Gonna Be Three Very Long Days Around Here

NOT my house, but I have at least this many roofers crawling around on mine right now

 Well, as promised, the roofers arrived about six-thirty this morning to start moving their equipment into place (all raw materials were delivered yesterday afternoon). And by seven-fifteen the ripping and banging was well on the way, so I'm hoping my next door neighbor and the houses behind me were wide awake at that point. If not, I'm sure it didn't take long to get them all to that state of being. 

Too, that means cars and trucks are parked all over the corner I live on, including the three vehicles that live here with us. So barely controlled chaos seems to be the plan for the rest of the week. I have to say that the neighbors are all being very patient because several of the homes within "listening distance" are also scheduled for new roofs following the hale storm that killed off mine. (And my house is only the second one that's even gotten to this point of the replacement process, so it's going to be noisy around here for a while.)

I did try reading for a while while I was having my coffee this morning, but that didn't go very well because of the racket overhead. So we opted for breakfast out, followed by a quick library stop for me to return a book from my stack that I abandoned yesterday (a debut novel by a young Irish guy filled with characters who seemed in a big hurry to go exactly nowhere). Big mistake. In the ten minutes I was there, I dropped off the one book and spotted three new ones to take home with us.

Couldn't resist these for even ten minutes:

I've read and enjoyed three or four other titles by Sandra Dallas, so I knew the name, but in all honesty what snagged me on this one is that beautiful, eye-catcher of a cover. Dallas writes period-novels about very ordinary people and their lives, and at least all the ones I've seen are set in the American west of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This one is about a young school teacher who moves to a "two-street" Wyoming town in 1916. The story is about how she finds a husband and forms strong bonds with the other women living around her.

The Revivalists is one of those apocalyptic novels I've loved so much since I stumbled upon my first one as a young teen reader. Now they read to me more like training manuals for our likely future, so I hope that something from all that reading has sunk in and makes me useful enough that the new ruling class decides to keep me around for a while. In this one, it all starts when "Shark Flu" emerges from the meltdown of Icelandic permafrost. Global warming, anyone? Who knew we had to worry about Iceland now, too.

I'm a big fan of the Outlander TV series, which has just begun its sixth season, so when I spotted this memoir from actor Sam Heughan I had to take a look. As it turns out, the memoir combines with another favorite genre of mine, books about Long Walks, so it was an obvious choice to make this morning's cut. It appears that Heughan made a ninety-six-mile walk across some of Scotland's West Highlands during one of his long breaks between Outlander seasons. Can't imagine how he made it, so this should be an interesting one.

I just realized how quiet it's suddenly gotten...sounds like there are only one or two guys on the roof. Must be lunch time because the crew is gathering in the shade of the tall Oak tree in my front yard. Now I need to grab something to read for the next hour.