emporium

my mom made cookies today, a strangely soft kind topped with sprinkles for an extra sweet crunch. they're really good. but for some reason, it made me think a lot more about traditional / specialty sweets, and sweets shops.

there used to be one near me. can i tell you about it? 

well, i guess i don't have that much to say, considering it was a quite a while ago that it closed down now... it was in the next town over, and i used to go there with my mom on occasion after piano lessons or when we visited family there on sundays. they referred to themselves as a sweets emporium, actually. a fancy name, for an equally fancy-feeling place~

it was the cutest and coziest place i'd ever stepped into, with lots of tall wooden cabinets and retro illustrations, and lace doilies on every table. it smelled like chocolate. it had one of those registers with loud metal buttons and tags that pop out like toast from a toaster whenever a calculation was made. most of the shop consisted of various trinkets and paper things you could get, based on the season. around valentine's day, there'd be heart-shaped garlands and rose memorabilia, for instance. or around christmas, various cards with nutcrackers and teddy bears, fairies and candy canes... things like that.

and of course, there were sweets! lots of traditional hard candies, like ribbon candy and bonbons. they also had lollipops and chocolate truffles. my mom and i's favorite treats to pick up there, though, were the petit fours they had. like the rest of the items, the decorations they had were based on the season. the holiday season petit fours had white chocolate with dark green and red accents, oftentimes in the appearance of presents. springtime had lots of pastels, polka dots and stripes.

unfortunately, it's been so long since they closed that i don't remember how they tasted. i don't remember a lot of things about it, aside from the general. i also remember how much i wanted to try their ribbon candy. oh well.

it's interesting how we tend to think things will always be with us. it's sad, but also very lovely.

... in the technological world. i've been looking deeper into pdas. i know i mentioned them some time ago, but that was only a cursory skim through wikipedia rather than anything concrete. the past few couple of days, i've been scrolling through ebay in my offtime, to see what they're really like. 

so far, the ones i've seen are so cool... most of them were mainly outfitted with file managers, address books, and email connections, but there were some that could go beyond... some could send emails and text messages, too. i don't know how well they'd be against the current iteration of the internet, however-- how could you get antivirus on it...? some also had mp3 players, video players, could have photos added to them and play photo slideshows-- basically became media players on their own. you could write notes on some of them, with styluses as i mentioned before. it wouldn't note your handwriting though, just follow the set of character inputs it was given. there were calendars as well, so you could add in all your important events of the day. 

there was one i saw from sharp, part of the sharp zaurus series, that could access the internet. and it was built on linux! so it wasn't super user friendly, but it could do so much. 

and that's thing thing that really gets them, like i mentioned in my past post. they could do so much, but no one talks about them............

sotd: ethereality by pastel ghost