IceFloe of Sleet

It's still cold and grey out. Our ceiling sprung a new leak. This is #3, but it was a relatively small one. The roofers came at 9 and scooped the snow off all the flat parts of the roof with great alacrity. They also smashed off the icicles, which was exciting and made some fun sounds. Now there are vast mounds of snow along the back of the house, thoroughly blocking both the back door and the door to the screen porch. I expected this. One can still exit through the garage in an emergency, and at some point I will go out through the front door and make my way around to the back, where I will clear away in front of the doors. Awhile ago, when I was thinking about accessibility, I realized that most Michigan houses have steps up to the doors for this very reason. If the doors were flush to the ground, they'd be blocked by every snowfall. When there are steps, the doors aren't blocked until a couple of feet of snow has fallen. The ceiling continued to leak. I assume that quite a bit of water had already infiltrated the roof, and it will keep dripping until it's all gone. At the moment, it's not dripping, because the sun has gone down, and the water is freezing.

By the time the roofers left, the Sparrowhawk was tired. Neither of us slept well last night. He let me drive myself to my lunch with the Former Student, rather than dropping me off and taking the rental car to get our stuff from the wreck lot. Holy cow, it is weird driving that monster car! It's YUGE. And in the modern fashion, it has one of those giant touchscreens in the dashboard. I could not decipher it and didn't want to. It was as much as I could do to figure out how to change gears. The Former Student made a very good decision and changed our location to a restaurant in a strip mall on the outskirts, so I didn't have to navigate through downtown and find parking. Our meeting was a great success. It was interesting and fun. Although it concerned death and many somewhat macabre subjects, the FS laughed until tears ran from his eyes several times. He said "Oh, this was so good for me. I haven't laughed like this in weeks." He was leaving for a conference several hours away after lunch. I used to send cookies with him when he would go to visit my mother, so they could have some sociability in assisted living. She felt embarrassed when she had nothing to offer guests. So he gave the cookies to her, and then she gave them to him. For old times' sake, I gave him a little baggie of cookies for the road, which I think warmed his heart.

Tonight, the Sparrowhawk's book club was in the neighborhood. Instead of driving the Monster Truck around a couple of blocks, he opted to ask another book club member to stop by and pick him up. It's within walking distance, normally, but not in the snow, in the dark, for someone with Parkinson's. He took along some cookies, too. Those cookies are getting around.