Sweet potato soup and a day of Spring (Fall) cleaning; my folks and grandmother are spending the weekend at the farm and I need to carve a third bedroom out of our small, improvised office. The season mostly wrapped up, I'm using the occassion to pile nine months- three years worth of files into totes and haul it upstairs, to one of the only two closets in the house. We're making progress, but it's slow. Luckily, my family have a five hour drive ahead of them; I've got time.

I've also, I hope, got time to make my mother a cake of some yet-to-be-determined sort, and to make copious use of streamers and balloons. Her 60th birthday was a few days ago. My mother never missed a birthday of my brother or mine, to cover the house in streamers and balloons after we went to sleep and again before she went to work, for us to get off the school bus, decorations strewn in the trees at the bottom of our long, long driveway; it is an important tradition.

Soup is no more, back to that third bedroom.