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a team of competent roofers Tuesday, June 4 2024
After we pulled the trigger on getting a new roof on the Hurley house, things sprang into action a bit faster than expected. Gretchen was actually contacted on Thursday by someone from the Albany roofing company saying they'd be starting on Friday. She thought it best if I was around, so they moved it to Tuesday. Last night while we were at dinner in Woodstock, someone dropped off a cart in our driveway, so Gretchen suggested I park the cars on the Farm Road (which mostly just gets traffic from our neighbor Georges).
Sometime before 8:00am this morning, the roofers all arrived. They were mostly a little skinny Hispanic guys, though there was also a woman in the mix (she was a little plumper). They immediately started throwing ladders up against the house and were soon crawling all over it with big scrapers shucking off the thirty-year-old shingles and underlayment. It sounded horrendous from inside, like a bunch of velociraptors were scampering about trying to claw their way in. I went outside not long after they'd started and they'd already cleared vast swaths of the roof down to the plywood decking (which looked to be in good shape, even in places like the northwest valley that had been prone to leaks for years). Amazingly, the roofers scampered about like mountain goats, perfectly comfortable walking down the ridgeline without any form of harness. When they needed to address places lower on the roof, they hooked on to ropes with great confidence. I was surprised by the limited amount of hardware they relied on; mostly they just used ladders and ropes.
I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos about shoddy workmanship, particularly on rooves, so I was primed to look for evidence that we were being scammed. I was a little concerned when I saw them starting the application of underlayment at the top, since that needs to lap in a way that keeps water on top of it should the shingles fail. But I later figured out that the underlayment gave them a more secure surface for walking (particularly on the roof ridge) and that they were lapping it correctly even though they were installing it from the top down.
At some point a flatbed truck with a crane arm arrived, and it was used to hoist whole pallets of shingles up to the roof ridge. From there, one of the workers would hand down the shingles from above while an installer quickly put them in place and fired nails with a pneumatic gun. Clearly this team had installed a great many rooves, so doing it fast and correctly was all just muscle memory for them. When you get a roof installed, you want a team like this to do it. I should mention that what exactly they did when they needed to use a bathroom was a complete mystery. They never came inside our house at all (though Gretchen told them in Spanish that they could) and there was no port-a-potty amongst their equipment. They did take a substantial lunch break, but otherwise they worked hard for the entire twelve hours they were here.
That said, it would've been much less stressful for me to not have been present while the roof was being installed. The constant banging made it hard for me to formulate complex thoughts or focus on anything in anything but an extremely superficial manner. As the day wore on, I grew gradually more and more irritable. The constant violence to the house reminded me of the violence necessary to do some kinds of dental work. If you can imagine being in a dental chair for 12 hours getting implants installed, that's kind of what I am talking about. Periodically a thunk or hammer blow outside would be so forceful that something would fall off one of the laboratory's many shelves.
My mood wasn't helped when Roseanne, our least-favorite neighbor, had hand-written another one of her nasty notes complaining about our dogs barking in the forest behind her house last night. She said she'd contacted the dog warden, something she always does, but the dog warden has her all figured out.
My increasingly foul mood caused me to eventually snap at Gretchen when she criticized me for waking Oscar up for his afternoon meal. I pointed out that this was an experiment that I was conducting, not unlike the experiments Gretchen insists I participate in. My thinking is that if I make sure Oscar gets all his meals, then maybe he won't insist on his meals constantly, since he will know that the meals he is owed are definitely coming.
After Gretchen drove off to her prison poetry class, I was left with the dogs to endure the continued roof work for more than two more hours. They didn't leave until about 7:30pm.
To keep the dogs from spending another night barking in the forest, I'd made a special wooden flap I could hang from a couple cup hooks installed above the pet door. This made it so that when the wooden flap was hanging, creatures could only come into the house from outside. If they tried to leave, the wooden flap who hit the frame of the pet door and stop. I'd had to make this because out twenty-something-year-old pet door keeps being destroyed by extremely agitated dogs bursting through it, something that, when the glue in its mitred corners inevitably fails, they can do even when the door is latched shut. So I could take a bath in peace, I installed the flap before getting in the tub this evening.
The main goal I'd set for myself today was to lay the groundwork for a system allowing me to add additional sensors to ESP-8266 running my remote control system. The way it had been, only one such sensor could be added. I wanted to make it so that sensors could be added as device_features and the system would then know what to check and how to do it using data stored in the server-based database. In order to use multiple sensors, particularly if they are the same kind, one needs to be able specify additional information such as I2C addresses or GPIOs for reading serial data. I especially wanted to be able to use multiple BMP280s, a I2C temperature and pressure sensor that I have many of. But I had great difficulty finding a library that allowed me to specify a I2C address. It turned out that the one that worked was the official Adafruit BMP280 library.

Our roof as it looked last night. Click to enlarge.

Early in the removal of the old shingles. Click to enlarge.

Early in the removal of the old shingles, viewed from near Eleanor's grave. Click to enlarge.

The crane delivers shingles to the roof ridge. Click to enlarge.

The state of the roof at the end of the long workday today. Click to enlarge.
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