Chan-TEE-kohhh!!

McCoffee is offering up a new molten chocolate beverage called Chantico. Watch out! It's hot.

It's also almost 400 calories for less than 8 oz. and has 21 grams of fat!!

Sure, it's tasty, but a bit thick and very sugary, too. It's the kind of sugary that coats your teeth for the rest of the day. And I being a person who can't understand when somebody gripes, "This is too rich" or "It's too sweet, I can't eat it," when evaluating a dessert, I was bowled over by how rich and sweet this drink was.

Be careful. Be very, very careful.

Who Is This?

I bought this wallet at a cutesy shop at Queens Center Mall last weekend. None of the employees knew anything about this character!

Is it Mio, pet cat of Pucca Love's boyfriend Garu?

My only indication of this, is that the wallet was merchandised next to a very similar wallet featuring Pucca. So I Googled "Pucca Love" and "cat." I came up with Mio. I'm just not exactly sure this is Mio.

Why Are Hipsters SO Annoying?

Right before Christmas, a new McCoffee was installed in an empty storefront on the ground floor of my (temp) office building. It's on the map over there with all the other locations on lower Manhattan. (Man, I thought for sure there were more than that.)

Anyway, no worries, I still get my medium coffee, cream, no sugar I'm-sweet-enough-already-thank-you, from Raf's coffee cart every morning. But occasionally I purchase some sort of McCoffee blended beverage or espresso drink or snack downstairs. Today I picked up a Toffee Nut Bar, and a young hipster woman behind me ordered one of those irritatingly "healthy" forms of a McCoffee. And I wondered, "Hm, I wonder why people who order those kinds of drinks always order them with the same inflections and accents?" (i.e., "Yaah, can I haave a soyyy laaate, pleese.") And it's never a question. It's posed as a statement. A statement of their hipsterness for drinking McCoffee with soy instead of that god awful milk, and they are so better than you for doing it.

Well, I use half-and-half. Sometimes I even wanna drink it straight. So, there, you hipsters, take that. Yaah.

You've Got Dessert.

After work, my friends took me out to dinner as a belated "thank you" for dog sitting. We ate at Haru and then had dessert at Cafe Lalo, the cafe featured in the movie "You've Got Mail." It looks quite different than in the movie. There's hardly any room to walk between the tables in real life. But the desserts are amazing and it's a very bright and cheery place with lots of Christmas lights and shiny ornaments still hanging about. Although there was no wait, it was packed with locals

I earned a kind lecture about picking one career and sticking to it, and, as usual, the question, "Why aren't you writing? You're such a good writer!" And all along I thought, it's not that easy.

All Signs Pointing Nowhere.

Oh, great. According to CareerBuilder.com, the apparel industry is a big "not" for jobs in 2005.