A Day In The Life

 

I am a very positive person and I rarely allow self pity to enter my life. Today I am not only indulging myself I am sharing it with the world. Many of you know that as a result of a serious accident 27 months ago, my life has been a bit of an ordeal. As a rule I find that reminding myself of how lucky I am to be alive sufficient to ward off the blues. However, it doesn’t always ward off the frustration.

A couple of weeks ago my husband Todd purchased a used freezer. I was very pleased about this because the one we used to have was sold with the house in Patzcuaro, and we really did use it a lot. I am somewhat incapacitated, and everything I do takes three times as long as it used to, so I thought it would be a good idea to, every now and again, make large amounts of food and freeze several portions so that it would be available, for Todd or myself, if I am having a particularly bad day and don’t want to cook.

I am currently on the Weight Watchers diet and eat a lot of zero points vegetable soup, well known to all who have ever been on Weight Watchers, I am sure. What better way to begin my freezing project? On Sunday, after a trip to the mercado, the market, for mountains of vegetables, I set to work and made a huge pot of soup. As I had Spanish class yesterday, the soup was still in the fridge today, and I decided this afternoon to go and get myself a bowl for lunch.

Once my bowl of soup was in the microwave a somewhat slap-stick turn of events ensued. It occurred to me that since I had the huge pot out of the fridge, no easy task, that I might as well put the soup in plastic containers and stick it in the freezer. After portioning out the soup I had ten 500 mil. containers and two liter containers that I, somehow, had to get to the freezer which is in an unused bathroom on the other side of the service patio.

No problem says I! Todd had gone into Celaya today and it did occur to me that perhaps I should just put the soup back in the refrigerator until he got home and let him take it out to the freezer. That would have been the smart thing to do, but since no one has ever accused me of high intelligence, I decided that I could manage it myself.

I put all the containers of soup on the seat of my walker and thought, this is a piece of cake. There is a small step, only a couple of inches, from the kitchen door to the service patio. As I was lifting the walker (and soup) down, one of the wheels caught on the lip and all the soup slid off onto the patio floor. The tops popped off some of the containers and a  couple cracked.

It was a very hardy soup….. Mounds of carrots, turnips, asparagus, cauliflower and numerous other green things started to float away on the tide of broth. The service patio is small and cramped and full. Soup ran under garbage cans and buckets and into every nook and cranny.

 

 

Since my goal, when this began, was only to get a bowl of soup for lunch, I wasn’t wearing my brace. I am smart enough to know that being alone in the house and trying to clean up that mess without my brace was not a good idea. At this point in time my walker and I were standing in a sea of soup. Since the diet is working and I have lost 25 pounds the house pants that I was wearing were dragging on the ground….. in the soup. This is also the point at which the cats arrived, all three of them, to investigate the commotion. Anyone who has owned cats knows that they are nothing if not curious.

My brace was in the master bedroom which is through the kitchen, dining and living rooms. I slipped my thongs off at the kitchen door but there was still enough broth and squashed vegetables on my feet, pants and the wheels of the walker to leave a pretty good trail through the house.

After changing my clothes and putting on my brace I returned to the scene of the soup avalanche with a damp towel and removed the intact cartons of soup from the floor, cleaning them with the towel, and returned them to the walker seat for the rest of their journey to the freezer. Once there, with the soup safely in the freezer, all that remained was to clean up the mess.

 

 

I had to first recover all the recalcitrant vegetables and remove everything from the service patio before I could mop up the broth and begin the floor washing process. I think this took a couple hours and when I was done I was soaked with sweat and my much unused limbs were shaking with fatigue. I was now definitely feeling sorry for myself!

I decided that all I wanted to do was to go and lay down on my bed, put a movie in the DVD player and relax. I was about to do just that when the power went out.

It would be impossible not to see the humour in all this, but at this moment I think I will appreciate that aspect of it more tomorrow. Now I am going to go and take a hot bath.