Damn that Ice Dam!

Like many homes in New England that were utterly swamped with snow in the last six weeks, ours developed a massive ice dam on the roof. I'm not just talking a little ice dam. I'm talking a foot thick ice dam. Too late, hubby started picking at it, and filled cheap Wal-Mart hosiery with calcium chloride, and waited for the miracle to occur. When the sun hit these things, it was supposed to magically create channels for water from the melting ice to pass through, and hopefully would leave us with an ice-free roof, sooner rather than later.

All it did was turn the snow green.

We had a warming trend this week, so the roof is bare now, but it was too late to escape interior house damage. I watched the paint on my office wall blister out as water dripped in behind it. Luckily, these blisters did not burst, and now they have completely dried out, and the wall doesn't look so bad. But the ceiling...ugh! There's a patch near the window that look like an incurable skin disease. And the dampness traveled across the room and very nicely loosened the top layer of paint and weird sandy stuff, and it's peeling like a bad sunburn.

I could deal with this, no problem. I still have a house, even if it's a mess and spring will mean doing some cosmetic work in my office and bedroom. What is disconcerting is having bits of this paint/sandy stuff drop down on my head while I'm sitting at the computer typing, or sitting here playing guitar.

I was trying to learn the riff for "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" from Nirvana's "Unplugged" album when a rather large flake descended on my head and instantly broke into smaller flakes.

Maybe if I plug in to my amplifier the vibrations will shake the rest of it down, and we can be done with this for the time being...