Sukah 2002

On September 17, 2002 we started our lease on our new apartment in Highand Park, NJ. Our first night was the following eve, September 18. Two days later, on Friday evening September 20, was the first meal of Sukkot.

On Thursday we purchased the wood and tarp cloth to build our sukkah on Friday. Friday, at 8:00am we left to Philadelphia to borrow bamboo polls for our schach from friend and client, Jay Press. We had the bamboo loaded into our car by 9:30am and with only a small stop to make in Aaron's parent's home, we expeceted to be back in Highland Park by twelve noon. Under ordinary cicumstances... we would have been.

Candle Lighting that Friday was 6:40pm. Now 5 hours isn't an insane amount of time to allow for building a sukkah from scratch. (That would allow 1 hour and 40 minutes to prepare for Yom Tov/Shabbat.) As it turns out, that Friday, at about the time we started back, there was a major accident on the New Jersey Turnpike closing all northbound lanes. This diverted all traffic to US-1 and US-130. It took us about 4 hours to get home. In two hours we compeltely assembled the sukkah pictured below.

As we could not run electricity to the sukkah we used those battery powered lights you see advertised on TV. (We found them at National Wholesale Liquidators.) For the second night, when the batteries went dead (as expected) we lit T-lights in glasses and had a candle light dinner. One more thing... while the sukkah was built to accomodate our 30" card table... we could not locate it. We ate our meals picnic style on a vinyl table cloth for our picnic blanket.

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