This morning was one of those, "I am so blogging this!"

But, for the moment, I am going to try to catch up on the lost study time, when I had to join the clean-up effort. Things could have been much worse, so we feel pretty happy, all things considered. Just a wee bit annoyed at the mess...

More in a bit.

A few thoughts...

locally last night, we had a downpour of Biblical proportions. The falling of rain woke me, then the thunder and lightning. And the fire truck down the road - near as we can piece together, from various accounts in the news, they were there inspecting a roof that suffered wind-damage.

While it was the thunder and lightning that woke me, it was the crow's nest crane motor of the fire truck that kept us awake. Not that I'm complaining - if the fire service are out, I accept that they have a Very Good Reason.

But the kicker came when I arrived downstairs to make the morning coffee, a couple hours later. (Thank goodness, Mr Sweetie saw fit to decline my offer of some tea in the wee hours - and you will see why...) We live on a 1st floor, but our kitchen and dining room are on the ground floor. The dining room is beneath a large sky-light.

And, sometime in the middle of the night, the area had become flooded enough to overwhelm the structure, and so it started to leak.

Mightily.

There wasn't much to note of the cats - they'd all retreated to their 1st floor room - and the reason became quickly apparent: the kitchen tiles still sported little puddles, and everything I'd left on the dining table, where I'd been studying the previous day, was sopping wet. Thank goodness that I'd been embracing a certain psychologically responsible habit, of putting away my work for the day - notes got soaked, but nothing lost. Eventually, I gently pulled apart 30 sheets that threatened to stick together, and laid them out on a bedsheet to dry. And by golly, my decision to park my very best kanji dictionary on a chair, to keep a cat from claiming it later, meant that it was sheltered by the dining table during the deluge.

Our racks of staple goods in plastic containers, and our cookbooks, fared rather less well... and Mr Sweetie, after getting my help in spreading out books to dry (and triage - yes, we're going to toss a couple, but nothing particularly wrenching, thank goodness!), gave me leave to return to studying for exams. I lost a half-day, but he devoted the entire day (of his free-time within working half-time) to recovering what staples could still be used, and tossing those that had become drenched despite their plastic containers.

We'll be eating a lot of lentils, red beans and chickpeas this coming week. That's because he spent most of the day cooking up those legumes that could reasonably be salvaged. Stuff that was only a little damp. There were other things... a container of dates, only 4 or so, thank goodness, but swimming. Good God, but the actual event must have been a sight. So, I'm again grateful that Mr Sweetie did not take me up on the offer of tea in the early hours: I would have received an even greater shock, confronted by the immediate result of the deluge. In the end, it was better this way - remaining night's sleep, and let at least a little of the first rush of water pass. I can vividly imaging what my state of mind would have been, confronted by water pouring from the skylight, as it most surely must have been doing at some point.

A lot of our cookbooks are no longer pretty - but I forbade Mr Sweetie from throwing away the Dutch "cooking encyclopedia" he bought the year before we moved in together. Not just a sentimental thing: there is a hell of a lot of information in those books we have no where else. And while the covers all stuck together and ripped as he pulled them apart, the pages can still be consulted. If we remember to take time to pull them gently apart, before we really have to use them for recipe consultations.

It was a weird day. It could have been a lot worse, though. Now, we're waiting another day before trying to turn on the lights in that area...