New Roof

  • July 1, 2026

That’s a close up of our old roof, and yes there’s trees growing in the gutter! I used to get up on a ladder and clear them out, but it became more difficult every year and… I just stopped.

Furthermore the roof itself was wearing out, and moss had started to grow on it. Since it was there when we bought the house, it was at least 25 years old, and very likely much older than that.

It was time to replace both the roof and gutters. Finding companies to do both was much easier than expected, and we had both jobs done during the past week. The roof came first.

The first step was to put this giant tarp shield up around the house, to protect everything when the pieces of the old roof came down.

After the tarp was up it was time to tear off the new roof. I was home when this occurred and the noise inside was unreal – like fifty tornadoes destroying the house simultaneously. It took them about two hours to completely remove the old roof and underlay, which included a surprisingly thorough process of cleaning the plywood underneath to prepare for the new roof.

It was dark inside due to the tarps, but as you can see sun was shining into the attic with the roof off!

The top shows the bare plywood – only two pieces of which needed replacing. They then put three layers of waterproofing underlay down (middle photo) before laying down the new shingles.

I had been wondering how they got the heavy boxes of shingles up onto the roof, and the answer was with this ‘laddervator’. A motor-powered elevator attached to a ladder carried them up in moments, and then the workers placed them on the roof near where they’d be installed. Every time they dropped the shingles down the sound inside was like an elephant jumping onto the roof. The cats were terrified!

After the shingles were done all that was left was waterproofing the chimney and installing the piece at the top of the roof (called a ‘ridge cap’). They then did another exhaustive cleanup of the property – including using an electric magnet to comb the grass for nails – before it was all done.

All told it took seven guys about seven hours. It looks great, and is warrantied for fifty years. It will outlive me 🙂

If you look closely at the above photo you’ll notice there aren’t any gutters, since the old ones were removed before the roof went on. It was four days before the process was completed with new gutters being installed.

This process began with careful measurements, before a machine called a ‘guttermaker’ extruded our new gutters in a single forty-six-foot piece!

This was entertaining to watch. They told me the theoretical longest gutter the machine could make was over 700 feet (!) and the longest they’d made was about 150 feet, which required six men to carry.

The gutters are aluminum, which begun as a flat roll of metal. After endcaps were put on the new – permanent – guards were attached:

We don’t have a lot of leaf material falling onto our roof, but these guards should prevent any that does from going into the gutters. This means we (hopefully!) won’t have trees growing on our roof any more.

The new gutters were then attached in a single piece, new downspouts were fashioned and attached, and the job was done:

All told it took three people three hours. Like the roof these are wandered for decades, and I hope they’ll outlive us 🙂

All told the new roof and gutters was much easier and less expensive than what we expected. If I’d known that in advance, we may have got this done years ago.

Fireworks Shopping

  • June 28, 2026

We went fireworks shopping yesterday, a now-annual tradition to secure supplies for next weekends pyromania.

As usual the selection at the store we go to – about two hours drive east to New Hampshire – was enticing, with the majority being large and expensive ‘cakes’ where a single fuse results in several spectacular minutes of explosions and sparks.

We don’t buy these of course, since they’re not permitted where we live. But I always daydream of setting them off!

The ‘Ghost Dragon’ is a large box big enough to hold a watermelon, fires only 9 shots over 30 seconds, and costs $140! Thats a lot of money for a single fuse, but at least people living miles away will know you’ve lit it 🙂

If you’d rather deafen only those living in your street, I imagine 8000 tiny firecrackers would do the job. This massive roll is heavy and expensive, but you’d feel it in your bones if you could light it and stand only a dozen feet away!

If we lived somewhere remote I’d invest in a mortal launcher and some artillery shells like this set. These are essentially commercial fireworks, just like you see out on by a town or city. I find it amazing that in many states here you can just buy these and launch them in your backyard! (Although we don’t buy these, many in our state do and we expect to see a few visible from KLS’s parents yard next weekend.)

The above is most of what we bought. In total it cost $250.71, and as a bonus they gave us three free fireworks and offered us some artillery shells (which we declined).

Since the purchase and use of fireworks is ancient history for the Antipodean readers, I’ll go through the above in a little more detail…

These little guys are what I light before it gets dark because I’m too impatient to wait! A few tiny crackers, some spinners, flashers etc. are a fun intro to the true show. These are inexpensive and fun.

Here’s the sparklers, which never get old. The two on the top are hand-held, and the others are the different types (including the crackling ones). We also bought some of the meter-long ones. Sparklers are the only ‘firework’ still sold where we live, although they’re still not easy to find in stores.

To get to NH we have to drive through Vermont, where fireworks aren’t legal for sale either. However ‘smoke fireworks’ are available there, although these two were bought at the same store we got everything else. These simply emit thick smoke, often coloured. I was tempted to buy one of the ‘five minute smoke’ ones but recalled that when we lit one years ago the amount of smoke was gargantuan and we almost went insane trying to put it out after a minute or so 🙂

Ground spinners are a favourite of ours. You light them, they spin around quickly, and then the better ones fly up into the air. These can go very high, and sometimes leave trails of sparks as they rise. The ‘Gyro Sonic’ is something we’d not got before, and the description is a little mysterious. I can’t wait to see what it does!

