Oh My Gosh, It's French Onion Soup!

A bunch of storms moved through in the past few days, and behind it, the temperatures dropped to something much more comfortable. It was a bit cool, and sunny, and gorgeous out, and time for a lunch date with dear, old friends!

We met at Duffy's in Boalsburg and were able to sit outdoors. It was occasionally a bit toasty in the sun, but overall quite nice. My friends mostly ordered salads; I ordered their famous French onion soup!

My friend Judy smuggled me yet another of her hippo collection. I sat the hippo on the table, and T. Tiger tried to ride it. Well, OOPS! Suddenly, the Tiger flew through the air! The hippo had tossed him, first time out of the gate! Well, THAT didn't go as planned. . . .

We caught up on news, and one of the sad bits is that my friend Celia, a bicycle rider who goes on long rides with friends, was badly injured in a hit-and-run incident a few months ago in North Carolina, where she now lives. A woman in a big white pick-up truck hit Celia and knocked her and her bicycle to the side of the road, where Celia lay in a puddle of blood. Celia's husband, on a bicycle right behind her, came to her immediate aid.

The attack was intentional, and the woman who did it was not found. Celia suffered a broken pelvis, from which she has mostly recovered; the whiplash remains. We hugged and hugged, for it's been far too long since we were together. And I asked my friend what she does or did with her anger over the attack. I am just her friend, and I am plenty angry on her behalf. I felt so horrified, and so helpless, when it occurred.

She said she had dreams about it for a long time after it happened. "I had to let it go," she said. For her own peace of mind, that was her choice. But I am sorry; I am still mad. I still have fantasies of karma coming back to bite that lady someday further on down the road. I'm not talking about revenge. I'm talking about the reckoning.

Aaaaaaand . . . for a blip that started out in a pretty happy place, that one took a pretty serious dark turn near the end. Please enjoy this photo of the soup, which was delicious; among the best I know of in these parts. And please hug your friends, for you do not know what tomorrow holds in store for them OR for you. Oh, and in the extras, there's a photo, left to right: Celia, Cindy, Gina, Judy. FRIENDS.

Here's a song for a girl who loved her friends, and loved her soup too! Bruce Springsteen, with Hungry Heart.

P.S. I mentioned my Instagram was hacked over the weekend. On this day, I finally called Instagram and got ZERO assistance; they simply referred me back to their online help center. So I created a new Instagram on this day, and I used it to go in and report the fake Instagram account pretending to be me! Take that, hacker! And when I made my first posting from the new account, I mentioned I'd been hacked and included the hashtag #hacked. Well, guess what: all of the hackers came out of the woodwork, and now I've received more than a dozen offers of "help" (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, she laughed hysterically!) from strangers on the Internet, some who have told me they are professional hackers. What would YOU do? Who would YOU trust? I say . . . be careful out there.