And Now the Flood

 So what were you doing Monday at 3AM? I assume that you were probably sleeping. We were sleeping at 2:59 AM. But at three the phone rang. It was our lovely night shift doorman letting us know that there was a leak into the apartment below us, and perhaps there was something that we needed to turn off.

We went into the room next to our kitchen, in NYC real estate parlance it is the maid's room where back in the day when every middle class family had a maid living in that room.   A maids room is where one of your kids might live or it might be used as a home office. We use ours as our basement. We have old college text books and textiles that have been given to me from friends, plastic bins with Costco stuff, a box of rags, a big stack of ironed tablecloths, laundry waiting to be folded and the stuff the kids left in the apartment when they moved out in short our maid's room is a small room sized junk drawer.

Anyway after a few minutes of groggily looking around we realized two things. There was a small pond on our maid's room floor AND the leak was from upstairs. My husband then moved everything within the path of the flood into ur dining room and I began first mopping and then redirecting the flood water waterfall into dishpans. The source of the flood was eventually located and we mopped up to the best of our ability and went to sleep at 5:00am.

This is how our dining room table looked just before dinner on Sunday night.

This is what it looks like as I type this post.

Our maid's room now smells like a basement. We have been running a dehumidifier for the past several days and also purchased a giant bucket of Damp-Rid to absorb some of  damp. 

Our kids came over to help put away all of the Passover STUFF amid the flood chaos. I am so very grateful to them.

Yesterday, a friend invited us to go to the country.

We leapt at the opportunity.

I did get through some of the stacks of STUFF. But it was so good for our spirits to spend the day out where it was pretty.

I felt too overwhelmed to make challah, so I made lazy pita using a loose dough that had been hanging out in the fridge.

I had seen a video about making pita like bread using a very loose dough. I pushed the lumps of dough into shape using wet hands.

My mud pie making experience was very helpful here.  I never would have guessed that all of those years playing with mud on Presidents Lane would actually turn out to be a life skill.

I didn't use up all of the dough. 

I added some more flour and water

and some brown sugar and this will serve as the starter for another batch of bread that I will make after Shabbat.

So we will have two loaves as expected on Shabbat, just not two challot. I am grateful for all of the chickens that I had made for passover. I just pulled one out of the freezer for Shabbat dinner.

New Songs for Children 

This record was a big part of my early childhood. My mother had some connection to the women who put it together did she teach in their school? Perhaps my sisters will remember. The record is a great example of 1950s educational music. Some of it is kind of terrible and other tracks are pretty great. It's been a hard week, indulge me.