$4.

$4, after tax, for a small mocha (and that chocolate-covered coffee bean they give you).

Now, mind you, it's probably been 9 months (or more) since I've set foot in any coffee chain store. And certainly their mocha's are tasty (better than Starbucks IMHO) and certainly the staff is friendly and fast and certainly they're in a good location (right in my station in Chicago). But seriously. $4.

Shame on me for not looking at the price board before ordering.

Taste of Chicago 2009

It has been, literally, weeks since the orange-handled pot was used. At all.

And so this is the state of things. Even the decaf drinkers have abandoned all hope. It's a good measure of what work has been like recently.

Banana, apple, cherry, blueberry, pineapple, guava, apricot, peach, grape, mango, pear, cranberry, and on and on.

Cranberry. There's a good one. Ocean Spray, which I am sure you are aware, is big into cranberries. Really big. When we drive up into central WI, we pass by acres and acres of cranberry bogs (one web page claims there are 110,000 acres of cranberry bogs in Wisconsin). Ocean Spray buys a lot (if not all) of those cranberries.

I like Wisconsin and I like cranberries. It's a match made in dried fruit heaven.

So, I have a couple bags of dried fruit at work that I purchased at the new Jewel near downtown. Except, despite being a brand new store, they didn't have just regular dried cranberries. All they had was cherry-flavored dried cranberries.

Yes, cranberries flavored to taste like cherries. Except not really. They taste like industrial cherry flavoring. Like something you might find on a snowcone. And why is this? Well because they don't actually flavor the cranberries with cherry juice. They use elderberry juice.

Elderberry juice...To turn dried cranberries into something that is supposed to taste like dried cherries.

???

Can you see the meeting at Ocean Spray headquarters? "I'm telling you, people want fruit to taste like other fruit! The guys down in R&D are working on making bananas taste like kiwi!!"

Fear not, dear reader, for my love for dried fruits is greater than my confusion over the existence of dried cranberries that taste like industrial cherry flavor. I will continue to eat them and, in fact, might even buy them again. Maybe they'll be on the shelf next to the kiwi-flavored dried banana.

• Vegetarian bbq
• Vegetable tempura
• Sweet Potato Hashbrowns
• Frozen chocolate-covered banana
• Fried-chicken and waffle
• Samosa

Yes, the Taste of Chicago opened today and I went there for lunch. Yum yum. (Doubly-so because we get half-price tickets through work.)