Friday fun

Which is which? Maddie and Sue Ellen enjoyed

their walk around the lake.

Chocolate labs, chocolate, coffee, conversation...and tennis. It was a good way to spend a day.

Friday morning tennis dates back to another lifetime. A group of us used to play Friday mornings in the summer before work, racing into the newspaper to slide into our chairs, our minds still full of the morning's scores and strategy.

The group has long since scattered, but it just so happens that the round robin I'm doing at the Enfield Tennis Club is on Friday mornings. I am back in full swing (so to speak) with Friday morning tennis and feeling like I actually fit into the group as opposed to not so long ago when I was afraid to play for fear of holding everyone else back.

I haven't gotten new running shoes yet, but my feet and knees feel fine in my tennis sneakers, so I figured it was OK to play. It was great, starting the day with a natural high.

Afterwards I went out for coffee with a new tennis friend, then headed for Whole Foods, where I had a healthy salad and planned to pick up a few things. It turned out to be chocolate tasting day. Due to low sodium, I am supposed to eat more salt, but give me chocolate over a bag of chips any day.

Employees throughout the store served everything chocolate...truffles, mousse, brownies, espresso with chocolate flavoring, blackberries dipped in chocolate and even bacon wrapped in chocolate, which is just about the only thing I skipped.

It was an odd scene, with a violinist serenading shoppers like the pied piper leading them to different stations. Shoppers (including me) became giddy with sugar, chatting with each other about what they had just sampled.

Next Deb and I took our two chocolate labs, Maddie and Sue Ellen, around the lake, same as we did yesterday. In the blur of brown, it was sometimes difficult to tell them apart.

It's hard to take all three dogs, and afterwards we returned to Deb's so Mary Margaret (her black lab) could run around the yard with Maddie. (We crazy Moms are all about giving the "kids" equal play time.)

Deb made coffee and we talked about this, that and everything in between. I could not believe it, but I ate a chocolate eclair.

I finished the day "high" on a lot of other good things.

My second year is starting off pretty nicely.

Maddie, thinner and with a pointer face,

is the one up ahead.

Sue Ellen, right, has an orange collar.

(Maddie's is red.)