September 23, 2002

• Roof update:

  
  

  This was sunrise this morning: a few breaks in the clouds.  With few exceptions, it has been either wet or windy or windy and rainy for days and days.  Every time the weather was agreeable, Doug was asleep or otherwise occupied. 

  
  

  Today, his wake/sleep cycle is including more daylight hours awake.  He was ready for roofing.   About the same time we got on the roof it started to rain.  We got a little bit of roof work done, one tarp spread but not tied down or sealed.  I hope it doesn’t get windy tonight. 

  
  

  This one today went over the chimney from the woodstove.  We had some conflict over how to do it, and Doug thought I wanted to do it the simple way to avoid the effort and exertion, when what I wanted to avoid was risk of damage to the stovepipe. 

  
  

  He said he had watched me do it and he could remove the top section of stovepipe so we could slip the tarp over with less cutting.  Thinking he needed the practice, I let him take it apart.  The problem… problems started when he lifted without first twisting to disengage the top section at the joint with the one below.  He lifted three sections, and the remaining section at the bottom fell over.

  
  

  Greyfox heard the noise from another room and came to see what had happened.  From the roof, I heard his yip, and then nothing else, until after Doug had lowered the big chimney pipe back down, bending the ends of both sections in the process.  After some feats of strength and skilllessness, we determined that we needed, for several reasons, to replace the entire stovepipe.

  
  

  Doug went to bed.  You can read his version of the stovepipe story at his blog.  He was blogging about it as Greyfox and I went out the door to go to the hardware store. 

  
  

  To replace one double-walled 3-foot section of smoke pipe and three 2-foot sections of Metalbestos®, I had to use a slightly different configuration because our local store didn’t have any of those things.  I ended up with two 2-foot sections of ordinary matte black smoke pipe, an adaptor for the top and 2 sections of Metalbestos®, 18″ and 3′ long.  There is also a collar and a cap, so we may have less water leaking in around the new pipe, and will surely have less moisture in the stove.  It hasn’t had a cap since we moved in here in ’98.

  
  

  We had an interesting little Mercury retrograde contretemps in the hardware store as I was trying to mentally calculate what combination of available components would give me optimum function within recommended parameters.  Greyfox kept asking me why we had to do it this way, why we couldn’t just leave out that 18″ section or the adapter.  I couldn’t, apparently, answer him adequately, because he kept asking over and over.

  
  

  My hands were full of stovepipe stuff and since words alone were not conveying my meaning and I was hampered in my sign language capabilities, I decided to set down my encumbrances.  Since I was going to free my hands, I thought I might as well draw him a diagram, but when I suggested that, he said, “I’ll take your word for it.”  I didn’t know what he was taking my word for, since I still had my hands full and hadn’t started my explanation.  My mother never could talk without using her hands, either.

  
  

  While we were on our hardware run, our neighbor Jason dropped off half a cord of firewood, and just a little while ago brought the other half of that cord.  Another cord is coming tomorrow.  Big woodpiles are winter security.

  
  

  The roof will get done.  A few days ago, while Doug slept, Greyfox acted as my ground support, and I got up there alone on a beautiful cloudless day and secured the antenna mast.

  
  

  Because his job consisted mostly of standing by, and he tends to wander off if not occupied, I had Greyfox take some pictures.

  
  

  He had a great time with the colors and composition, but he thought I should have worn something different.  The old beige turtleneck with tar on the sleeves wasn’t colorful enough.

  
  

  I told him where my t-shirts were, and with a shout of, “Wardrobe!”, he tossed my red shirt up to me.

  
  

  I obligingly changed shirts and finished nailing the mast to the side of the house with plumber’s strap.

  
  

  Proud of his work before he even saw it on the monitor, he took this self-portrait for his signature.  Portrait of the artist as an old fart.  The old fart blogged today, too, before the stovepipe went awry.  It is, he said, a political rant, state politics specifically.  I haven’t read it yet, but I will soon.

  
  

  There at his shoulder is one of my strips of plumber’s strap.  I did an okay job of strapping up the mast, except I’m going to have to adapt the tarp to it at top because I forgot to allow for overlap… oops.  Did I mention that Mercury is retrograde?

  
  

  

  • 10:50 pm
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