What the Roof Really Looks Like

The roofers, about 8 months after they were promised, came by, pounding and ripping early this morning, and I was happy because my neighbor Terri and I both needed new roofs, seriously. And I saw what the roof looked like beneath the composition shingles. It looks like shingles. Here's what's been sheltering the house all this while (this is probably the 80-year-old decking). The workers sheathed it and applied new shingles. Click the above picture to see the whole thing, including a roofer.

Naturally, because it was foreordained by God from the dawn of time, one of the roofers knocked just after my shower and I answered the door with toweled hair sticking out like Phyllis Diller's, and comforted myself by saying they have surely seen worse. (Any worker who goes house to house will always, if you ask, describe the worst they've seen. It isn't a squinting little woman in pink thermals with wild hair.) They needed a 3-prong electrical socket. There aren't any outside. So I plugged it into the bathroom, and the pounding and roaring was such that I left home for the day.

By 4 p.m. most of the work, as you can see, had been completed except for new shingles over the porch area, and the mess in the yard cleaned up. The first photo shows the old TV antenna still standing, next to the shorter chimney. The antenna is now leaning against a tree in the yard; there is nothing more useless. Terri informed me that the local recyclers aren't accepting metal and glass anymore, only paper and cardboard. Because gasoline is so cheap there's no money to be made from metal and glass recycling. I can probably turn the old antenna into some kind of wild-bird attraction.