-machine event.

I finished work, drove home, and got Ebert's leash to take him for a walk.  In the meantime, he had licked the edge of the cup and the open spot on the lid so I needed to get rid of those doggy germs.  As I removed the lid from its cup, the steaming chocolatey smell hit my nose, and I was instantly transported back to 4th grade, on a fall day with my Grandpa Peacock, standing in the cold before an Illini college football game.  We were tailgating middle-class style. How's that, you ask?  It's this way:  hatchback of the car open and my grandpa and I eating the meal that my grandma had prepared for us.  First there were hotdogs boiled in water and then placed steaming hot into a thermos.  I never liked hot dogs that were microwaved, the salt was too concentrated in them; but, if they were boiled, some of that salt leached out, and they became delicious.  O.k., hot dogs on white, Butternut bread, coffee for my grandpa in his thermos, hot chocolate in my thermos, and Hostess raspberry zingers for dessert.  Perfect! 

After the game, we would go meet my grandma at the mall and then my grandpa and I would go to the arcade where I would play the pinball machines--oh the quaint memories (p.s., I was killer on those pinball machines--and air hockey, too! (-;)

Anyway, that watered-down hot chocolate was a gift--an enveloping of the weak, Swiss Miss hot chocolate of my youth.  Any gourmet would poo-poo such an inferior beverage, but for me, it brought back, however briefly, some of my most cherished memories.  Thank you, December universe. (-: