I have a lot of things to do in the UberHousehold to prepare for Dilf's in-home office, so I was going to take a week off and concentrate on that.

I'll start tomorrow.

I opened today's Chicago Tribune to discover that the EPA has cited Blommer Chocolates for violating limits on opacity, or the amount of light blocked by the factory's grinder dust.

One day, this "opacity" occurred for 16 minutes, the next for 10 minutes. The horror, the horror!

Interestingly, our State's Attorney, Lisa Madigan, "has documented more than 7,600 violations since 1999 at six coal plants owned b Midwest Generation, including two in Chicago and three in the suburbs." None of these complaints have been addressed by the EPA.

Blommer has yet to be fined for its heinous violation of temporarily kinda sorta making it a little harder to see the sun for, like, 15 minutes or so. In the meantime, Blommer has vowed to install a new filter system.

Two things:

One: Cocoa powder? Cocoa powder??!! Of all the toxins and pollutants this administration thinks are okay for human consumption, they crack down on cocoa powder? No wonder Willie Wonka became a hermit.

Two: Chicago has already witnessed the closing of big candy factories like Brachs and Fannie May, eliminating thousands of jobs desperately needed by the working class. Of all the industries for whom to make life difficult, they had to pick this one? Is that random or calculated? It's certainly heartless. Pro-business administration? For whom? A select group, it seems. Their pro-business stance doesn't extend to everyone.

When residents were asked about the chocolate factory's "pollution," they said the chocolate smell often masked less desirable urban smells, like storm sewers and bus exhaust. As for the biological effects of cocoa powder, if too much has been emitted (which was not the complaint, the complaint was "opacity") people with asthma or lung disease might be affected. There is nothing cancerous or otherwise disease-causing or environmentally dangerous about cocoa powder.

Please, if you can, buy Blommer chocolate. Those people need those jobs.