Tikkun Olam

So those of you on Facebook already know what we've (read: me) been going through.  Not that my D.H. isn't exhausted with working on the town home practically single-handedly--but that on top of putting house back together, flood in basement, inventorying what was damaged (dozens of books which were stored away in boxes on the utility room floor), I got very sick, the worst during Shabbat.  I actually had a fever.  I can't remember the last time I had a fever. I wasn't able to help him at all.  He put our new bed frames together without my assistance (did I tell you we had to buy new frames because the 30-year old one finally gave up the ghost? It just wouldn't put back together. Oh well. We got our money's worth out of it.). Tonight will be the first night we are not 'guests' in our own home.  By that I mean, from the day we returned we slept in Rambo's old room because we had no bed frames.  This room will now be the guest room.  Toodle's old...

The title expression is that of a book by Thomas Wolfe , and is commonly used to mean that a person cannot go back to his childhood home and expect it to be the same, expect himself to relive his (or her) experiences and feelings; that time passes, and our childhood is gone forever . I had just read an article in the Wall Street Journal about returning to one's childhood home, and I had never even thought to Google - sorry - to search for the apartment building where I grew up by using Google Maps until I read the article. So I did. Parts of the neighborhood are the same, but I didn't recognize the shops, nor the playground where I used to play as a little girl. When I was little, all playground equipment was made of metal: the swings, see-saws, monkey bars--which I loved to climb to the top, scaring my mother half to death--and the slides, which I used to call "sliding ponds." To this day, I don't know why (but then again, I also called pony-tails 'horse...