Even though I passed a truck piled high with sugar beets the other day on the highway, just as I was driving down the hill where I could see the plumes from the sugar factory smokestacks cottoning their way into the air, and even though the chill in the evening air is noticeable, and even though the speed limit through our little village has been lowered to its autumnal crawl zone of 30 MPH (thanks to those those same sugar-beet trucks), it does not FEEL like fall.
It feels like summer. Still. Still summer. What with the endless cloudless blue skies and the endless warm sunshine and The Upbeat, which like the sky & the sun, is currently feeling endless.
I feel caught up, sort of. Caught up on catching up. Caught up at work, caught up on cleaning, and caught up to our routine. Yesterday as I opened my feed list to catch up on blog reading, I realized that there was a reason for the seeming dearth of posts from the sites I read over the past week: some apparent glitch had caused a delay and there were several days’ worth of posts from all of them, all at once. So instead of only a days’ worth of reading to catch up on, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a weeks’ worth. Still: caught up.
Yesterday was cooking day. We cooked up a storm. The husband of a very good friend of mine was diagnosed with AML Leukemia on Monday and started chemo on Friday. Completely out of the blue: he hadn’t been feeling very well for a couple of weeks…mostly draggy and a bit achey and they all thought it was just a late-summer cold; a virus. I am shocked and scared for them but holding onto all the positive things that I know are being done with leukemia treatments nowadays and sending them all the positive strength that I can muster. She has 3 children and even though they are older than my kids, she was worried about being able to provide decent, nutritious meals for them over the next few weeks while she is spending so much time at the hospital, and not knowing how else to answer all the offers for help, she thought some meals to freeze would be an easy and useful answer.
So, in addition to the much-loved couscous salad that I whipped up for the supper club potluck last night, I made korv stroganoff and my aunt’s Easy Chicken recipe, and Anders made a batch of his awesome spaghetti meat sauce, a bath of wok chicken veggies and TWO taco pies. We put them in aluminum pans, covered and labeled them and dropped them off on our way to the dinner party. This friend has the most generous and loving heart I’ve ever met and has done so incredibly much for our family and our kids, that I was so glad to be able to do ANY small thing to help her and her family in this rough time. Cancer just sucks. And it feels like it’s everywhere. So damn scary and helpless-making.
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Christina was asking about blog crushes recently and I couldn’t think of any off the top of my head (beside HER, of course) but that was mostly due to it being past midnight and I was on complete information overload after the feed-dump of a week’s worth of posts from every single site I read. Here are some new ones I’ve been enjoying recently: forty-sixth at grace, The BHJ, Flotsam, English Muse, Suffix Abuse. How about you?