Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Got back on the roof just long enough to check how much the ballast had shifted, add a few more weights, and retrieve the partial roll of paper towels befre they got wet. By the time I was up the ladder I was sure that I shouldn't try driving more nails, and wasn't sure I'd have the stamina to finish attaching a sheet of plastic if I started. So I'l just have to see how it does tonight.

Some of the lighter rocks and broken bricks had shifted more than I'd like but not far enough to be realy scary -- air was getting under the east edge and making bubbles that nudged the weights downhill, so I put most of the new chunks in the middle of those bubbles to try to keep them from getting so big. If we do get a thunderstorm instead of just rain, I don't really trust the plastic to stay put. But otherwise it seems a reasonable bet.

Then I spread another smaller blue tarp (one I already had as part of my Pennsic stash) in the room that'll get wet if the plastic on the roof doesn't do the trick. I haven't spotted the hole in the old one yet, but all that water did escae somehow ...

I'm hungry but nearly too tired to eat. I don't want to eat, I just want to not be hungry. So I'll see whether a chunk o' cheddar and a spoonful of peanut butter silence my stomach until the rest of me can deal.

I spotted two buckets of broken bricks in the back yard of one of the vacant houses. I think they're waste that just hasn't been gotten rid of yet ... If so, I can save some gathering effort and just attach a rope and haul them up to use around the edges of the next piece of plastic when I finally get to it.

By the way, there's at least one style of helicopter which, when travelling quickly enough after sunset, looks startlingly similar to an old science fiction movie spaceship or maybe one of the cigar-shaped UFOs.

Uh, at least I think it was a helicopter. (So it's technically a UFO because I'm not certain ...) The noise was more airplaneish than helicoptery, but there was a little bit of helicoptersound in there, and a fighter would've been louder at that altitude (and I couldn't see wing lights or the shadows of wings). So I suppose it could possibly have been some unfamiliar-to-me jet airplane, but I think it was some sort of rotary-wing craft, not fixed-wing.

If it'd been moving more slowly or had been farther away, then I could say a lot more about the shape. At the rate at which it traversed my field of view, I got a rather impressionistic idea of its shape, couldn't see the rotor(s) at all, and got mostly a shadow with blurry lights, in a shape that really looked a hell of a lot like an old-fashioned idea of a rocketship.