Gift horse

Sometimes, I have business appointments that take me quite far out of town. Today, I had one that was supposed to start at ten a.m and take place in a city some 250 kilometers off. As DH needed the family car, I went by train, which meant getting up at four o'clock so I'd be on time. Five hours later, I arrived, only to find out that the appointment had been cancelled because someone had had to call in sick. I later found out that they had phoned my office about the cancellation... after nine:(. 

Which left me in that town with a day of nothing to do, as I had purchased a return ticket for the afternoon already that was nonrefundable. My estimated colleague had advised me that the city I was going to has plenty of historical buildings, and I should really do some sightseeing. 

Which is what I did, after buying a pair of sneakers on sale because my business shoes, while comfortable enough for walking to that appointment from the station, weren't exactly made for walking around on cobbled streets all day. 

Of course, as it was Monday, all the museums and churches one could have visited were closed. So I took a couple of pictures of the outsides of the buildings to show to DH and set out to explore the older part of the city. 

All in all, that meant walking for almost five hours with a backpack full of files. I was rather glad about the sneakers soon...

And, as this was kind of a holiday for me, I did sit down at noon for an ice cream with sliced almonds and hazelnuts on top. I had not had any ice cream for about three years, and besides, had not had any breakfast because I just could not get anything down at such an ungodly hour. So, I did enjoy that ice cream to the last spoonful, and then proceeded to visit the sights. 

Which of course meant window-shopping, too. 

Being female, of course, I ended up at a shoe store.

I didn't buy anything for myself, but I found something for DH. He'd had, for a long time, had a favourite pair of brand-name shoes that he practically lived in. Having to retire them because they were worn out was a sad event for him, but we had not found another pair in his size. Guess what, they had those very shoes, same model, his size, and at half price, no less. So, tonight DH is in for a surprise...

And I am interested to find out if ten degrees less heat plus five hours of walking might turn that upward trend on the scales around again..

Julia

Never out of the woods

For the longest time, I had been getting along without consuming cookies, bread, or sweets. If I did have some, say, at MIL's, I was able to stop eating after consuming just one slice, or one piece, without having cravings for more. 

I had been certain that I could, by now, handle that stuff. 

I was wrong. 

That week of enforced feeding on carbohydrate-rich foods has been wreaking havoc on my self-control. 

For one, I am almost continuously hungry. Even worse, I crave carbohydrates, to a point where I gave in and bought a big tin of chocolate cookies. Not only that I ate most of these over the course of the last week, yesterday I had a veritable binge for the first time in years. One of the kind where I keep going in and out of the kitchen, returning for another handful or bowlful of food as soon as I finish the preceeding one in spite of my stomach already feeling uncomfortably full. 

What saved me from an even bigger caloric desaster was the fact that my former favorite binge foods were not in the house.   

The whole thing has been scaring me, badly.

I can still remember what it felt like, many years ago, to be stuffing my face with two pounds of spaghetti aglio e olio, while begging my boyfriend to take me away from the house because I could not stop eating, or that other night when, after scouring my pantry for the literally last crumbs of dry cereal, I drove my car ten miles to the next McDonald's (tm) drive-in and bought twenty of their standard hamburgers, and began wolfing them down in the car while driving, dripping ketchup and grease all over me and having finished off half that giant bag of food by the time I came home. 

In that kind of situation, it is no longer about willpower, because that just got short-circuited. The only chance I have of interrupting that kind of binge, other than reaching the point where I literally can't get any food into my body any more, is physically removing myself from food. 

Re-experiencing that kind of out-of-control food craving is scary. 

If I don't stop this fast, I will regain, big time. 

I had not thought that the effect of eating sugar and wheat several days in a row and in larger amounts would be so drastic. 

Obviously, it is. I am acting like a dry alcoholic who has been made to down a bottle of something 80proof and ends up craving alcohol as if he'd never been dry. 

