A little rain must fall

Well, we'd been very blessed this past week+ with awesome remodel weather. As is typical for the 4th of July in northwest Oregon, however, it rained today.

I was still lying awake in bed when I heard the sound of someone using a large concert band bass drum somewhere nearby. I thought about the parade at the St. Paul rodeo, but it was still too early and I don't think the sound would travel from St. Paul that well. I looked outside and saw the lightning and then booked downstairs to check my favorite mashup weather site and saw a severe-rated rain storm coming up from the south. It was just making it's way through north Salem. Oh, goody.

Even though it looked like it would mostly his McMinnville and Dundee, I got on the horn, and finally, after about 45 minutes, had my framer and a 30x60' tarp ready to spread. Now, let me hand out some free advice: a 6/12 pitch roof may be relatively easy to walk on in general, but if you try to walk on a tarp on that roof, you will not stay in place. You will slide and you will see flashes of your family and friends as you scramble for a foothold, or to grab the rumpled tarp with your fingers. Oh, and if you're holding onto a handful of nails or a staple gun, it's ok to drop them first. Here's another bit of information, not advice though, but just a so's you knows: a large tarp is hard enough to unfurl on the ground. On a roof, with a bit of wind, lightning and thunder, it's enough to nearly make you curse aloud at the inventors of the machines which fold those dastardly things in such a way that no mere mortal can understand.

So, in the end, my house was covered with a relatively short shower of rain which looked something like this to the weather radar folks:

So, now I have a really nice blue tarp roof. Like the kind Jeff Foxworthy talks about. Sorry, I have only one dog and he doesn't sleep under the front porch. And I don't even own any cinder blocks to prop up my car with. Aren't those storm clouds to the west, after the rain passed through, just dark and nasty-lookin'? I'm sure it dumped hard on McMinnville.