how has a week gone by already? it’s like time travel i tells ya. last sunday morning we were a flurry of activity, pretzel-dipping. this time i roped in eager little hands: grabby fingers to break up a lindt bar, agile fingers to fish pretzels out of the chocolate bath, grubby fingers from samples along the way.

we packed a picnic then: buffalo mozzarella and pesto sandwich for me, tasty cheese and avocado sandwich for the kid, and a little box of sliced tomatoes for on-site insertion. a couple of mandarins in the basket, and a few chocolate-dipped pretzels for good measure. we were off to the acoustica festival, just up the hill and then down the hill from home.

from the crest we looked down into birchgrove oval, and it was like a quaint village through the clearing. an arc of little white tents lined the perimeter, some festooned with balloons, proferring all manner of festival foods, sunglasses and quick massages. there was a giant inflatable slide, and a swing-carousel, and something with a row of clowns’ heads that swiveled to and fro.

in the middle of it all there was a boy and his guitar. he was the first act of the day, and the front row was his friends from high school. there was no second row — it was very early in the proceedings — so we sat a couple metres back, on my $10 “burberry” picnic rug, and minutes later, as he played an elliott smith song, all the food was gone.

“can we go and buy some ice cream?” asked the kid. it was a reasonable request, even though the new zealand natural ice cream stand was charging an unreasonable $4 per scoop.

we returned to our rug to catch as many minutes of act number two as it took for the pink ice cream to be eaten, and then, “can we go to the face painting?”

we returned to our rug — one of us hopping all the way — to see the third act of the day, but it was perhaps too much to ask of the kid. she was already being pulled in the direction of the playground up the hill. we left in the middle of some pretty good 12-bar blues.

considering the last live music i saw was baby proms at the opera house, and the second last live music was a playschool concert, i was pretty happy.

this makes me happy too: the six-month expired box of royce nama chocolate in my fridge is still completely edible! these little bricks of fine chocolate, each one dusted in cocoa powder, pack a punch of dark chocolate flavour and melt away to nothing on my tongue. actually, the google translated page tells it better:

it is the raw chocolate of the sweetness moderate adult. …the elegant fragrance starts overflowing, V.S.O.P was blended in the bitter chocolate. tastefulness it is the raw chocolate of the adult taste where the elegant fragrance and the bitter impression of overflowing do not accumulate.

all true. it is made with fresh cream, and apparently has a shelf life of one month. but i have put it to the test, and six months past 27 october 2006, they are still perfect. now that’s time travel.