It's Almost Thanksgiving (and ten other random facts)

Fact #1: I haven't been blogging much lately for two reasons - 1) I've been really busy and 2) my laptop's guts fell out. Luckily Scotty was able to repair the guts, and with a little duct tape, it's working now, but I don't know how long it will last. 

Fact #2: I have exactly 20 minutes to write this post, and then I have to get to work on my next task which is getting myself ready so I can be seen in public as I hang out at the high school for a few hours doing hair and make-up for the school musical.

Fact #3: When you do hair and make-up for the school musical, you have to appear presentable so people will trust you with their "look." I can't go in my usual messy bun, make-up free face, and hoodie because I have to look like I can do hair and make-up (although to be honest, I suck at both. Don't tell the high school kids).

Fact #4: The high school is doing Cinderella, and then in a couple of weeks, they are doing an adaptive musical with special education, Beauty and the Beast. They'll be using the same set, which Scotty helped build, and I helped paint. My friend's daughter, Whitney, who has autism, will be playing Belle, and I'm so excited to go see her. 

Fact #5: Last week I made 15 batches of this soup, 8 dozen cookies, and 150 breadsticks to feed the cast of the musical during a late night rehearsal. I made the breadsticks and cookies ahead of time and froze them, and then I spent all day Tuesday making soup (yes, I made this harder than it needed to be, but I was trying to save money). We put the soup in a 22 quart roaster and a 16 quart stock pot. I took the stock pot in the school, and I was working on getting tables set up, when Scotty came running in covered in soup. He'd dropped the 22 quarts right outside the school doors. 

Messy kitchen

It doesn’t look like it, but that’s 75 Costco potatoes

Soup spillage

Fact #6: The accident was completely unlike Scotty (I'm the one who drops soup, not him!) 

Fact #7: Since we'd lost over half the soup, we let the cast know that we were so sorry, but we were going to give them very small portions. They'd basically get a soup "sample," and then if we had extra, they could come back for seconds.

Fact #8: We experienced a miracle! After scooping 30 small servings of soup, the pot was still full. We were able to feed 80+ students, and they even came back for seconds and thirds. The pot just kept serving. I had measured the batches of soup to see how much we needed, and 15 batches gave us 90 (12 oz) servings (I planned on 8 oz servings and having extra for seconds). How we lost over half of that and still fed 80 kids is beyond my mathematical reasoning. It was loaves and fishes! LOAVES AND FISHES!

Fact #9: We weren't sure what to do about the soup mess outside, so we took a cardboard box and squeegeed it the best we could, then prayed for it to rain all night to finish the job, and it did! (Although our friend, Ally, informed me that there were still chunks of potato on the ground the next morning - the worst of it washed away).

Squeegee-ing

Fact #10: A lot of the bad things that have happened in my life have involved soup. Several years ago I experienced sudden onset head pain and vomiting. It happened twice in two weeks, and both times I had eaten soup and ended up in the hospital catching my vomit in barf trays (I also puked on the triage nurse, who was notably rude prior to me vomiting on her, so I didn't feel all that bad about it). I didn't eat soup for two years after that. Scotty and I have already agreed that we won't be making potato soup again any time soon after the Great Spill of 2022.