One of my roommates was ill last night. I stayed up until around 3:00 AM with her this morning, as she struggled to find a way to deal with vomiting and a high fever. I did what I could, fluffing pillows and bringing her water, but I felt pretty useless. I was quite worried - she is a very tough girl, so to see her crying because of pain is unusual and frightening. She is somewhat better now, and finally sleeping... so naturally, the roofers have arrived.
A few weeks ago, our landlord decided that our house needed a new roof (very responsible of him), so his contractors started ripping the shingles off yesterday at 8:00 AM. They continued to bang and thump about on the roof until well after dark yesterday, and they returned this morning promptly at 8:00 AM to continue. I've had about four hours of sleep. It's Saturday, guys... can't you come back on Monday, when I have to get up and go to campus anyway? 
If you've never lived in a house that is being shingled, let me describe it for you. A crew of 4 or 5 men with kneepads, armed with pneumatic nail guns, hammers, nail bars, electric saws, and a noisy air compressor clamber on to your roof and stomp about. They drag heavy things around. They pry stuff off and throw it in a big dumpster parked conveniently in your driveway. Eventually, they begin nailing the new shingles down with the nail guns. Nail guns are amazing tools; they use compressed air to fire belt fed nails through the shingles and into the roof - which sounds a bit like small arms fire. When two or three of them get going at once it sounds like a war movie is being shot on your roof.
I'll be hiding in the basement until the skirmish up there subsides.
Early Saturday Morning
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It's true, roofing can be... strange. I swear I saw one of the roofers yelling about steers and queers yesterday while his assistant did nail-gun drills...
I went back inside and turned the lights off...
Joanna had her roof done a few weeks ago. Those boys and girls were toting hatchets around and apparently had to cut through several layers of roofing materials that had, in the past, simply been ignored while the new material went on top. I was nearly clipped by a piece of roof that was tossed down with rusty nails protruding from the timber. I examined the piece, and apparently in the past the number of nails needed to hold down a shingle were vastly greater than today... when you have 15 nails in a piece of wood about 10 inches long, that must mean that shingles "back in the day" were a more wild and rambunctious sort that needed extra persuading to stay nailed down, unlike their domesticated descendants today. So aside from the small arms fire, we had the added mystery of repairing a roof with hand axes. It was like a dozen hobbits were doing construction above our heads. I have never felt safer.
On another note, the word verification for this post was drugme.
Welcome back, Captain Corley...
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