We’ve been in the middle of a little roofing ordeal recently.  In short, we had hail damage to our house back in April.

 
(click pictures to embiggify)

The Durango got a little bit of damage, and you can see on the railing above that some of the lights got smashed.  We didn’t really think much of it in terms of our house until some roofers were going through the area and offered a free inspection of our roof. 

After a quick survey, they said the roof was totalled and we should get our insurance company out here.  So we did and they confirmed an entirely new roof needed to be put in, and that they’d pay for the whole thing minus deductible.

(click to embiggify)

Our deductible is actually quite low (compared to friends going through the same thing) so I was pretty happy to get a new roof for such a low amount of money.

I’ve heard bad stories about door-to-door roofers, so even though the traveling shingle seller was a bringer of blessings, I stayed away from them and besides, they were headquartered out of town, which didn’t necessarily add any feelings of security.  Instead I asked my friends who THEY used, if they liked them, etc.

One coworker said HIS roofer was all that and a bag of chips, so I called him up, had a nice conversation and scheduled a visit.  My coworker was right – the guy was honest, forthright, helpful and just about everything I could hope for in a contractor.  We scheduled the roof installation and waited.

About a week later, the roofers showed up early in the morning and proceeded to remove the existing roof.  I left to run some errands with my daughter, knowing that it would be half a day before the roofers were done.

Then it started raining.

HARD.

My wife called while we were out and said that it was leaking in the house, and that Jaden was putting out bowls and pans to catch the dripping water.

(click to embiggify)

Good thing for us this roofer maintained his honesty and integrity, and is working with us to fix all the damage before we pay him for the roofing repairs.  He’s also maintaining the responsibility to pay for all of it.  In his words, “I want you to be happy with the inside of the house before you pay me a penny on the roof.”  Man, it’s refreshing to have this kind of customer service.

Plus, the roof looks real good from the outside

Our problem right now is that these types of internal repairs are more difficult than you’d think, since we have no attic or crawl space.  Water damage is NOT a fun thing.  We gotta get someone with powerful vacuums and mold treatment sprayers and have about 2 feet of the roof taken off along both long edges.  Then it takes 2-3 days to do it all, since they have to take out all the blow-in insulation, wait for it to dry, then treat it with bleach, vinegar and water (or something like that), and then wait for it to dry as well.  Then they blow in the new insulation and put the roof sections back on. 

Needless to say, we hope it doesn’t rain those 2-3 days.

Meanwhile the house stunk of wetness, but that went away after about 5-6 days.  We’re hoping the replacement of roof insulation will be the last of it. We also hope our exposure to mold or mildew wasn’t too bad – we all stayed at a friends house for 2-3 days right after it happened just to be sure.

I know a number of bloggers do bullet fridays or bullet sundays, but I do Stuff You Don’t  Want To MISC. 

WordPress upgrade

I upgraded my blog to the latest released version of WordPress, 2.8.  The upgrade itself went fine (took about 1.5 minutes), but it appears most of the plugins I happen to use cause problems. 

This may make my blog slightly more unreadable than normal.

Most of them cause my dashboard to not display everything that it should.  Take a look here at a before and after:

Some of the plugins make half the page disappear, like above, and others make the entire page disappear.  Even others cause the plugins page to completely fail with Internal Server error 500.

I’m hoping the plugin developers take note and update their plugins.

wHAIL

Last night brought a severe thunderstorm, tornados, hail and all to our area.  For most people, this is not too big of a deal, but in our case it’s a little harder to deal with.  For these reasons:

1. My wife is still recovering from knee surgery and therefore only has one good leg to use.
2. My daughter had an MRI Arthogram on her ankle/foot late yesterday afternoon and was on crutches from that procedure.
3. We live in a double-wide, so high winds by any name usually bring a deep concern

Fortunately, we have nearby relatives in a “real” house, so that’s our place of refuge when events like this occur.  We even heard the tornado sirens in the neighborhood a couple of times.  Had I thought to move the family over about 10 minutes earlier than I did, I would have missed the sheets of rain and hail pelleting me as I moved them out of the house and into the car. 

I was pretty thankful for the umbrella I used, which deflected most of the hail from hitting us in the heads.  Most.

We came back home around 1am after everything died down and we were certain we could move without angering the skies.

Trillian Astra

Not only did I upgrade WordPress, I also upgraded my Trillian multi-protocol chat client from Trillian Pro 3.0 to Trillian Astra.  Astra is the code name for trillian 4.0, and it’s been in Beta for 2+ years.  I’ve been on some form of IM for more than 10 years, so I’ve collected a number of accounts.  Trillian has had it’s issues in the past (for me, it’s usually be CPU-related) but has been a great sidekick for me while I go about my heroic duties in life.

So far, I’d say Astra has everything good that the old version had, and adds some very neat new features.

The interface is pretty slick, too:

Some of the new features it adds that I’m excited about is facebook updates and twitter.  I like that it integrates with Google Talk a little better than before as well.  It also seems faster than the old version.  I went ahead and upgraded my Trillian Pro status for $10 (gets some more features).  Seems more fitting for my Windows 7 system.

Best of LOLcats

One of these is for Confab attendees.    Can you guess which?