Soup, Haider, Pumpkins: which of these is not like the other?

It has been a rough week here at Casa de Burli. We are all going to bed early. Seems that we have caught the flu - basically since Wednesday evening: JT has a terrible cough, I have a sinus cold, aches, feverish, etc., and Mr. Burli has the sniffles, too. I made some cabbage soup to help us feel better.

(You only get a small picture, because it is not in focus. But it was tasty, if not so photogenic.)

The weather has been absolutely bizarre lately - one day 85 and sweltering, the next (like today) cool and windy. Supposedly a Santa Ana is on its way tomorrow - those are the hot dry winds that come off the desert and fuel the fires. So even though it rained last weekend (briefly), everything is very dry and fire danger is up.
Perhaps the sharp temperature differentials have acerbated our intolerance to flu germs. In any case, today I went to a picnic hosted by a professor from my department. She has 4 month old twins, I was glad to find out. (The last news I had heard about her was that there were complications with her pregnancy and might lose both babies. I just couldn't bring myself to ask her what had happened, since we hadn't talked in months. So, now I know.) At the meeting there was a student who had just come back from fieldwork in Northern Pakistan, another leaving Monday for research among Bedouins in Israel, a student from Turkey, another from India, and anther from Slovenia. What an interesting group!
On the way there, I heard on the news that Joerg Haider had died in a car accident. Luckily I was already parking, because I needed to immediately jump out of the car and call Mr. Burli. Haider was the far-right politician from Austria always making the news for some obnoxious comment or anti-foreigner action, and also governor of Kaernten, the southern-most province of Austria, from which Mr. Burli hails. It will be interesting to see what ramifications his death has for politics in Austria. Just a month ago there were elections again in Vienna (they occur a lot since the gov't has to have a coalition to function and the parties are always squabbling) and although the first "Austrian [woman/Muslim] with a migration [Turkish] background" was elected to Parliament (for the Green party), the far-right Freedom party (formerly Haider's party) and the far-right "future Austria" orange party (the new far-right party he formed after having a dispute with the other Freedom folks) won something like 30% of the seats, which is the most that have won since 1999.

Now, to distract me from talking Austrian politics and keep me from talking American politics (I was about to plead with some unnamed relatives to vote for Obama, but I fear that may be a lost cause), I will bombard you with some photos from the pumpkin patch. Yes, Last week we also went to the pumpkin patch after camping, apple picking, and apple pie eating. Maybe we just overexerted ourselves.

Well, blogger isn't cooperating, so I can't bombard you. Maybe next time...