Strange afternoon

What a funny afternoon we had yesterday. It started very normally with Cat asleep and me embroidering the eyes for the latest sewing project. I was listening to the sound of rain and eventually got the feeling that the rain was inside our building. Maybe the neighbours are having a shower, thought I. They do have showers at odd times, yet it didn’t really sound like one. Eventually Cat woke up, but wanted to stay in her cot to look through some of her favourite books, so we both read for a bit. And then on moving to the living room we discovered water dripping of the wall around the balcony door. It didn’t look like the water was coming from the outside, but from the flat above. So I went outside our flat to investigate and found out that the downpour was much worse in the communal corridor. At this point the fire brigade arrived and turned off the electricity and the water.

Trying to act normal, but unable to go outside for the worry of coming back to drowned furniture, we played inside periodically empting containers of collected water. Since electricity was off I couldn’t cook us dinner (our stove is electric), so we nibbled on fruit, crackers and had some breakfast serial with yogurt. After it got dark I lighted the candles and recited as many nursery rhymes and tales as I could remember. I wonder what my little girl thought about all this, it must have been pretty strange to her – sitting in the dark, listening to my voice and the sound of the dripping water.

We saw the fire-engine leave earlier, and by about 7 I started thinking of going to bed, since no one had any idea if the electricity will be turned back on. And of course as that thought came into my mind I heard the knocking. Some official looking guy brought electrician to check out the damage. After checking the leakage I was told that the electricity will be back on in under an hour – it actually took them less than 10 minutes. We didn’t get the water back on until around 10 pm at the same time as Clive arrived back home from the office. By chatting to the workers, who just fixed the water flow, he found out that a cold water pipe burst upstairs on the sixth floor, which is taken up entirely by a penthouse apartment and since no one was home it flooded the whole apartment until water found a way out and gushed down flooding the fifth floor and eventually sipping down to the fourth and our third one. The water damage was so bad upstairs that people on the fifth floor moved out and last night we were the highest floor to have electricity. We weren’t badly affected, ending up only with the small bit of soggy carpet and some soggy toys. Pretty lucky, I wasn’t looking forward to functioning with candlelight and no running water. Today in the morning I found out that our neighbour’s flat on the other side of the building got much more water damage and was deemed too unsafe to have electricity.

To get some normality back into my life, after putting Cat to bed, I finished the Green Kitty Pillow. The pattern is free from Amy Butler website.