Shingles at last, shingles at last, thank God almighty....

(Apologies to Martin Luther King.)

The pre-stained #1 rejoined and rebutted western red cedar sidewall shingles are finally here!

This presents me with a number of issues:

#1 Getting them into the basement, because each box says "keep dry until installed." Luckily, the nice guy from the freight company, seeing that working alone I would have to schlep each box over to the basement door, hop down into the basement, pick up the box, put it down, climb back out of the basement, and repeat the whole thing, helped me tremendously by schlepping the boxes over while I stayed in the basement and stacked. This plan was almost nixed by Miz Biz (now known, in true 1L style, as "my little tortious liability") and her desire to attack. I whisked her into the basement where she could do no harm to the plaintiff.

#2 The shingles are stained with an oil-based stain, which is still curing, thus they stink. They're piled right below my bedroom. I can smell the fumes inside. This is the kind of thing that gives me a migraine.

#3 The shingles cannot be installed until we get a few dry days.

#4 Because there's only one coat of stain on the shingles, they're a bit blotchy. (See picture 2.) Ideally, I would throw an additional coat of stain on them immediately after installation, but that means I need at least two sequential weekends of dry weather.

So, my prediction is: barring a very nice October, no shingling until next spring.

But October's often nice, right? Right??