Post-Pesach 5774/2014 report, part 2

From chaos . . .
We chose to have our new kitchen cabinets built all the way up to the ceiling so that we'd have extra shelves on which to store some of our lighter-weight Passover items, such as tableclothes and dish towels, and would no longer need to store all of our Pesach things in boxes.  It had not occurred to us, however, that storing some Pesach items on separate shelves in the Chametz cabinets meant that, rather than taking out individual items as we needed them, we'd have to take out everything Pesachikeh at once, before Pesach, so that we could lock up the cabinets.  We left for the first seder with Pesach things piled up willy-nilly on the kitchen table and counter-tops.  What a mess!

to order, or some semblance thereof . . .

Years ago, an old friend thanked a group of us for being her Shabbat (Sabbath) guests, saying that we'd done a maaseh tov (good deed)--knowing that she was having guests had forced her to clean her apartment.  :)  I felt exactly the same way about the guest we'd invited for Shabbat Chol HaMoed Pesach dinner--in order to be good hosts, we had to know where everything was, and were forced to get our kitchen into something resembling order.  We did exactly that, and a delightful dinner was enjoyed by all.

and back to chaos :(

While I was reading some Haggadah commentary on the seventh day of Pesach, I heard a helicopter buzzing persistently over our neighborhood.  That turned out to be a television-news helicopter.  As we walked to Mincha-Maariv (Afternoon and Evening Services), we saw thick, black smoke curling over some apartment buildings a few blocks away.  When we got to the street on which our synagogue is located, we discovered the source--there was a massive fire in a commercial building only a few blocks from the shul.  Firetrucks and ambulances lined the street for several blocks.  The fire was so severe that there were still two groups of firefighters hosing the building with water when we came back to shul for Shacharit (Morning Service) the next day.  Gone, at least for the foreseeable future, are a restaurant that had been at that location for roughly forty years, the office of the otolaryngologists (ear, nose, and throat doctors) whom we'd been seeing since our son was a toddler, and many other commercial, medical, and non-profit renters.   The good news is there don't seem to have been any serious injuries.  Thank G-d for big favors.