Sukkot w00t! and muddy football players

Here's our Sukkah going up. We've spent the last week trying to locate reed fence because - you guessed it - we left ours in Va Beach when we moved. We tried Home Depot, Lowe's and even our trusty Sweetgrass Ace Hardware, to no avail. Just when we figured we were going to settle for a wood frame, plastic mesh and sticking all manner of grass, reeds and brush into it....I took one more lap around Lowe's and there, in the garden center stood a whole pallet of reed fence! Oh joy, rapture! So we picked up two of them and today when there was a (brief) break in the rain Danny and Yeshi got the frame up and then while Yeshi was at football practice Danny and I tied the reed fence to the frame. Then we drove over to Park Island (just a few blocks from us) where they are building a bunch of new homes and scavenged for palm leaves. Well, ok, I did cut fresh ones but I took them from several areas so they wouldn't be missed. I think a lot of the stuff will be cut out when they build the houses. The leaves will make excellent roofing material. Naturally it started raining again while I was trudging through the swamp but the big palm leaves kept most of it off. When I first went in to get them Danny yelled out to me to watch it (he was only wearing flip flops and I had on sneakers so I ended up doing the cutting) because he saw a really big spider. Turns out it was a little brown crab. They were all over the place and went skittering in every direction as I slogged through the squish to get my palm leaves. Tomorrow - hanging up the lights and decorations!

Oh yeah, don't let the look fool you. He had fun practicing in the rain. Apparently some rolling in the mud was involved. Gee, getting muddy playing football? Who would have thought? Note the gray sky - yeah, it's still raining.  And the pants used to be white...