How to Distract Yourself from Missing Football

Yes, I'm really missing my Sundays spent watching football. I miss the football. I miss the 1:00 game. I miss the 4:00 game. And I really miss the 8:00 Sunday Night Football game. (I even miss Madden even though he's not calling the games any more--my memory hasn't latched onto that yet.)

But Troy helps me work through it by distracting me and keeping me busy with siding. Yes, we were at it again.

Having gotten past the window last week, it was a straight run for the northeast corner. I estimated we had 12 sheets to go so we set a goal of doing at least six today. That way we'd be half way (obviously) and could be pretty sure of being able to finish next time.

The only thing slowing us down was working around the hill from the cistern. I don't know if you can see it very well in this picture but there is a ring of rocks that come within 12 to 14 inches of the shop:

(The orange line approximates the lower edge of the cistern; the yellow line, the top.) If you can believe it, Troy and Isaac completely cleared off the cistern two summers ago. The sumacs have come back like gangbusters; some of the trees are as thick as Troy's arm already!

While impeded upon by the cistern, we had to work with a smaller ladder and that meant I couldn't work under Troy. But we figured it out and progress continued...and continued...

and we got eight done!! (If you don't think that's worth bold type and two exclamation points, then you don't have enough vested in getting this stop done!) And we got them done very quickly; we were done by five. I believe we would have gotten even more up but we ran out of flashing:

Troy says that is now at the top of his list. (But the first thing he did when we were done was run out to the garden, so I think there's a lot of room at the "top" of his list.)

And what does the north wall look like now? We have made enough progress I can finally take a picture from the east side:

That looks so good, let's see another shot:

Unless we run into big trouble, two more work days just might do it for the siding! Now that will be worth bold, exclamation points and italics! (And might even be more rewarding than watching a Manning-Clark touchdown.)