All The Soups

 It never fails.  August rolls around and I start craving soup.  All the soups.  I started buying a head of cabbage every week, dreaming about cabbage soup.  But then I remember it's 100+ degrees out, and make coleslaw or cabbage stir fry and call it a week.  

It's now late September, and although most people are breaking out the sweaters and pumpkin spice about this time, I'm still flip-flopping my way over to the pool to swim laps in the evening when it's not so blisteringly hot.  

But last week? Last week's forecast was shaping up to be blissfully cool (lows in the high 60s!!) and rainy--really rainy.  Alright, so it was because a hurricane/tropical storm was rolling in, but I'll take that over one more week of summer any September.  

So, I bought another head of cabbage, and battened down the hatches and settled in for a pretend autumn.  Yes, I realize it's not real, and that autumn won't really arrive until December in Houston, but shhhhh....just let me pretend for this week.

I made a cabbage soup with sausage and barley and lentils--a whole vat of it that my family would not dream of eating, but was sufficient for one person for breakfast and lunch all week long.  

I also made some ramen eggs, and miso pork, and got out the giant ramen bowls for an evening of steaming hot noodles and pork bone broth, which my kids will eat.

I don't understand why everyone in my family doesn't adore soup like I adore soup.  What's not to love? Brothy, creamy, spicy, chunky, vegetably, hot, cold, bring it on.  All the soups....(ok, maybe I draw the line at some soups with extra special animal parts, but I'm down for the vast majority of soups).

So if you like soup to the point of turning down the a/c in the heat of summer just so you can put on a sweater and eat soup, come on over. We will get along just fine.

Medical Tourism

Hello blog, my old friend. It's been a while. So long in fact that I don't think anyone else ever really comes here. I think it's just you and me. That's okay. I mostly cone here for me anyway. They can all go hang out on Instagram--whatever that is. I think it's kind of like a blog but without words. Which makes it sort of the opposite of a blog doesn't it?  I'll take words over photos any day. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But why would you give away a thousand beautiful words in exchange for one crummy picture?  I digress....see what I mean about the words?  You couldn't have gotten the half of that from a picture.
I'm sitting here in a private hospital in Genova, Italy. Here's a picture of my view out the window:

But that doesn't tell you anything now does it?  See what I mean?  Why is she in a hospital? Why Italy? Why January? Why Genova?  None of that can you get from this picture. So I disagree about the value. It's a nice enough picture but surely it's only worth 15, maybe 25 words tops. Maybe it's not just any picture that's worth a thousand. Maybe it's only certain ones.  How about this one? 

Does this one provide any more context?  Perhaps you can see that I'm sitting on a black sofa with my shoes on in a room of a coffee shop. So maybe you can infer that I'm not actually a patient at this hospital?  But still, you are left to wonder just why I find myself here, trying desperately to remember my once passable Italian and to round out my limited vocabulary with terms like flebo and causalgia. 

Well, if you must know, my husband is the patient and strangely enough there is a treatment for his rare condition that is only available in Italy. We've waited a good four years or so for the FDA to approve it back home. And even had our doctor attempt to obtain the medicine to administer stateside--FDA be damned-- to no avail. So here I now sit while he is upstairs being infused, via un flebo. 

Later, if he feels okay, we will attempt some sightseeing. We are in Italy after all.