Where to start?

I can't really say what happened this week, because if I did it would be like giving you a map to our house.

But, well, if you've been hearing about any rather extreme natural phenomena happening this week, which you would really, really not want happening while your building was being re-roofed and had tarps instead of a roof, it was probably happening on our heads.

We live on the first floor, and our apartment is basically okay. We are back in our building, after a night spent elsewhere on the advice of the fire department ("Turn off the breakers and vacate the building.") The people upstairs have ceilings on the verge of collapse, and we don't know yet if the roofers that were hired instead of the ones I wanted to hire have insurance. If they don't, our insurance company may or may not decide that's a reason not to cover the damage. The roofers say that they will deal with the internal damage, but it is so extensive I'm not sure how adequate that will be. We already had an electrician come in on Friday and check the wiring, and say that it's safe to be here (after he took all the light fixtures and fans out upstairs--they have power, but only to the wall sockets, not the ceiling). But this could go any number of ways, especially since two of the four families in this building are not terribly inclined toward ongoing maintenance, may or may not have insurance on their individual units, and may not think of things like, oh, mold, when considering whether or not to rip out and replaster their ceilings.

Oh, and our toilet seat broke off today. That too. And I haven't made it to Target since our guests left, so we are out of, um, pretty much everything I think, including laundry detergent, and I got speech requests this past week from two countries that are, if I may say it, insane, adding ELEVEN full-length speeches to my list, three of which were due yesterday (I did those) and eight more of which are supposed to be done by Sept. 7th (you can just laugh at that one.)

Yom tov? Yeah, that's coming up too.

But... Grandpa M sent me flowers on Monday. Bright yellow ones. And right before Shabbos, I got a huge box from a friend, full of desperately needed, um, I'll tell you what exactly in a few weeks, and FOUR bags of chocolate-covered pretzels from Trader Joe's (very, very handy since I had not exactly had opportunity to do any Shabbos preparation the previous week). And the boys were ridiculously cute and funny this week, and we went to friends' for lunch, and Barak was amazingly well behaved. He asked for a second piece of cake, and I told him yes, but then he was not to ask for any more, and when he finished it he hopped off his chair and went off to play and did not ask for any more. And Iyyar went up and down our friends' stairs, accompanied by their ten-year-old daughter, and on one of the trips down started repeating after her on every step, "down... down... down..." Oh, and he's just starting to say "ma ma," too.

It could be worse.