Feb. 17th, 2008 [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-10-26:

"In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant," marvels Colbert. "One of our mottoes on the show is, 'Keep your facts -- I'm going with the truth.'" -- Stephen Colbert, comic, on the cable news hosts that he mocks.

(submitted to the mailing list by Dana Weeks)

There are no comments on this entry. (Reply.)

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-10-26:

"In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant," marvels Colbert. "One of our mottoes on the show is, 'Keep your facts -- I'm going with the truth.'" -- Stephen Colbert, comic, on the cable news hosts that he mocks.

(submitted to the mailing list by Dana Weeks)

There are no comments on this entry. (Reply.)

One nightmare is over: I have curry powder again. Two different kinds. From Penzeys, yet. (I hadn't quite managed to get the mix of ingredients right on my own during the time I was out of pre-mixed curry powder, though I was getting closer). I even have vindaloo powder. Thanks, Sheepie! Eggs finally taste right again. *whew*

The other nightmare, the leaky roof, continues, with some progress...

So -- yesterday I spent a while lying on my stomach at the edge of my roof with my head and arms over the edge, driving nails into the wood on the underside of the overhang on the front of my house. I managed to not drop the hammer. In fact, I only dropped one nail. But my arms got really tired. And my hands don't seem to want to grip things well today.

I started composing this yesterday evening, then got interrupted, and then was too tired to deal with it after the interrution was over. (The interruption was almost for a good thing, but for a trivial goof to be laughed about at random times in the future.)

What would have been posted last night:

Done for the night, but not finished. :-( Dizzy, arms trembling, so yeah, I'd better stop. I tacked one edge of a sheet of plastic to the underside of the overhang on the front of the house, then piled ballast around the edges (and some sprinkled across the middle), hoping that'll be enough to keep it from blowing away overnight. Part of the roof is covered, including the big obvious torn-off section, but it's not really quite ready to be rained on and really not ready for significant wind.

For the record, climbing a ladder with a bucket of bricks is not my favourite athletic activity.
( some details )

There was more in my head then but I've lost my train of thought overnight. Anyhow, I slept late, and am moving slowly now that I'm up, and my shoulders hurt a lot whenever I raise my arms, and my hands feel clumsy and slow. Ugh. But the rain seems to be holding off, so if I can drag myself up there and still have the strength to lift more bricks and rocks and small containers of water to use as ballast against the expected winds, I guess I have a little time. I'm just not sure I can actually do it so soon after yesterday's exertions.

I'm also wondering whether the winds overnight will have moved things around already. As the sun went down yesterday the wind came up.

If I do spread the expensive blue tarp, I'll want to be very certain that it's not going to blow away. And I'm worried about that facing on the front of the house not holding up if it's the only anchor. I'm considering tying half-gallon containers of water to all the eyelets around the edges of that tarp and letting them hang over the edges of the roof, hoping that'll be enough weight to keep the wind from picking up an edge (and that random stuff placed on to of it is enough to keep the wind from sucking it up in the middle). Two problems I'm still not entirely certain how to solve are the chimney and the antenna. I might get away with just going over the chimney, since it's at an edge, though that does increase the 'sail' aspect of the tarp. I'm less comfortable draping the tarp over the antenna (I'm also not certain what frequency my ISP connection uses, and what is or isn't radiopaque to that wavelength). That leaves bunching the tarp up to go around the antenna and leaving an unprotected section of roof as well as places that can catch water and funnel it under the tarp ... or getting the tarp under the antenna, which I don't think I can do myself, given that it's bolted to a base of cinderblocks that got made larger and heavier each time a storm knocked it out of alignment, until storms stopped doing that. (There's also the question of re-aiming it afterward, but silmaril suggested a technique that will help with that.)

Whee.

I never did get my neighbour's ladder up, but I did follow the solution of the roofers -- there's a fire escape on the house at the end of the block, and that house and the ones between it and mine are vacant, so there's noone there to hear me walk across their roofs and complain, so that's how I've been getting up and down. The uppermost stage is a vertical ladder -- the rest is very steep, slippery, metal stairs. Climbing it with my shoulders feeling the way they do today will be ... interesting.