Which is probably the lesson for me in this. My body doesn't react normally to wheat and sugar. If I consume more than a minuscule amount of either, the cravings for crap food I thought were gone come back full force. And I, especially when there are other stressors around, may not be able to resist them. 

So, what I need to do is detox again. Go cold turkey on anything wheat and sugar. Fill up on real food. 

If I don't, I'll be back where I never again want to be. 

Todays WI: 83.3 kilograms. 183 pounds. 

Again.

And I never wanted to be back up there, either.

Back in morbid obesity.

High time to pick myself up and get back on the tracks. 

Julia

It's a jungle out there

...at least if I look at the temperature and humidity. As there is still plenty of water in the ground from the flooding, the forty-degree centigrade (about 100 degrees Fahrenheit) heat vaporizes that. The result feels like a Turkish steam bath, except I still have to work in that climate. 

As always when it's that hot, I'm retaining water, which means swollen hands and feet and my weight going up at a rate of about a pound a day. 

Exercise is, at least for me, a physical impossibility right now. I'm glad if I make it home from work without collapsing halfway to the tram stop. 

My office has no A/C, so all I can do to keep my cool is switch on the big fan under my desk and drink lots of water.

The forecast says severe thunderstorms tonight and ten degrees less tomorrow.

I just hope it's true.

Julia

Going up

Temperatures and my weight. Both of which I don't want. But whenever there's a heatwave, I find my hands and feet swelling up and my body retaining water to a tune of a several-pound gain that takes away all of this year's losses at once. 

So, groundhog day again. If I could catch that critter I'd ask him if at least this time, the weather guys are right about the heat being over by the weekend. 

Tonight's dinner will be caprese salad with mozzarella and fresh basil off our balcony plants. And lots of water, because the edema does not keep me from showing the symptoms of dehydration otherwise. 

I'm off to the relative coolness of our home before I start to melt....

Julia

Swinging pendulum

This year, the weather has been outright crazy. Cold and snow well into April. A few sunny days in May, but apart those, mostly rain, culminating in the torrential rainfalls leading to wide-spread flooding at the beginning of June. And now, as if to make up for the delay in arriving, meteorological spring gives us the first serious heatwave of the year, with a forecast of up to 37 degrees centigrade (over 98 degrees Fahrenheit). 

Definitely not my kind of weather. 

At least we did restock our freezer over the weekend so there's no need to go grocery shopping in the heat. 

As the unperishable foods (ie carbs) that found their way into our pantry to fuel us during the emergency are, by now, mostly used up, things are slowly getting back to normal.

Except that having eaten a carb-rich diet for over a week I now am back to battling carb cravings like I didn't have for a long time. 

Maybe there is truth in the claims of sugar being addictive. In that case, a sugar detox would be in order if I want to get back on the losing streak that was so rudely interrupted by the flood. 

As it is, I still have digestive problems, and in spite of having had my usual two-egg breakfast, I am ravenously hungry by noon. 

Just what I needed to happen... I just hope the weather guys were wrong about how hot it will become this week. Carb cravings plus melting in the heat is a bit too much. 

Julia

Almost normal

Except for cable TV, all amenities of life have by now been restored to us. The experience of having been a whole week off the grid is beginning to recede in the background among the usual business of the day. 

Still, there are things that have changed. 

Just this morning, DH and I both stated that we are glad to be rid of the junk in the cellar. 

Mind you, with almost every piece that went down there, there had been an argument, either between the item's owner and the other person in the household, or between the owner and himself or herself. 

The argument went like- we don't use this any more-but it's still good for using- it clutters up our flat-but in another flat we might use it again- it's not worth keeping. - but if we ever wanted to use one again we'd have to pay for a new one - I ought to toss this in the trash -but if you did you might regret it-   and so on. 

Deliberations, in all of those cases, regularly resulted in a hung jury and the defendant in question being confined to the cellar. Which meant that decluttering our flat turned into cluttering up our cellar.

When the flood hit us, that cellar was actually so full of stuff that most of it was, for all practical purposes, inaccessible unless one were to climb over other things and dig down to the crate in question, if one knew at all which one it was. 

