The Roof Over My Head

Fortunately, I was more or less awake at 6:55 a.m. yesterday morning when my doorbell rang.  I heard it, thought it might be a USPS or UPS delivery — I do have one Amazon order outstanding.  (It’s a used book, and I am resigned to the fact that it will get here when it gets here.)  There are some conscientious delivery folk who plong the doorbell of the houses on whose porches they leave boxes, and it was not out of the realm of possibility that one might have started their day entirely too early because HOT in Tx in Aug, or COVID-thinned ranks.

I threw on one of my sleep shirts (which I don’t sleep in, oddly enough) and meandered toward the front door thinking thoughts of porch piracy and the removal of temptation, when the doorbell plonged again.  I do have a glass storm door with a fairly substantial ($7.73) latch on it.  I unlocked the front door and peered around it to see that there was a very rotund young Hispanic man  on my porch, who informed me that the roofing crew was here and that they were going to be replacing my roof today.

As regular readers will know, out here in the flatlands, we are prone to a weather phenomenon called “super cells,” which is to say we are accustomed to getting the dickens hailed out of us on a fairly regular basis. — often enough, in fact,  to support quite a healthy hail damage repair industry.  We had an attack of golf-ball sized hail earlier in the year, and the local roofing companies have been in a feeding frenzy for months as a result.  The lady in “B” had mentioned earlier that an insurance adjuster had been by to look at our mutual roof, but that the landlady  was on the fence about whether or not to have the roof replaced because $$$, and that was the last I (or the lady in “B,” as it turned out) had heard about it until 6:55 a.m. yesterday morning.

Well, joy electric.  So much for any plans I had to sit quietly and do anything, including hear myself think.  Still, it is for times like these that God gave us cordless headphones and smart TVs with WiFi access. That and Netflix (and an abundant supply of TV knitting) got me through a day that otherwise would have sounded a lot like this:

for about 10 straight hours. . . .

God also gave us nail guns, which means they had the old roof off, the new roof on, and errant bits of debris picked up out of the yard by dark.  The supervisor from the roofing company did plong on the door at around lunch time to check my end of the HVAC  and water heater ducts to make sure they had not been dislodged by the herd of buffalo overhead, and actually checked that the smoke detector in the hallway by the mechanicals closet also detected carbon monoxide.  During our brief conversation, he did remark that he was supervising eight roofing crews (see ‘feeding frenzy’ above).

Anyway, today things have returned to what passes for normal chez nous. Blissful silence reigns again.  I am at the computer, having a large, soothing dollop of Franz Schubert applied to my soul by those fine folks at Venice Classical Radio, and as soon as I’m done catching up on my blog reading and webcomics, I’m going to do a little writing.