These are the only traditional ‘fountains’ we bought this year. Our shows used to be dominated by these back when fireworks were briefly sold here, since ‘launchers’ were not permitted. These are pretty devices that shoot out fountains of sparks, often accompanied by crackling noises and tiny little bursts. The ‘No. 8 Cone’ on the left cost $8 and only lasts 15 seconds but claims to shoot sparks 3 meters into the air!

This sword is a handheld fountain, shooting sparks out from the tip. A few years back these were sculptured as medieval blades, but now they’re always lightsabers. One of the ones at the shop even had a light up battery powered blade!

This year is the 250th anniversary celebration of the United States, so of course we couldn’t pass up this launcher that shoots 250 balls! I don’t think this will be noisy, just lots (and lots!) of roman-candle like projectiles shooting up over a half minute or so.

Here’s some more roman candles, and we got this pack since they all claim to be different. As a child we used to shoot these at each other using garbage can lids as shields, but we were immortal in those days and never cared about repercussions.

Incidentally it can be difficult to determine actually what a lot of these fireworks do. Something that says ‘emits showers of sparks‘ is just a fountain, but if something says ‘shoots flaming balls‘ then it fires a projectile upwards. If it includes the word ‘reports‘, then that means an explosion accompanied by a loud bang. We try to avoid the more powerful and noisy examples, but over the years one or two have snuck through our vetting process.

These guys all ‘shoot flaming balls with reports’, but they’re all small and short and I doubt the ‘report’ will be very loud compared to some of the examples shown at the top that we didn’t buy.

Here’s some more we got. Some of these are very heavy since they’re packed with clay to weigh them down. A few of these have QR codes on them so you can watch a YouTube video to get an idea what they do, which helps, but even then it’s not uncommon for the link to be dead or even direct to a different product!

We’ve got no idea what the above one does, but I’m sure it’s obvious why we purchased it. Based on the aisle in which it was sold I expect it’s a noisy one, but you can see it doesn’t even include the word ‘report’. I guess we’ll find out on Saturday 🙂

I expect all this will take a couple of hours to set off, and as usual I’ll try to take photos and capture some video. If you could light one of these in your backyard, which one would it be?

Japan Pickups: Gamebooks

  • June 26, 2026

I was stoked to buy the above three Japanese Fighting Fantasy (FF) books on the recent trip. Each is in immaculate condition for books almost forty years old, and included unused adventure sheets (shown below each in the photo). These weren’t cheap, but I now own 75% of the original Japanese editions and if I see one I don’t own, I’m buying it 🙂

This was a surprise! Tantalon’s Cube describes itself as the first Advanced Fighting Fantasy (AFF) adventure, and is a lengthy quest where adventures must assembled the ‘Cube Of Balance’ created by the legendary King Tantalon to save the Kingdom of Galantaria from invasion. This – a Japanese only book – seems to be full of references to the larger FF world, not the least being Tantalon himself. I’m sure you’ll agree the cover art is wonderful.

The book itself is a traditional RPG module in the bunko (A6) size as was common in Japan when it was printed. It’s full of original art and many half-page small maps like those above. I’ve never seen or even heard of this book before, so I was surprised to find it for a very low cost (under $10)!

I don’t often buy Japanese AFF rulebooks, but I like monster manuals and this recently printed third version caught my eye.

Much like the previous ‘Out Of The Pit’ monster manuals this is loaded with stat blocks for monsters taken from FF books, including the newer titles published during the Wizard and Scholastic era. Lots of lovely art and detailed descriptions for beasts that had perhaps a single line in the original books 🙂

This is the very recent Japanese translation of the FF history book first published in 2014. From what I read this was a kickstarted product that is currently still shipping to backers, so I was surprised to find it in a used store. This was expensive, at about $100.

I was even more surprised when I opened it and found it was actually new! This is a lovely book – printed on high quality paper, hardbound and with a metallic ink and red velvet cover. It’s also written in an interactive format which surprised me, since I’ve got the original 2014 version (and the 2016 update), neither of which were written as a gamebook:

I was so impressed by this updated version I’ve now purchased the English edition, which while hardly as impressive in terms of production quality, means I’ll be able to read it!

But the best part of this premium set is the inclusion of a separate, smaller volume that is a history of FF in Japan. As a collector of the Japanese editions, I hope this is full of answers to many questions I have:

The above example page contains a discussion of Japanese bootleg FF books (!) and the entry itself is impossible to reach if you read the book interactively, which is a joke reference to paragraphs in some FF books which the player can never read without ‘cheating’ 🙂

I’m very much looking forward to reading this Japanese history!

Lastly I purchased nine Queen’s Blade gamebooks. I already owned about twenty, and with this purchase I think I have more than half of them. These remain very inexpensive at the used stores in Japan – none of the above cost me more than $7 – and I’ll continue to buy them as I see them on future trips.