Blessed by the Potato

I used to love Hershey’s Special Crisp: a chocolate bar with peanut butter rice crisps, a thin layer of caramel, covered in milk chocolate. It may just have been the perfect chocolate bar. For whatever reason, they discontinued it many many years ago here in Canada. In the States, that bar has continued as the Whatchamacallit. I was in a Rite Aid store the other day specifically looking for this wonderful chocolate bar, and found to my great pleasure that it was on sale at 3 for a dollar — a better deal even than buying chocolate bars in bulk from Costco back home. I bought 15 bars pretty much cleaning them out, and they are every bit as glorious as I remember Special Crisp being.

Now I’m contemplating going back for more, though according to their website the sale ended yesterday, and it would cost me over $5 to take the trolley down. I kind of wish I had bugged the clerk to get another box for me to really clean them out, but there were like 8 people waiting in line behind me that day. So now I’m going to try to see if someone in the states would be willing to buy a box or three and ship them up to Canada for me (I found a company a few years back that offered to this, specifically selling chocolates and candies not available in Canada, and the cost was like $1.50 per bar; it’s good, but not that good).

In other news, the conference has ended and I won a student presentation award :) The internet is back up after going so long without it. I don’t think I’ve gone 3 days without internet access since the 90’s.

We went tried to go surfing yesterday, but were only so successful. The place we went to offered lessons for something like $75 per person, but of course we didn’t make an appointment so we couldn’t do that. However, the rental place did give us a board and a wetsuit for $17 and let us make fools of ourselves. I think we were almost as successful doing that as we could have been with a short lesson, no matter how professional. Nearly everyone managed to get up on top of the surfboard in a standing position, if only briefly, while I alone seemed to have trouble just riding the wave on my stomach. I kept getting off balance and flipping around, sometimes hitting my head on the surf board as I was plunged underwater. Despite stating repeatedly that there were going to be plans to go out last night, everyone just went to bed after getting back from a day of being thrashed by the waves. I’m trying to figure out what to do with my last bit of time here, and I think I’m going to go to the San Diego zoo. I’ve got 600 MB of space left on my camera, so hopefully that’s enough to get a lot of shots of the wildlife :)