Wednesday, May 18

Got up late again this morning, around 8:15, but did a treadmill session and resistance exercises after breakfast. Mother came over while I was getting ready for the day and started onions, carrots, and celery cooking for making a pot of veggie soup later for supper.

I spent the rest of the morning gathering materials I'll need for completing scrapbook pages tomorrow. Mother chose background card stock for photos that she wants to work with, too...of nephew playing with a Celtic music group at a recent local Scottish Festival.

I hope to finish pages of winter photos, and begin pages of our yard and house in spring, as well as snapshots of the March super moon event.

Later this morning, though, one of the scrapbook club members called to say she injured her back today while cleaning out a closet, so she will not be able to attend. If I get a call that the other member can't come, then Mother and I will work on our own here at home. We want to get enough pages done for the county fair in July.

Around 3:30, Hubbie and I ran errands...to drop the word search puzzle contest off at the newspaper office; to the bank; to the roadside stand to buy more strawberries (the vendor there also gave us an overripe cantaloupe for Shih Tzu, who loves the fruit); to a grocery store to get lemon and chocolate cake mixes, and a couple of cartons of my favorite brand of fat-free ice cream (in accordance with my request that the store stock it); and to the WDCS to pick up more photos at the one-hour service, and a loaf of sourdough bread to have with our soup supper.

It was 5 p.m. by the time we got back home, and Mother had the soup ready. This was another Dragon Soup (everything we could drag out of the freezer), also known as Bottom of the Refrigerator Soup, or Same Song Second Verse Soup. The soup is different every time, because it contains a different variety of leftovers each time.

The base is the same...onions, carrots, and celery sauteed in olive oil, to which is added beef and chicken broths, a can of diced tomatoes, and a package of soup starter veggies from the store. After that we add whatever is on hand...tonight it was portions of leftover macaroni and cheese, sauteed potatoes, onions and celery in chicken broth from last Sunday's slow cooker meal, overripe grape tomatoes, and yellow and zucchini squashes, plus garlic and a variety of spices.

This delicious soup, with slices of buttered crusty sourdough bread, really hit the spot on this cooler than normal, overcast-with-threat-of-rain evening.

Mother went home afterward, taking a slice of bread for her breakfast. Hubbie and I did our usual thing of watching TV. Tonight, we saw the 2011 Hallmark Channel feature, "The Edge of the Garden."

A man and his fiance' break up on the night of their engagement party, and he moves to Maine and buys a charming, but rundown house. Strange things begin happening in the house and in the garden. One evening, he meets a woman in the garden, who says he has found her locket, but when she tries to take it from him, her hand goes right through it. She is a spirit of the 1960s. Seems that he, and the woman and her husband, are living in the same house, fifty years apart. Eventually he and the woman become friends, and he gets a lesson in love and loss.