Levels of the game

Javier took the day off from the roof today, so it was just me holding down the porch, listening to Chris' leftover winds making thunder with the tacked-down tin.

"That's a great place to sit," said one woman strolling by; I heartily agreed. "I'll bet you can't wait till it's finished," said a guy a half-hour later. Again, no argument at all. "I did a renovation last year back home," he said -- turned out it was Toronto -- "and it was like a second college degree."

It's great to live in a place where passers-by say hey to a guy on a porch -- but I digress. The Candadian and I had a nice chat about learning the fine points of building.

When I checked up on what Javier had d finished yesterday, for example, I discovered another of the million things I didn't know.

In this case, there's s not just roofing paper under the tin, as you can see from this part of the "cricket" (a slanting plane that carries water away from the house) between the den and master bedroom. There's a rubber waterproof underlayer, welded together by a propane torch.

Crickets, kings, jacks, smurf tubes, plates, straps -- I've opened a whole new dictionary to guide me through an astonishing new encyclopedia.