Soldier Ant 

John Tolva, the gauntlet is thrown: in your corner, IBM corporate anthem "Ever Onward IBM!", a lilting little tune, circa 1958. In my corner? A brassy selection, The Power of Sun (set, of course, to that Huey Lewis fav.)

Hey! Supercool -- those crazy kids at Yahoo! have released their Design Pattern Library into the wild. I know some of the characters behind this, but I understand that the patterns themselves are the product of the entire design community at Yahoo. Well worth a poke, and a prod.

Would you believe that I actually slipped on a banana peel this morning? It's true; coming home from walking dogs (my first time in weeks, since my trip to California, plus a couple weeks with a nasty cold) I stopped by Starbucks.

With two venti bold-roast (the classic charred-roast) in hand, I was settling into my driver's side seat when my foot landed on the damn peel. I slipped, but somehow managed to keep the coffees upright (I've got my priorities, folks.) After a quick look around to see if anyone had witnessed my foolishness, I was safely in the Subaru and off.

On the 6-block trip home, I kept thinking of this quote by Mel Brooks:

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.

An unwelcome water-intrusion about a month ago has forced our hand sooner than we would've wanted: we've known since we moved in that we'd have to replace our roof eventually.

Particularly in the front of the house (the oldest part of the house, dating from around 1901) the current roof was amateurishly installed. No ventilation, no baffles of any kind, the shingle is just setting flat on the vaulted roof. During those hot Ohio summers, that room heats up like a convection oven and the poor shingle suffers for it. It bakes, then cools, bakes then cools, the ends curling up like Marlo Thomas's flip hairdo.

Then came the early-January rainstorms. Surprisingly, it wasn't the front of the house, but the back that got it (the water-damage.)

The very back of the house is the newest addition to the house, done in 1985, and it too has a problem roof. A low degree of slope ensures that water takes twice as long to run off, and there's some funky valley-trough that causes us problems. (It's been explained to me twice and I still don't entirely understand the issue. But that roof is a problem, trust me.)

So anyway, we're going to go ahead and do it. We took some bids from contractors that we thoroughly vetted thru Angie's List, and made our selection and signed the contract last week.

Somewhere in the course of that, we decided that our old smokestack was really bothering us. It vents a woodburning stove in our front living room. A stove that we've wanted to replace ever since we moved in.

The woodburner looks a little 70s ski lodge funky -- brown with gold trim -- and we have the usual prejudices against wood-burning: messy, demands a lot of storage space for the wood, and labor-intensive besides. To be honest, the only time that stove ever got any real play was when LeeAnn's brother Andy was living with us. That kid can stoke a mean fire.

Anyway, it makes a lot of sense to replace at least the smokestack before putting the new roof down. A gas stove requires a thinner stack, so we'll need to put new wood down right there, and you really want to give the roofers the chance to flash the whole thing in there, not the stove guys.

So I took the day off of work on Friday and LeeAnn and her Dad and I hit 3 different vendors in Columbus, wanting to compare three different manufacturers for a decent mid-size gas stove. We wanted to choose between Vermont Castings, Jøtul and Heat-n-Glo.

Okay, this is getting long, and it's pretty damn boring at this point..

So we really love the Jøtul Series 3 stoves, and we're going to get one. Hopefully soon, so we can schedule the roofers to come soon after. We may be dry and warm within the month, or at least while it's still cold enough out to enjoy our investment.

And that picture above? That's the Jøtul (a Norwegian company, pronounce it kinda like 'yodel') from their website. It's not our living room.