A BOWL OF SOUP

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind.  What would normally have been 'the dead of winter' with no activities and a lot of staying at home and keeping warm was anything but for the first two weeks of January.

The first mission of the year actually sent out a warning just before Christmas, but its message wasn't interpreted correctly.  Our daughter and her husband are the recent new owners of an acreage about an hour's drive from here.  It's 22 acres with a house, two barns, a workshop and a huge shed in a well treed yard; the perfect place to raise their growing family.  It's wonderful to have that kind of space and control of what you want to do with it, as opposed to living in a city setting with architectural control and animal bylaws in place.  Of course, there is a trade off for these freedoms: where as no one is going to tell you how to design your house or what kind of animals you can keep, when you have water and sewer problems - they are entirely your own problem to fix.

When their water pressure started giving them problems it was misdiagnosed to be a foot valve problem and that repair was made; it made no difference.  Then came Christmas and then the blizzard and then the yard clearing which led to the discovery of a growing ice pond forming in their front yard - they obviously had a water line break between the well and the house.  It was New Year's Eve and the next three days would be weekend and holiday - they needed to deduce where the break was, dig down to find it, repair the line, and properly re-bury the line so the frost couldn't get at it and freeze it solid.

On the good side they have their own backhoe to do the digging and our son works at a store that carried the plumbing pieces they would need so the holidays weren't going to stop them, on the other hand it was bitterly cold and if we were going to be able to help them it had to be right away - we had booked a week in Mexico and had to be gone to catch our flight by the morning of the 4th, at the latest.

The men gave it everything they had but the little backhoe just didn't have the power to get through the layer of frost.  The break ended up being under where their driveway is and the more ground is compressed with traffic the deeper the frost layer gets.  They finally had to call a neighbour to come with a bigger machine and six hours later it was dug up, fixed, and buried again - all for an inch long split in a plastic hose!  We heard about this in a text about the time we were halfway to Calgary; it was good to know they had their water back.

The tropical holiday was lovely and warm, the beach and pool at the resort were great, we went with fun people and met more while we were there ... and I fought a cold the whole time.  And just as I began to get better Glen came down with it.  We were invited to stay longer and visit more when we got back to Canada but all we wanted by that time was to go home - besides, no one in their right mind would seriously want to share space with our germs.

I think we were in bed within an hour of getting home on Friday night.

And yesterday I got up and made soup.  After all the tropical fruit, fresh fish dishes, and fancy cuisine we had all last week all either of us desired was a pot of hot, meal-worthy, vegetable-filled soup.  Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home.