Crazy Stable

Yesterday I planned to relax in post-houseguest mode, putter, and progress in my third-floor rehabilitation, but that was before the nor'easter. (What's with that apostrophe, anyway? Why do we suddenly turn into old seafaring salts chomping pipes around a crackerbarrel when referring to this meteorologic phenomenon? Gar, gar, cap'n...she's a fine nor'easter!) During the recent monsoon, the trickle of roof tea in the second-floor laundry room had advanced to a brisk drumbeat into the foil catchbasins. It had just about dried out, and now this fresh onslaught...So I spent yesterday morning scaring up a roofer to slap some flashing cement on the offending Valley of the Damned before the deluge. Nice fellow named Nick showed up. Carries insurance! (Which is to say, he's expensive.)  Seems to know what he's doing, and to take some pity on me (How long ya been in this house?)...barks very specific orders at his guys...informs me that a whole new roof would run about $40,000 (this is about what I'd heard from others, believe it or not), and that today's outing, whose results he could not guarantee, would be $950. Black stuff was slapped about as I davened and stuffed myself with little Hershey bars and paced. Soon,
extension ladders were screeched and borne away, and dark wedges of cloud scudded in.

And today it rained, hard...and it leaked quite a bit less in the laundry room.  Just a few tablespoonsful from a whole nor'easter. Which is not quite the bang I'd desired for that particular pile of bucks.  The whole affair, combined with the sudden need to turn on the heat (now a commodity so expensive that it feels like some designer drug to be resisted by force of character), has just had me curled in a ball like a hibernating vole.  The Crazy Stable loves summer: Almost every room has two capacious windows inviting the breezes, which issue from Prospect Park still fragrant with pine and pond, and the Ent provides a towering green scrim. The Crazy Stable detests winter: Warmth vamooses out of every crack, the wind rips in from the park's expanse, and the Ent groans under a weight of icicles, while the various parts of the steam heating system wheeze and hiss and fizzle. Today was the season opener of Flue Spillage Season--in a high wind, the pilot blows out on the hot water heater, usually while I am steamily showering to defrost my poor overstuffed hibernating-vole body. (Why does fat insulate other mammals and not me?) And, after $950, there is still roof tea brewing. 

Could've been worse department: The wind has died down, and the Ent is unscathed...