Apart that, it always had high moisture, and very poor lighting, which perhaps made it even easier to bury our junk there, sometimes half hoping for humidity to make it tossable, as in "this is too far damaged to save it, now we may throw it away". 

The Greek have that tale of Hercules being required to unmuck the stables of King Augias that had not been cleaned in ages. He did it by making the waters of a river flow through there. Our personal Augias stable also has had a river run through it, and now that the clutter has gone for good I am still stuck wondering why the heck I did keep most of it. As I mentioned, a lot of the things we tossed might have been cleaned and dried, but when thinking of the work that would have meant, and the fact that we would have to find a home for every single piece we rescued from the debris upstairs in our flat, there was suddenly no discussion at all about tossing things which we had almost quarreled about when it came to taking them out of our flat. Not even the fact that some of those things cannot be replaced did stop us from throwing them out. Actually, it was the realization that we might go to the pain of cleaning those things, only to box them up again and put them into the cellar, never to be thought of again until the next inundation. 

If I neither love nor use it, it is clutter. 

The very fact that I did not want these things around any more and banished them to the cellar amply proved that I neither loved nor used them, in spite of what I made myself believe about how valuable they were. The things I really value have never been inside that cellar. 

The knowledge that it is no longer feasible to stash stuff that is too much for our flat in the cellar actually helps declutter in even another way. I know now that bringing any new item into our flat means having to make room for it, and that any item that was in the way would have to be tossed at once, so, even before bringing in the new item I must realize that it will probably cost me, not only what the price tag says, but perhaps also another piece of my possessions that would have to be thrown away to make room for it. 

Considering that, it suddenly becomes easy to leave things at the store. 

There may even be a second round of decluttering coming on at our flat, because there are still plenty of candidates for inspection which, in the past, escaped being banished to the cellar only because there was still closet or cupboard space they could be put away in. 

Even if I have a space to keep it in, it may be clutter. 

And I do not forcibly have to hang on to every piece of crockery or flatware I ever bought. 

It has taken me many years to arrive at that conclusion. 

But the feeling of peace and accomplishment after getting rid of all that stuff in the cellar tells me it might be very much worth my while to put it in practice. 

Julia

Levelling back to normal

Slowly, things are returning to the usual path. With electricity and gas back working, the only things in our household that still bear witness to the inundation are several boxes and flower pots that sit on our balcony awaiting the cellar to be cleaned and my bicycle on the landing in the staircase, waiting for the same. And, of course, we still have no cable TV reception. 

I ran several loads of laundry yesterday. The things that had been contaminated by contact with the muck I have been washing with desinfectant. The salvaged china did, after some reshuffling, find a new home in one of the cupboards. 

The empty freezer will be filled up again on the weekend (didn't have time to do the grocery run yet). 

And just one day of being able to eat normally again made two pounds of carbohydrate bloat drop off me again. 

Business as usual. What a concept. 

They say it's a blessing to live in uninteresting times.

How true. 

Julia

Tallying the damages

Up four pounds and back above that pesky limit of obesity. 

That's what one week of being unable to cook and having to eat crap has been doing to me. 

Actually, I had feared worse.

Yesterday, the first errand after work took me grocery-shopping. Yoghurt, eggs, bacon, cheese. 

For the frozen veggies, a trip to the local Costco equivalent is planned tomorrow. 

The experience of being flooded with no chance of saving any of the contents of my freezer has actually made me a bit apprehensive about what to put in storage. Stockpiling enough meat to last us through a whole month is something I'm not likely to repeat anytime soon. As long as I can get over two or three days' worth of cooking before the next occasion to grocery shop, I ought to be okay. 

Once again, the damages were worse than necessary because I had too much of something. Too much stuff in the flooded cellar, which necessitated several times the work we would have needed to do clearing out everything than if we had been more choosy about what to keep, and too much food in the freezer. 

