Sometimes They Walk Out Of A Book

Welcome to the three column GLow monster ;-). I'll be moving links and stuff around for better eye/space coordination. Hopefully, when I'm done, this place will look more functional, letting readers look at my books at one side and my more personal quirky collection of stuff on the other. That's the plan, anyway, but I'm by nature a messy person, so I have a feeling the end product is just going to be all frenetic and crazy like me.

If you have any suggestions or if you know how to move that pic to the middle, feel free to post. Because I need all the help I can get when it comes to computers and arranging things.

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Talking about quirky characters, I have one that is definitely going into my book of character sketches one day. This man is in his mid-fifties, I think, and talks slowly, like a Florida cracker (good ole boy). He wears a suit and tie. He drives a James Bond Beamer, you know, the one in the movies. He has a high-paying job/he might own (not sure) a steel factory.

Now, if you meet someone like this, what would be your expectations/assumptions? In the usual book of character sketches, you might imagine him perhaps a Southern gentleman, maybe grown up poor and is now making big bucks, and he'd have women in his life. You would definitely peg him down as someone who owns a nice house, right?

Well. Suppose you go to his residence and it's this Very Dilapidated house? The roof is so old, it's probably the original shingles, but you can't tell because there are only crumbles of what used to be a roof left. HOLES gape at the sunlight and rain, holes left unattended for so long, the surrounding plywood sheathing are warped and gnarled by the elements. Water has been pouring into this house for years.

And this is only THE FRONT SIDE of the house. The back is covered by plastic sheets, like what you see after a hurricane, except there hasn't been a hurricane in these parts for a few years. The plastic looks old and moldy. On removal, you find another layer of tar paper tacked on top of two other layers of tar paper. Then, after removing that, you find big pieces of plywood nailed on top of the shingles. It seems, as the years went by, the owner of the house has just kept putting on layers of "protection" to stop the leaks.

The roof is so bad, in fact, in a year or two, removal of shingles wouldn't have been neccessary. All you needed to do was climb up there, avoid the holes, and SWEEP the remaining shingle granules off.

Yes, you guess it. This is my current job. RB and I replaced so many pieces of sheathing that we might as well have rebuilt a whole roof deck for this place. At one point, we took out so many of them, we could look inside the house, which HAD SEVERAL big holes in the ceiling because, obviously, the roof has been leaking for years. There is a dog in the house, wandering from room to room and sleeping in the insulation that fell from the "attic." He just stares up at us everyday.

At one point, we found a nest of ants living in the wet decaying wood. RB told me to go into the garage and look for some insect-killer. When I got back, I reported: "Umm. There's nothing in the garage except for stinky clothes and a bottle of Armor All." I had to crack up at that because the Armor All was all about character.

At the end of the first day, the owner came home from work. Parked his shiny Beamer right beside the dilapidated home.

He looked up and asked, "How ya doin'?"

RB said, "Looks like it might rain tonight. We won't be able to replace all the plywood."

"That's okay. I'm used to a little water in the house."

I almost fell off the roof. Now, THAT, is character study.

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