Keep it level

If you can't tell what the picture above is, it is a pizza box that was carried vertically, literally, and up 11 flights of stairs.  Let me start from the beginning of this little ditty as it is one to remember.

It was a Tuesday and Domino's Pizza is often our faire for this evening as the weekly special is 2 for 1.  I was busy all day with various things,  Joey is out of town and I had planned to have Seth go get the pizza while I cooked the veggies at home.  Dinner done!  I sent Seth on his way, started the spinach and sat with John on the couch to help him finish his homework.  A few minutes later the power goes out.  Now sitting in the dark I reflect.  "Good thing I'm not cooking dinner tonight" I say out loud and I figure I better call Seth and tell him on his return he may have to walk 11 flights of stairs!  Luckily Seth had made it down the elevator and was well on his way!  

  I briefly remember many spring nights of fun in the dark as a child with thunder storms pulling down power lines.  We wait patiently playing around with our phones using them as flashlights and I  tell John and Reuben that when I was really young we used candles, sometimes because we simple couldn't find the flashlights or because the batteries had run down!  It occurs to me Clara is still out as she had stayed after school to get some help with her Russian homework.  So I try to reach her but her phone battery has died!  Hum.. she'll have to figure it out.  We'll see how good her Russian is I guess.  

I then call Seth again and he is making his way up and says the door lady has given him the code to the stairwell door.  We meet him on the inside of the door smelling the delicious pizza and now realizing the door only opens from the outside and the code he has is not working.  Wow.  Now what.  We try several variations of the code.  Our neighbor shows up on Seth's side of the door and speaking Russian really offers nothing new.  Reuben tries taking the lock off from our side.  Nothing is working.  Feeling a little trapped, I tell Seth.. "guess your gonna have to go back downstairs and tell her it isn't working and see what else can be done, but just leave the pizza... you don't want to carry it down and up again".  

As I return in the dark to the couch and the house is cooling off with no power, and the phones are dead and the internet down and my phone on its last 30% at the end of the day and my husband out of town, and 2 kids totally out of reach, I realize how helpless I am.   So I call a friend.  Just in case I explain to her if my phone dies here is the situation.  Please come check on me if you don't hear from me I ask!  She understood.  

Meanwhile, Seth goes down and is handed a set of keys and pointed to another stairwell (oh, another stairwell, really? I had no idea!)  He climbs to the 11th floor once again but there is no key hole.  He punches in the same key code given for the other door but to no avail.  This stairwell was pitch dark by the way and it is a good thing his phone was working as its light guided his way.  We chat for a few seconds as not to drain my phone unnecessarily but I understand where he is.  

On his way back down he runs into a couple construction workers and the three make it down to the 6th floor and cross over to the first stairwell.  About this time the power returns.  Seth now in the original stairwell returns to the 11th floor to get our pizza.  Then he and our neighbor go 2 flights down  and finding an open door head in and up the elevator to our place.  Clara actually beats him to the door just a few minutes before.  She had arrived and not wanting to climb the stairs, sat in the chair in the entry.  She says she sat about 5- 10 minutes and when the power came on she took the elevator (anyone know its the sitters not the circles that get the parking spots?)  

But poor Seth, we  quickly do the math and all told he climbed 27 flights of stairs, about 540 steps, and  while I sat helplessly on the couch.   But we all kept a level head about us.  The pizza however, well, warm enough but not quite kept level and a little bit of a mess in the box.  A night to remember. 

By the way, the key Seth was handed actually was to a door on the inside of the second stairwell that then lead to a hall to the door to the stairwell.  The key was useless to him on the outside.  And it was a good thing he had not gotten this stairwell door open as it was blocked by heavy construction materials that would have fallen on him.  Lord keep us safe here in Kyiv.