Mark and I had a fabulous time yesterday. He built the succah and then our new friends from SOJC came for dinner. It was so much fun having the five of us out in the succah. We had dinner early, well before dark, because we didn't want to sit out in the backyard in the dark. There are no fences back there like in our old house; there are also no floodlights on the back of the house. It's DARK out there at night, and we have seen too much wildlife to want to be sitting out there in the dark. No one seemed to mind that we ate early. Karen, Jules, and Ilan enjoyed seeing our house for the first time, eating Cincinnati chili for the first time, and having fun conversations. They were our only guests for the holiday, so we really made the most of it. Thanks to the three of them for coming to our succah!
I had a terrible night last night with hours of leg cramps. I got up at 1:30 a.m. with a horrible inner thigh cramp on the right leg, followed by a terrible one on the top of left foot running up the shin, followed by the right inner thigh again, followed by the left inner thigh. I spent the hours from 1:30 to 4 a.m. working through these cramps in the living room. I had eaten my usual banana before bedtime, so I was sure it wasn't a lack of potassium. Around 3 a.m. I decided it might be dehydration, so I quickly downed three coffee mugs full of water and then sipped a fourth over the next half hour. Once the cramps subsided enough to get in bed, I hopped up out of bed every 20 to 30 minutes until 6 a.m. peeing the water out. When my alarm went off at 6:30, I just turned it off and actually fell into a deep sleep. I finally woke up at 8:20, already too late to make it to shul on time. We did our best and got to the services during Hallel, about 10:30.
There was a pretty decent crowd and almost everyone had a lulav and etrog. Mark had pre-ordered one, as always, so it was waiting for him. I took one turn to walk around with it during the Hoshanas, and there was a respectably sized parade of folks carrying them. We shall see if tomorrow has an equally big turn out of people for second day services.
Then we had kiddush in the succah. What a succah!! It was HUGE!! All wood with great scach/roof covering. They had taken out tables and chairs, so there were maybe four long tables and plenty of room to maneuver around all of them. We were really impressed with the size of the thing. Mark did point out that it had no decorations to speak of, but I honestly hadn't noticed since the sheer size of it just caught my attention.
We have spent the entire afternoon catching up on our TV shows that we have missed this last week. I have downed two big mugs of coffee to fight the sleep that wants to overtake me. Tonight we will eat leftovers from last night by ourselves in the succah. It will still be nice.
Enjoy a few of these pictures of Mark building the new succah. I never had time to scan any pictures of previous succah building days with the kids. Maybe another time. I never understand how blogger puts up these pictures. No matter that I select them in some logical order, the blogger decides the order! I'm sure you can tell from these how the progression went even though the blogspot decided to mix them up! LOL
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