When You've Got a Full Weekend, You Make Soup

This weekend is going to prove to be another filled-to-the-brim variety of days. My elderly aunt may be coming home (or going to a nursing home for rehab, is more like it) tomorrow, so I will need to transport her there and get her comfortable. Next, will be to rush from one town to another to meet up with my mother for a funeral. It is for another aunt’s mother. This aunt, in particular, passed away 3 years ago at age 61 of a heart attack. No one saw it coming. She was healthy and active. Her mother outlived her. It is sad when the parents outlive the children. My aunt (my mother’s sister-in-law) suffered a massive heart attack one night before going to bed. She was out planting flowers that night (the week before Mother’s Day), came in shortly afterwards and didn’t feel good. When she died, her mother, who has now passed away, didn’t know her as she was suffering from Alzheimer’s/dementia. It makes you ponder which is sadder – the fact that a parent outlived a child or the fact that the parent didn’t know she has outlived a child.


The other part of my weekend is going to be filled with a birthday party on Sunday for a 9-year-old niece. The nieces and nephews in our family are all growing up. I think all my siblings are done adding to the population, so we are now waiting for the next generation. The span there at the moment runs from four in their 20's, six in their teens and five under the age of ten, the youngest being two. It might be awhile. By my calculations, my oldest niece is the closest prospect -- all her and her husband's married couple friends are getting pregnant. This kind of thing is contagious and she might get the itch.


On Saturday I plan to spend the day cooking, baking, cleaning, laundry, and reviewing/ordering some more plants. When I got home from work last night there were three new gardening catalogs, two regular cooking magazines and my Family Circle waiting for me. I have a lot of bedtime reading to catch up on. Which means I have to put aside my recent book purchase, Richard Castle’s Heat Wave. It isn’t that large of a book but I haven’t been able to get totally captivated by it yet. Some catch me the moment I open the book, others take awhile. Certain authors take me away when I simply say their name. Which reminds me, I have to make a stop tonight to pick up James Patterson’s Worst Case. It just came out on Monday and I have been so busy lately I have had to put it off. I love his books and am never disappointed. I've always loved to read and can zoom through a book if it latches onto me right away. I have to give thanks to my mother-in-law for this as she has helped feed this addiction and guided me toward new authors that I might not have thought I was interested in.

I think that if I am going to try to spend some time reading this weekend, it calls for homemade potato soup. The Wisconsin Winters makes me soup crazy and just about every weekend I try to throw together a batch of one or two soups. We’ll have it once on the weekend and then my husband and I eat the leftovers during the week. I can take it to work every day and not get sick of it. My husband can only do it a day or two but then, again, he usually consumes bigger quantities at one time than I do.

With such a crazy weekend, it looks like the hubby and I are out of luck for our weekly try-to-make-one-day-for-a-day-lunch-date. I don’t work on Fridays so sometimes that is our day to head out around noon to catch lunch somewhere and then do any shopping we need to do, which usually means Farm & Fleet. Since we are also dairy farmers (well, he is anyway), we need to be back for chores & milking and, well, we just aren’t night people anymore. So our lunch is our "dinner out." Our usual haunts will take us to Red Lobster, Boston’s Sports Bar & Grill, Olive Garden. This weekend doesn’t look too promising unless we do it on Saturday and then that means I have to juggle around all my house chores and squeeze them into open time slots. Well, that has happened before and I am sure it won’t be the last time.