Sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun. As I mentioned before, because of a hailstorm last spring, our house needed a new roof, siding, and garage door. As you may have guessed from the title, the siding work happened this week.
It wasn’t without problems – apparently it’s fairly common for siding work to mess up the fiber connection to the house, so my ISP was out here yesterday, starting to repair our internet connection as the siding team was wrapping up. And my mailbox, along with the neighbor’s, now have new posts because they got knocked over around lunch yesterday.
Here’s what the house looked like on Monday, with beige siding and brown gutters.
And here’s what the house looks like now, with blue siding, white gutters, and a white number plate with gold number replacing the old (and smaller) black numbers. At some point soon, the garage door will be replaced with a white one for a fairly uniform look.
As we come upon Super Tuesday and other primary dates, I thought it was important to mention that voting in primaries matters as much as voting in the general elections. Like with the general elections, there are local races that are probably not getting much press that you should absolutely pay attention to.
Let’s start at the top. If you use Ballotpedia to create a sample ballot based on your voting address, you should see the federal elections (in my case, Presidential and Congressional district candidates) and state races (Senate and House of Representatives). I’m (not surprisingly) voting in the Democratic Party primary, so without Ballotpedia, I wouldn’t have realized that our incumbent state representative has no primary candidates from other parties. When we bought this house in 2016, I noticed in that general election that several positions only had Republican candidates, so this is definitely a shift. If there’s one thing you can give the previous President credit for, it was galvanizing people to run for office at all levels because of how offensive he was (well, is).
And that’s where Ballotpedia stops for me. It says there are 4 candidate races on my ballot, so I have to research the county and township races somewhere else. Most of the primary candidates at this level are both incumbents and running unopposed, leaving only one race I feel I should research: the county recorder. Since the local races are the ones that will have a more direct impact on me – they influence property taxes, school and library boards, and such (though I still don’t know why county coroner is an elected position) – I’ll take the time to look up these two candidates before completing my mail-in ballot.
We attended Capricon last weekend, building a box fort (again!), hanging out with friends, and attending and/or participating in various panels. I’ve written about Capricon multiple times over the years, as it’s by far my favorite science fiction convention. Smaller conventions – say under a couple thousand people – give you plenty of opportunity to connect with your friends and random encounters with other people, including making new friends.
I’ve mentioned the parties a lot the last couple years, since we started running The Box Fort party at Capricon. While those fill my late night hours (and my nights are definitely later than normal when I’m at conventions), there are a lot of options during the day as well. There are panels on a wide variety of geeky subjects, including a writer’s track for existing and aspiring authors. There’s a gaming room with an extensive library – it was open Thursday evening, then re-opened Friday morning and stayed open until Sunday afternoon. The filk track had both a variety of scheduled events and open jam times.
There were several shopping opportunities between the dealer’s hall, art show (I sold some crocheted items), and author signings that were located just outside the dealer’s hall. Any art show items that receive three or more bids end up at the art auction; this year that included a good selection of board games from our friend Marinda’s collection, donated to support the convention’s designated charity for the year.
Alas, at least one event on the calendar was cancelled because of the weather. The annual “Snow Goons!” (a tribute to Calvin & Hobbes) outing relies on actual snow; last weekend was surprisingly warm. Regardless, a convention like this is a great opportunity to let your geek flag fly, with whatever fandoms you’re inclined to include on that flag.
As I recently mentioned, a hailstorm last spring did considerable damage to our house. By the time I wrote that post, I had signed paperwork with [company name removed] to handle the work and provided them with a chunk of insurance money. (The insurance process involves providing part of the money in advance, and some only when they receive receipts proving that you actually did the repairs and spent the money you’re asking for above the initial payment.) The first step in the work – after the decision-making and signatures, of course – is the roof replacement.
Then it snowed, a fairly significant amount over the course of a week – we reached the 9-inch mark on the snow gauge in the front lawn. And then the temperature dropped, including a couple days where the wind chill was around negative thirty. Needless to say, those weather conditions are not conducive to working on a roof.
This week, after most of the snow had melted, the construction company reached out to schedule our installation day. Since our neighbor just had their roof replaced last month – by the same company, for the same hailstorm reason – I had a fairly good idea what the process would be like. The day before installation, they dropped off supplies onto our driveway in two waves: the first delivery was the shingles, and the second an assortment of other large items in their packaging. Early on the morning of, a trailer was backed into the driveway to serve as a dumpster, and around 7am, the team arrived to begin work.
Except for a brief lunch break, they worked all day, moving any obstacles (like the composter and solar path lights), laying tarp around the edges of the house to catch refuse flung from the roof, then tearing off the old roof before taking new roofing supplies up. (The entire process was loud, Zuko hid most of the day.) They had a fancy ladder with a lift attached to raise the heavy supplies to the roof. They finished as it was getting dark, so the photo of the finished roof is from the next (quite sunny) day.
