The Meltdown

Me and my big mouth. I now realize I shouldn't speak lightly of the spring thaw. It can be a serious event ... which we found out when we got home last night.

Our plans were that Jim was going to make a quick supper while I got some things together for a meeting at church. It was fortunate that I had to go into our "computer room" right away to print off an agenda. That's where I noticed the water.

It was leaking from the ceiling but pretty much at the point above the window. So it missed the computer, the scanner, the printer, by mere inches. The only casualties were a 15-year-old boom box, some printer paper and some books (that I may just keep despite wrinkly pages).

Carter and I worked frantically with towels and a bucket while Jim assessed the situation outside. This is what we found. First, the snow on the back deck is waist high. Jim put a ladder on top of that to peer at the roof. What he found was a foot-thick "ice dam" (which I think I heard him refer to as "damn ice" later).

How do you begin to chip away at that? First he tried from the ladder and actually bent a hammer, rendering it useless. Then he went around to the front of the house, climbed the roof and started shoveling and hacking and chipping away. Thanks to neighbor Mike and his muscles and giant ice pick (which I am pretty sure is normally used for ice fishing), the two made some decent headway and the leaking stopped.

On their side was Daylight Savings Time, giving them an extra hour of light to work by. Also, we were just plain lucky I had to go into that room right away or who knows when we would have discovered it.

Today Jim is leaving work early to shovel off or chip off what is left up on the roof, then tackle the 3 feet of snow on the deck. We'd hate for that to melt on the patio below and start flooding the basement.

Now we're of the mindset we'd prefer a slow spring thaw or it could get really messy. I guess it probably goes without saying that the word roof may move up to the top of the list of things to do with that tax rebate. Sigh... I guess it probably goes without saying, too, that I stopped on the way to work to buy Powerball tickets.