End of the Passover Holidays….

   Thursday evening and Friday day were the last 24 hours of the Passover holiday. But since they were followed by Saturday, for all practical purposes the holiday (and leaven-less eating) continued through and until Saturday evening. (And in actuality, bread will be TABOO in my house until I get my Passover dishes stored away.)

  This is the first year that I did not get my dishes stored away the same evening that the holiday ended, and left part of the big job of getting them away for the following morning….and it is all due to our “adventures” from the end of the week.

   What adventures?

   Well, after staying up most of Wednesday evening preparing for my coming guests, I dove into bed Thursday night, ready to get some decent sleep before continuing cooking and serving the noontime holiday meal on Friday. (After which I would need to finish my cooking for the upcoming Sabbath….)

  Suddenly at about 9:30 am, the lights went out. I opened my front door, and seeing that the lights were off there, I assumed that it was a general power outage that would probably be fixed soon. [I will not go into the details of electricity and Jewish holiday/shabbas (Sabbath) observance, but in general (unless it is a life-threatening situation), we do not fiddle with our electric appliances/lights on the holidays, but use them as they were set up before the holiday or Sabbath starts.] After a while I realized that it was an outage affecting only OUR building, and the reality set in: I was looking at the certainty of the next 36 hours being without electric power: no lights, and more importantly, no fridge!

   But of course I have great neighbors, and whoever I asked gladly took some of my freezer/fridge items in for the weekend. I also changed my menus, making things simpler (ie, flexibility). In the middle I paused to give myself a lecture:  “Rickismom, you are NOT going to worry, nor fret, you will do what you need to, not worrying about the small amount of food that will spoil, etc…..”    Of course this is easier to do than say, but I managed in general to take things in stride.

   I also realized that without electric lights even on Saturday evening, until the electric company would come fix the problem, there was NO way I would finish getting the dishes away. And I decided that it wasn’t so bad, that there is no need to rush….

[Image: hand-made matzah--ie, unleavened bread:]

    Of course Friday evening with not enough candle light to read with, I went to bed on time. And woke up feeling GREAT! And now that Passover is finished I can stop gorging on junk. [It is VERY hard to diet on Passover, because besides having fattening holiday meals, matzah (at MORE calories than bread) just doesn’t fill you up like 2 slices of bread. And in addition there are also many good diet foods not available for the holidays.]

 And I will forgive myself the relapse, as long as I :

1)get back on track RIGHT away

2)start getting enough sleep