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