I’ve succumbed

After dodging germs and avoiding family members like they had the plague (well, actually, they did), it’s happened.

I’ve succumbed to their onslaught of germs.

I hate being sick.

I really, really hate it.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m a terrible patient. Not in the
sense that I’m high-maintenance, needing fresh-squeezed juice and cold compresses, but in the sense that I’m horribly impatient and will do just about anything to get better faster–vaseline slathered on the bottom of my feet? I’ll try it. Drinking tea made from crushed twigs and eye of newt? Brew it up, I’ll choke it down.

The one thing I am loathe to do, however, is get in bed. In the daytime. While the sun is shining. Can’t explain it, but that just seems wrong to me. It goes against my grain. Yet here I am, on a perfectly sunny day–the first nice day we’ve had in a while–in bed. In the middle of the day. Still in my jammies from last night.

I got up long enough to drink a cup of coffee and eat some peanut butter toast, and to hopefully shake off the fiery ball of phlegm I felt forming in my chest when I went to bed last night. No such luck. That fiery ball invited its friends over, and the overcrowding is making me cough. The coughing reignites the fiery ball and it burns, baby.

This was not part of my plan.

Sunday is my day to get things done and to get a jump-start on the week. I know, that’s backwards; most people use Sundays as a day of rest, to recharge from the week that’s passed. Not me, I prefer to charge ahead and get the week off to an early start. I usually kick off my Sundays with tennis, then once fortified with 3 sets and a couple of beers, continue on making lists, doing laundry, running errands, and cooking for the week ahead. Lately it’s been all about soup. It’s been cold, really cold (ok, cold for Texas; those of you reading this while enveloped by real winter can laugh at me, but it has been cold here), and for me that means it’s time to make soup.

My soup kick has been good but repetitive of late. I’ve made several pots of vegetable soup. I was inspired by my friend Amy who brought me some yummy vegetable soup a few weeks ago, and it was so good that I tried to recreate it. Her version was inspired by her sister’s housekeeper’s recipe, and it was good. The first version I made to replicate it was the best. I need to stick to that one instead of trying to change it up.

The second time I made it, I added tomato sauce and substituted tiny star-shaped pasta for the diced potato, thinking my kids might eat it. The stars were so cute and inviting, but the incredibly picky duo said nope, not intrigued nor even a little bit tempted.

The next time I made it, I used whole-grain gemelli pasta instead of stars. Oh, and I added okra, too, because I really like okra. I think it separates the men from the boys. After all this research, I’ve concluded that the potatoes are the best in this soup and the okra kinda gets lost among all the other veggies.

Sundays are usually bookended by tennis and soup, not sickness. Come on…I can’t make soup from bed.