And the experience of being in the middle of a natural desaster instead of watching it on TV has been humbling, to say the least. Maybe people who live in areas that are regularly hit by floods or storms are more sanguine about such things, but we had been operating under the assumption of being well out of harm's way. Things like the possibility of having to evacuate on short notice just weren't on our radar.

When desaster struck, we were helpless and unprovided.

My new pantry will hold some things I had not bought before due to relying completely on cold storage. I know now that I must keep some things on hand that can be prepared without cooking and don't need cooling. 

And I will have to prepare a bug-out bag. We were lucky not to be cut off from water, too. Had we been, we, too, would have joined the ranks of the evacuees at local school gyms. If ever something like this flood were to happen again, I want to know just what to grab and take along. Hint: it won't be most of the stuff we still own. 

As it is, digging through all of that waterlogged stuff from the cellar, tossing most of it and having to clean the rest was exhausting. But if I were to apply the same standards that the emergency forced on us to the stuff we still have high and dry in our flat, I am certain there would be even more things that are, mostly, clutter and need tossing. 

Even after believing I had already got rid of most clutter. Some of it, instead of leaving our household for good, had ended up in that basement and came back to haunt me last week. 

Of all of the china, glassware, stainless steel stuff, and cooking accessories from the cellar, just one box the size of a beer crate is left. These will have to find a home upstairs. Perhaps even at the cost of removing other things. And this time, those other things will feed the trashcan instead of cluttering the basement. 

They say that what you keep in your basement is symbolic of your relationship to the past. If that is true, we have just been presented with a golden opportunity to bring new experiences into our lives. 

Julia

Hosing down

As our landlord announced that the whole cellar will be hosed down and cleaned today, we dragged the remaining stuff with the exception of our tires, two ladders and one bicycle upstairs yesterday. I spent the remainder of the day hosing down flower pots, boxes and one complete set of china in our bathtub. The china I dumped into a tub full of desinfectant after rinsing off the muck and let it soak overnight, so I can put it away tonight. And after the cellar is cleaned, I can put my other bicycle ( that still sits upstairs, blocking half the staircase) back down there again, as well as the big boxes holding flower pots. 

The weather is still doing somersaults. After a rather dryish and partly sunny week that helped greatly with clearing out the flood debris, it has been raining hard for two days again. As long as the water drains away, that's fine with me, as the rain washes off at least some of the muck that still coats the streets. 

The permanent smell that permeates everything should also diminish, which would be nice because the forecast says now we're expecting a heatwave. And a mosquito invasion because they have ideal breeding conditions on the flooded areas. 

Gas and hot water will probably be back tonight. 

I'll shower until I notice fins sprouting...

It's good to see normalcy returning...

Julia

Beep beep

Ordinarily, that sound would signal a major annoyance. It's my freezer's alarm that goes off whenever the temperature inside gets too high. 

Today, it's the most beautiful noise (cue Neil Diamond) I could imagine, because it means we are, after six days of no electricity, back on the grid, and our technical gadgets have survived the switchoff without damage.

Thank God.

Cleanup ops in our city are continuing. At every street there are heaps of soaked and unusable stuff. The trash removal guys are doing overtime filling and carting away garage-sized containers.

By now, people are beginning to question the way the catastrophe was handled by the Government. It looks as if things were dealt with rather inefficiently and damages could have been less if they hadn't. 

It makes no difference to the work at hand. I am, presently, through with clearing out the cellar. The stuff that's left in there is waterproof and cleanable stuff that I intend to keep. The two boxes of soggy paper I had taken to the balcony to sort are mostly empty. Nothing important in there, but some papers with personal data on that need shredding before discarding, so I have to take every single sheet and decide if it can be tossed at once. Two bags of immediate goners are already in the container in front of our house. Having to do the sorting with rubber gloves because the papers are all mucky doesn't help sorting speed. But sort them I must. Were I to procrastinate, the work would get ickier by the minute. 

So it's back to work.

As we did not know when electricity would be back, the food situation is still not back to normal. Too many carbs. I'll look at the damages when I can restart to eat normally. 