Or maybe it's saner to give up, considering that it's already after 15:00, just hope the plastic I put up yesterday holds and does enough to keep the rain out of the leaky part, spread a new tarp in the room that gets the worst of it if water does come through, and plan to go up top to look at the result and do the next steps Monday after the rain predicted for tonight is over and my arms have recovered a little.

I wish I felt more certain about any of these options. (Hence the lengthy babbling. It's partly thinking-aloud.)

There are 7 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

One nightmare is over: I have curry powder again. Two different kinds. From Penzeys, yet. (I hadn't quite managed to get the mix of ingredients right on my own during the time I was out of pre-mixed curry powder, though I was getting closer). I even have vindaloo powder. Thanks, Sheepie! Eggs finally taste right again. *whew*

The other nightmare, the leaky roof, continues, with some progress...

So -- yesterday I spent a while lying on my stomach at the edge of my roof with my head and arms over the edge, driving nails into the wood on the underside of the overhang on the front of my house. I managed to not drop the hammer. In fact, I only dropped one nail. But my arms got really tired. And my hands don't seem to want to grip things well today.

I started composing this yesterday evening, then got interrupted, and then was too tired to deal with it after the interrution was over. (The interruption was almost for a good thing, but for a trivial goof to be laughed about at random times in the future.)

What would have been posted last night:

Done for the night, but not finished. :-( Dizzy, arms trembling, so yeah, I'd better stop. I tacked one edge of a sheet of plastic to the underside of the overhang on the front of the house, then piled ballast around the edges (and some sprinkled across the middle), hoping that'll be enough to keep it from blowing away overnight. Part of the roof is covered, including the big obvious torn-off section, but it's not really quite ready to be rained on and really not ready for significant wind.

For the record, climbing a ladder with a bucket of bricks is not my favourite athletic activity.
( some details )

There was more in my head then but I've lost my train of thought overnight. Anyhow, I slept late, and am moving slowly now that I'm up, and my shoulders hurt a lot whenever I raise my arms, and my hands feel clumsy and slow. Ugh. But the rain seems to be holding off, so if I can drag myself up there and still have the strength to lift more bricks and rocks and small containers of water to use as ballast against the expected winds, I guess I have a little time. I'm just not sure I can actually do it so soon after yesterday's exertions.

I'm also wondering whether the winds overnight will have moved things around already. As the sun went down yesterday the wind came up.

If I do spread the expensive blue tarp, I'll want to be very certain that it's not going to blow away. And I'm worried about that facing on the front of the house not holding up if it's the only anchor. I'm considering tying half-gallon containers of water to all the eyelets around the edges of that tarp and letting them hang over the edges of the roof, hoping that'll be enough weight to keep the wind from picking up an edge (and that random stuff placed on to of it is enough to keep the wind from sucking it up in the middle). Two problems I'm still not entirely certain how to solve are the chimney and the antenna. I might get away with just going over the chimney, since it's at an edge, though that does increase the 'sail' aspect of the tarp. I'm less comfortable draping the tarp over the antenna (I'm also not certain what frequency my ISP connection uses, and what is or isn't radiopaque to that wavelength). That leaves bunching the tarp up to go around the antenna and leaving an unprotected section of roof as well as places that can catch water and funnel it under the tarp ... or getting the tarp under the antenna, which I don't think I can do myself, given that it's bolted to a base of cinderblocks that got made larger and heavier each time a storm knocked it out of alignment, until storms stopped doing that. (There's also the question of re-aiming it afterward, but silmaril suggested a technique that will help with that.)

Whee.

I never did get my neighbour's ladder up, but I did follow the solution of the roofers -- there's a fire escape on the house at the end of the block, and that house and the ones between it and mine are vacant, so there's noone there to hear me walk across their roofs and complain, so that's how I've been getting up and down. The uppermost stage is a vertical ladder -- the rest is very steep, slippery, metal stairs. Climbing it with my shoulders feeling the way they do today will be ... interesting.

Or maybe it's saner to give up, considering that it's already after 15:00, just hope the plastic I put up yesterday holds and does enough to keep the rain out of the leaky part, spread a new tarp in the room that gets the worst of it if water does come through, and plan to go up top to look at the result and do the next steps Monday after the rain predicted for tonight is over and my arms have recovered a little.

I wish I felt more certain about any of these options. (Hence the lengthy babbling. It's partly thinking-aloud.)

There are no comments on this entry. (Reply.)

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.