133 pounds of chocolate

Yes, that’s the final number.  Not quite my weight in chocolate, but getting close.  🙂

Another day of hard work – got up after about 5 hours’ sleep and spent an hour or two prepping for Weavolution conference calls, then (at the crack of dawn) started photographing chocolates and creating the chocolates index in Photoshop.  Around 7:30 am Michael (my cohort in crime) turned up with the last two types of chocolates – he’d been at the kitchen all night!

Then I had two Weavolution conference calls, and immediately after that was back to chocolate.  I dug out all the candy-boxing supplies, found all the boxes of chocolates (sounds easy, but there were 38 of them scattered around the apartment – like doing an Easter egg hunt!), and worked desperately at clearing off the dining room table and the coffee table to leave space for, well, 38 boxes of chocolates.

At 1pm the first set of friends showed up.  We folded all the chocolates indexes, stuffed all the AIDS Lifecycle thank you cards into envelopes, and then (once that was complete) started putting the chocolates into candy cups.  Do you know how many candy cups it takes to do 133 pounds of chocolates???  Well over 3000.  One by one.  Thank GOODNESS I had help!!!

Then we started boxing the chocolates.  28 candies in each box (one of each type), we just barely got them all to fit.  Each box got tied with a beautiful red or green ribbon (at least until I ran out of ribbons!).  We had a factory line going with three people loading the bottoms of the boxes, two people loading the tops, one person tying the ribbons, and me starting to pack things into shipping boxes.  It was quite the festive scene, and I had a box of rejected chocolates (cosmetic defects) on the table in case anyone felt like snacking.  The stack of boxes kept getting higher and higher, and the collection of chocolates smaller and smaller.  Finally, on the 127th box, we ran out of three kinds of candy at once and I called a halt to the chocolate-boxing.  We were done.  YAY!!!

Well, almost.  I still have about 70 boxes to pack away into shipping boxes and haul down to the post office, but I think I can do that over the next two days.  Wowza!!  What an experience.

Two weeks of nearly nonstop effort, 133 lbs of chocolate.  Next year, I send greeting cards!!

(well, okay, maybe not.  but not 133 lbs, lordy lordy!)