(no subject)

In the Hitch-Hiker-s Guide, Ford Prefect is trying to convince a Vogon guard not to throw him out the airlock. He asks what's good about being a guard.

"Well, the hours are good. But now that you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy."

That's my job. Many of the actual minutes are pretty lousy. Pay's not great either, especially this year with the "voluntary" pay cuts our buddy the Guv extorted from us. But the hours are good, and the benefits are still ok, in spite of years of attacks on them.

One of these is sick leave. I'm using a bit of sick leave today.

I'm not really THAT sick. I'm just fighting off a disease I call the Practical Joke Flu. It laid me low yesterday. I went back to work today but it came back on me again, so I went home.

The Practical Joke Flu puts me in a half-stupor, ruins my coordination, makes everything seem far away and unreal. In short, it's rather like being stoned, with the amusing addition of thunderous farts. Farts that could shatter glass.

At least my appetite is coming back. I think I'll feel like eating lunch today. Yesterday I chewed and swallowed some chicken soup, but it was only out of some weird sense of duty or something.

I suppose I could have toughed it out at work. Spread the virus, shut the whole office down... yeah. But there's another reason to vanish today. We have another winter storm bearing down on us, and this one may turn out to be a real SOB. Freezing rain followed by snow. We might get rain, we might get a foot of snow, we might get anything between.

I guess we'll know by this evening. In the meantime, I'm going to go back to bed.

(no subject)

Ice Damns Redix

So, woozy from the Practical Joke Flu, I went in for a nap. And heard water dripping. This is a bit alarming since the nearest LICENSED drip would be about twenty feet down the hall, in the bathroom.

A leak in the roof. Damn.

Or dam, as the case may be, because it's the ice dams on the north side of the house. I'd been keeping an eye on them by the porch, and found them much less than previous years-- welcome proof, I thought, that the measures I took last summer had solved my problem. I didn't think to get out and wade through the still thigh-deep snow to the north side of the house to look at them there. They're twice as bad as last year's over there. I have no idea why.

Nothing to do but go out in the freezing rain and bash the ice with a crowbar. I cracked a wide drainage path through the ice dam, took me about three hours to do it, but it's late enough in the winter that the odds are that will solve the problem for this year. Now, instead of pooling up, creeping upslope and back under the shingles, the water can find its way out and over the edge.

This ice was a foot thick at the edge of the roof. Tephie tells me that some of her geology students in Arizona didn't know that ice is a mineral, because they didn't know it was a naturally-occurring substance, or could form rocks. Trust me, if they'd bashed on the ice dams with a crowbar for three hours they'd know it makes rocks, and blasted hard ones too.

I think I'm getting over the bug still.. the exposure to the cold hasn't harmed me. But my arms and shoulders ache, and my thumbs are so tired from holding that crowbar in the cold and wet that I can hardly get them to move well enough to type this.

Awfully glad water dripped just when I was listening, though. I think I caught it before any permanent damage was done-- except to the fiber ceiling tiles in the spare bedroom, which are even more water-stained now than they were before. No big yank, I'm gonna get them covered with plasterboard when I can afford it anyway.

But I'd better get that metal roof I've always wanted first, because if you got water into a plaster ceiling instead of a tile one, it wouldn't just soak through and evaporate relatively harmlessly. Nope, it would accumulate until the whole ceiling came down.