1 mug coffee = 14 mugs hot chocolate (or 28 with my mug) according to CNN on caffeine withdrawal.

I have apparently become a chocolate snob. Walked into the break room looking for chocolate and couldn’t bring myself to grab a Hershey bar. Ehh, just as well.

(OK, I’ll grant you s’mores. I can’t imagine anything BUT Hershey’s on s’mores.)

After our trip to the nursery this weekend, Katie started seriously looking at our existing plants. We have a mint plant that got so pot-bound it grew down, through the drainage holes at the base of the pot, and back up the outside of the pot. She decided to make cuttings out of those bits… but what to put them in?

Well, she’d just finished off a container of baking cocoa…

Mint cuttings in a Hershey's Cocoa container.

The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf has a drink they call a Moroccan Mint Latte. It’s a tea latte with chocolate. You can get a fairly good approximation by making hot chocolate using mint tea instead of hot water. Katie suggested Bigelow Plantation Mint (after I mentioned that I’d tried it with Stash Moroccan Mint), which seems to work well.

Update: I forgot to mention the key difference between the two varieties of tea that I tried. Black tea works better with chocolate than green tea.

Some more strange sights from around San Diego (continued from last year’s series).

First, a modern Stonehenge from the UC San Diego campus, all made with stone (or cement) cubes. Update: Found some info on USCD’s Stonehenge.

Modern Stonehenge

Then there was this cactus in Old Town, which looked like it was made up of feet!

Cactus feet

Vegetable Garage
Something about the phrase “Vegetable Garage” just sounds funny. (This is at Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego.) There’s also a Fruit Garage.

Samuel Adams... Smoothies

Sam Adams Smoothies? Where’s Lister from Red Dwarf? Someone needs to tell him he can get those beer milkshakes here! 😉

We weren’t entirely sure just what was supposed to be haunting this hotel, but it’s next to Hooters. Make of that what you will…

The Haunted Hotel

And finally, here’s a movie-style marquee from the Ghirardelli shop.

Ghirardelli - Now Playing!

(On a side note, I really miss having a Ghirardelli shop in South Coast Plaza. After shopping overload, I could just stop in there, get a milkshake, and be able to face another store or two. Plus I actually had a reason to go to South Coast Plaza on occasion.)

(Continued in Part 2.)