But after this experience, beating myself up because I have probably regained is the last thing on my mind. 

We still have no gas, which means no hot water for showering. I am beginning to admire the old Spartans... washing my hair with ice-cold water gives me a headache every time. .oh well.

Force majeure, I think the French call it. An act of powers higher than us. 

I hope there won't be a repetition anytime soon. 

Julia

Regrets and what-did-I-thinks

Yesterday night's cellar cleanup operation made quite a not-so-clean sweep of the contents of the boxes of kitchenware and china I had decluttered from my kitchen only to carry them to the basement and keep them there. And most of what turned up belonged either in the "what, you're still there?" or in the "why did I ever bring you here?" category. 

A set of brand new teflon coated pans- I had been able to buy those at a steep discount once and bought two of each size because I wanted to have one in reserve if the coating on the other got worn. By now, I avoid using teflon-coated anything, so they were not likely to ever be used anyway. When I put them out with the trash, it took less than five minutes for someone to pick them up. 

About a dozen stainless steel lidded jars that I had relegated to the cellar after realizing that they were not airtight enough to store loose tea leaves without them losing their aroma. Unusable for the purpose I bought them for. Kept purely because they might someday be usable for storing something in. As the occasion to do that has not arisen in several years, it's not likely to ever come. Not worth the work of cleaning them. Ditched. 

A ceramic tea warmer for a single cup. Never used, because not stable. Ditched.

Another for a teapot. Was given to me as a present, which is why I hadn't tossed it yet. I own several other tea warmers that are more stable and prettier. Ditched.

Plastic containers for carrying apples and bananas to work. I'm not much of a fruit eater, so these wandered from the kitchen to the cellar instead of to the trash. As they were impossible to sanitize, ditched, along with the case of bad conscience for not using them and eating fruit. 

The two sets of colored glassware I had been agonizing over two years ago. They had, of course, not been used since. Ditched. The sanitizer necessary for cleaning them would have been more expensive than replacing them if ever the need should arise. 

A piece of juniper wood my parents brought as a holiday souvenir forty years ago. I had imagined crafting something from it. Ditched.

About half a dozen sets of paint rollers. I must have bought new ones every time I wanted to paint something, even though I had painstakingly cleaned the old ones after use and kept them. Buying new ones was obviously easier than locating the old ones every time. Ditched. And for the next time I paint anything, I'm resolved to just toss the rollers afterwards and save myself the mess. 

Several buckets of paint. As the water had been standing more than five feet higher than where they stood, there was, even if they were closed, no way of telling if it had been contaminated. .No way I would risk spreading that stuff onto our walls. Ditched.

When we finished working yesterday, there was just one set of china in a sturdy plastic box left, still dirty but minus the wet paper it had been wrapped in, two empty boxes, one metal stand for hanging files that I'll try to clean, one very dirty bicycle (dito), a yellow watering can, two empty buckets, our tires, the flower pots and boxes, and two ladders. 

That cellar has not been as empty since before I moved in. 

I was, actually, rather taken aback at what having to empty out all of the boxes and removing the loose stuff, too, turned up. We'd had it all set up tidy-looking, or put away in boxes. But still, even in the boxes, it was clutter. As were most of the boxes themselves. I had kept dozens of plastic boxes from my last removal, and so had DH, just in case we would move again. 

If ever we should move, it would be no problem at all to find other boxes. In the meantime, the important thing is that the cellar dries out fast so we don't get a mildew problem in the upper storeys, too. And that the layer of mud mixed with whatever gets removed. 

At least now we can do that easily because the cellar is almost empty.

Julia

From high water to hell in a handbasket

That's the way my eating has gone these last days.

After being cut off electricity by the flooding, we can neither cook anything, nor keep anything refrigerated. As the tap water has also been tainted, there's a public health advice out to not use it for drinking without boiling it first. Which we can't do because there is no electricity. So, we've been drinking nothing but bottled water and the boiled water I took home in a thermos from work.

