My wife and I celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot by building a sukkah (temporary hut) on our back deck. Two years ago I designed and built a new one using 3/4-inch conduit and clever connectors from an outfit called Maker Pipe. This is our third year using it and, frankly I was quite proud of myself for figuring out an effective, convenient, and lightweight design that stores compactly for the other 50 weeks of the year.
So I’m quite annoyed and a bit depressed because this afternoon some high winds came up and collapsed the sukkah. We only had time before Shabbat dinner to take down some of the lights and make sure it was more or less stable in its present state. We’ll continue disassembling it and fully assess the damage tomorrow. Which was when I planned to take it down anyway. ![]()
I could have taken steps to make it a little more safe against high winds, but I guess I didn’t notice how strong they had gotten, and thought it would hold up for another few hours.
The worst case is that I’ll have to replace a few parts that will cost a few bucks. But it was something I made that I was really pleased with, and its falling apart has hit me harder than I would have expected. At the same time, I feel stupid feeling this way, in light of the much more serious things going on in the world.