Peee-U

It’s been raining for the past few days in the Netherlands, which is a bigger threat here than in a lot of other places in the world. The Dutch struggle constantly with water because a large part of the country below sea level and is reclaimed land. They’ve come up with an ingenius set of locks to keep the water out but when it rains there isn’t a whole lot they can do. A lot of flooding has taken place due to the rain this week, but thankfully not near where we live. Unless you count our basement of course! Xander came home from work yesterday and yelled up that the basement of our building was flooded, which meant so was our storage room. We just cleaned it out not too long ago though so there was nothing really hanging around down there that could get damaged.

This morning when I was going out to walk the dog, I stepped out of our flat into the stairwell and was greeted by the smell of dirty wet things. The smell was wafting up from the basement all the way up to the 3rd floor and the first thing I thought of was my locker at the Northside Yacht Club when I was a kid. I used to take sailing lessons there, it was a great way to keep me occupied in the days during the summer when my parents were working. Of course, when you are a kid one of the best parts of sailing is tipping the boat over, falling out and just generally splashing around. So I would always end up with wet clothes. I guess one day I must have decided to change because I left my sopping wet clothes sitting in a blob on the shelf of my locker and kept forgetting to take them home. After about a week or two, my locker smelled jst like our basement does today.