If the water is not safe for drinking, it can't be used for washing produce, either. The veggies I still have sitting in my turned-off fridge would have to be washed before eating, so we cannot eat them either.

Nor could we wash our dishes with the stuff. So, anything that would leave smelly traces on the plates is out, which means no canned fish or something like that. 

What that leaves us at is exactly those things I had stayed clear of the last years. Bread and cheese for breakfast, fast food for lunch and dinner. 

Of course, my intestines are, by now, in open rebellion. While I cannot be completely certain that this is due to the lousy diet I had been eating these days and not to picking up some stomach bug from the flood water, I think the latter would create a bit more, um, drama. Anyway I've been feeling a bit queasy and very bloated for days, with a hefty uptick of my weight on top. 

Of course, most foods that don't need cooking or washing before eating and can be kept at room temperature, which right now are the requirements for what we can have in our pantry, are sky-high in carbohydrates, which means I am getting an unplanned carb refeed which explains the gains. Still it's annoying, especially as the electricity and water situation is unlikely to resolve in the next days. 

Being city-dwelling upper-storey appartment dwellers with a rather smallish balcony, we don't even own  a charcoal or gas powered barbecue, and if we did, it would probably have been kept in that basement. Buying one might be difficult because so many people still have no power, so they are probably sold out, and besides, we have no place to safely use it. So there's nothing left but to suck it up, although I am beginning to consider putting in a week of fasting to compensate for last week's nutritional catastrophe. 

I just hope we'll be back on the grid soon, before the personal damage gets worse.

Julia

Goodbyes made easy

While we are still off the grid with no hope of getting back electricity soon, one of the neighbors had organized for a portable generator to give us at least the chance of emptying out our cellar. Which meant that DH and I spent the better part of last evening down there.

Of course, everything was still wet and smelling like a big sewer. In the weak light of the jury-rigged lamps, we found a scene of utter and complete chaos and destruction. Pieces of wood mingled with soggy paper, plastic boxes filled up to the brim with water that had been carried several feet away from their former place and deposited on top of overturned furniture. The car wheels with tires on we keep down there must have acted like a mixer in the enclosed space when the air in the tires set them afloat. 

What used to be a wise precaution, namely, putting everything into waterproof plastic boxes, has come back to haunt us with a vengeance because these boxes, once filled up to the brim, won't empty on their own, which means having to drain them manually of the stinking liquid. As some of the boxes contained things that were salvageable, such as several complete sets of china (I mentioned these before), ditching them wholesale was out of the question.

Anything wood, cloth, paper and electronics, such as our battery loader, and the pieces of Ikea shelving I had kept down there were, of course, only fit for tossing. So toss them we did. The surprising thing, for me, was that many things that would, theoretically, have been cleanable turned out to be, to us, not worth the hassle. Pots, pans, the remains of my cheap glassware. Flower pots. Most of the plastic boxes. 

What I kept, at least for now, is my bicycles, the car wheels, both of which need to be inspected for damages, the best of the china sets, about half of the flower pots, our balcony boxes which we hadn't planted and hung yet, and about half a dozen especially sturdy plastic boxes. 

The rest of the stuff is mostly gone. I still have about five waterlogged boxes down there which I did not get around to emptying before the generator ran out of gasoline, so I'll have to return down there tonight. 

Of course, everyone on our street was decluttering their soaked stuff from the cellars. What was incredible was that some of the stuff obviously was picked up by someone else less squeamish than we were. Well, good luck with that. 

Decluttering our cellar was something we had planned to do for quite a while, except that the attempts we made were regularly cut short by the sheer amount of things to be moved. Having a bad case of might need that someday syndrome didn't exactly help, either. So the stuff stayed and multiplied.

Being forced to get rid of most of it is an incredible feeling. Everything in that cellar that was clutter is gone, just like that. It was not even hard. Tossing a piece of junk that drips with brownish, stinky liquid, or is caked with a layer of sediment, is easier than deciding to keep and clean it. 

