Stay Sweet - High School Yearbook Spread

Today Stay Sweet is out on general release, exciting ay?  

I think this means you can buy it from Itunes and other digital retailers; it comes with b-sides and all sorts!


If you haven't yet seen the vid please check it out 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_wI-ycCgnU


Anyhoo... I was asked to do this high-school year book feature thing for an American webzine.  It's not been posted yet, but I thought given the subject matter of Stay Sweet, it was a suitable thing to blog about on this fine day of release.


Here's a little snapshot from my high school year book and a blurb about what it was like to be in high school.

Hello readers, 


I'm Piney Gir and high school was funny for me because I didn't really fit in to any clique as such... I wasn't shunned or anything too bad - I certainly witnessed football players bullying drama students and stuff like that, but I was kind of a loaner, a drifter.  


I'd flit from debate team table to band geek table in the lunch room.  I joined student council but was the low-profile treasurer, not president or anything in the lime-light.  I was in all the school musicals usually cast as a cute kid or a crazy old lady; I wasn't the romantic lead or glorified heroine.  I was never nominated for homecoming queen or any of that nonsense, I think I was too weird to be truly 'popular'... in the Breakfast Club I would have been Ally Sheedy not Molly Ringwald.  


I was the girl that would date the tuba player in the marching band, not because he was hot but because he was nice to me.  I was the girl in the back of the class that would do a drawing depicting a scene from Wuthering Heights and turn it in for extra credit in my English Lit class.  I was the girl that excelled at creative writing, got bad grades in math, skipped out of gym class and chose tennis over cheerleading.  


I lost my class ring, I think it's around here somewhere...


xx
P

The Land of Chocolate

I went to the Land of Chocolate and it was fascinating!

I expected some scary Oompa Loompas and a chocolate waterfall, but what I got was much more clinical yet still enjoyable.

The land I speak of is the Lindt Chocolate Factory and Museum in Cologne, Germany.  I have to say the Germans do chocolate very well indeed and so it was with schoolgirlish delight that I approached the riverside building unaware of what awaited inside for me.  

Firstly, it is so educational… it shows you how a chocolate plant grows flowers then beans and what the beans have to go through to become the chocolate that we eat.  

There was a heated conservatory full of cocoa plants and butterflies, there was a series of machinery that ground, pulped, sieved, etc… and out the other side was  a golden, free-flowing, chocolate fountain in a glass room.  A woman in white from head to toe dipped cookies in the fountain and handed these out to guests.  

Next there was a machine worthy of a Raymond Scott soundtrack that churned out perfectly formed little chocolate pieces.  A lady sat at the end of the assembly line harvesting the gold-foiled little nuggets and placing them in a box.  It reminded me of this famous I Love Lucy sketch… 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnbNcQlzV-4

Upstairs was a room with mechanical arms throwing chocolate moulds around, creating chocolate footballs, hearts, bunnies and race cars.  More women in white were making hand spun truffles and specialty chocolate bars with different nuts, sprinkles and edible gold.  

This led on to the vintage packaging displays.  I love kitschy things and so for me this was inspiring.  Old chocolate boxes from the 20's featured kittens with large eyes and Kinder egg toys from yesteryear had a lot more pizzaz than Kinder eggs of today.

All in all, this was such a thrill, I might have to go for a hot chocolate right now with double marshmallow; close my eyes and think of Cologne.

xx

P