That sounds good as long as I do not remind myself that I might have saved myself hours of slaving away in that sewage hole if I had only kept those things that are, today, valuable enough to me to go to the pain of cleaning them. 

Just because I have a space to put something in does not mean I have to keep it.

Going through that kind of experience drives that home pretty hard.I don't think I'll ever fill that cellar up again. 

Tonight, if the generator is running again, I'll do the rest of the boxes. And then there's nothing left but to wait for electricity and heating to be turned back on so I'll have hot water to clean what I want to keep. 

Julia

Hell or high water

As suddenly as it had arrived, the flooding has drained away. Yesterday, coming home meant wading through about three feet of muddy water, with a backpack that held bread and two thermos bottles of boiling water so we would at least have some hot coffee. This morning, the street was almost dry except for a layer of smelly sediment covering everything. Only the cellar is still half full of water.

I shudder to think of what to expect down there when the water has gone. Most likely, I'll curse myself over every single postponed decision I stacked down there. As it is, the muck and water will probably make a lot of those decisions easier. And I might berate myself for procrastinating about painting our bedroom and rearranging some of the shelves in my living room, as both the paint and brushes I bought for the former and the wooden shelf parts I wanted to use for doing the latter are certain goners. 

Apart those, the cellar holds several boxes of china currently not in use. These should be salvageable after tossing the newspapers I wrapped the stuff in, unless the incoming water broke something. 

What also is unlikely to have survived are my christmas decorations. The box they are in is supposed to be waterproof, but I don't think they meant proof to being submerged for several days. 

Then again, nothing of all that is especially valuable. So, I should not be too upset.

And we were lucky on another front, too. 

As it had been raining cats and dogs on Saturday, we did not drive for our usual start-of-the-month grocery shopping. Which means the freezer is half empty, and we did not fill it up on Saturday. As everything in there has spoiled after two days with no power, any money we might have spent on refilling it would have fed the trashcan. 

The stuff in the refrigerator has been keeping until now, to the exception of some steaks I bought on Saturday as a special treat and decided to save for today instead of cooking them on Sunday. Oh well. 

Yesterday, I picked up some burgers and fries for dinner- not what we usually eat- and I will have to pick up something else tonight, or eat out with DH. Not what I budgeted for, nor were the stainless steel thermos bottles I bought for carrying the hot water. 

And the weight loss project has to be suspended for the duration. Not being able to cook anything is a real obstacle there. 

At least, from what I can see from my office window, the tram is operating again.

Keep calm and carry on.

Julia

Inundation

The valves were not closed. For another two days it has been raining without pause. We've been watching the weather and flood reports all day. This morning, looking out of the third-storey windows of our flat... the ground had disappeared under three feet of muddy brown water. Electricity has been turned off, the basement has completely filled up with the stinky brownish gunk, and I have no idea when we will get power back. The contents of our deep-freezer probably will not survive until then. 

As the colleague who would have to do my job were I to call in as being unable to come has been even harder hit, I have been braving the flood in a pair of old running shoes and my jogging dress, with my pants in a knapsack on my back. Goodness knows what is floating in that muck, and I just hope I did not catch anything from being immersed in it up to my waist. 

The forecast says even more rain, plus they will have to release even more water from an artificial lake upstream. So, the worst has not arrived yet. 

Of the cleanup that will have to follow in our cellar I don't want to think. 

Looks like Fate just gave me some big help with the decluttering I procrastinated on...

One doesn't usually think of how many things in our lives depend on electricity running smoothly. Or how dependent one is on clean water coming out of the wall. I am loading my phones and ipad at the office, as we still have electricity there. Our landline phones are dead, so we need the cell phones, especially since we need to stay in touch with MIL. 

And that fridge won't hold the temperature more than 24 hours. After that, goodbye to the contents of my pantry...

I only hope they will not have to turn off the water, too, even if we can only use it for washing right now.

And I hope the water won't rise much further...I don't even know if I will be able to return home tonight. 

Julia