Luckily, the weather has been kind to us in October: it was much colder in May and early June. Well, maybe not, but we had a lot more fires. It's been warm and off and on sunny and workable, with the odd downpour which fills the crawl space for the frog down there. It has proved to be quite complicated getting together the materials to finally shut the house up but I can now report for the patient readers of these notes from Grandpa that everything is in place and will be delivered Thursday and Friday. The 2 by 6 tongue in groove has been the culprit: we waited 3 weeks for CENTRAL to deliver the order from Montreal, but we should have known that those Montrealers were bullshitting. By the third official delay I have enough and get back on the phone looking for a Nova Scotian solution and, finally, I am given a name by the rep of a wholesalers for stores like Home Hardware, a small mill in Truro and a call to the Irish Canadian owner is enough. He is very honest and wants the business. After a panic about the humidity of his spruce, he suggests Alberta pine at the same very reasonable price which is only 12-15% humidity. It is like a miracle and Mike and his brother, Glen, arrive Tomorrow morning, Thursday 20 October, with 10,000 feet of Albert Pine! On Friday we receive the 44 3-foot panels of charcoal grey panels and their hardware as well as the 2-inch insulating foam and bingo! We have everything we need to make the roof sandwich, 5 inches of protection... But not before another huge downpour promised for tonight and tomorrow! The frog will get a reserve of water in his cave. So, this is a story which should end well with the house windowed and doored and roofed and shut up for 6 months with a couple of holes cut in the wall to allow it to dry out... And we'll get back to Montreal in the first or second week of November. Janet and Wayne have offered to come up for the weekend to help with the roof, an offer which we have gratefully accepted. We have just enough home-made beer for a last party. Furious exchanges with Stephen B and Donagh T on the upcoming World Cup final between the French and the Kiwis which, sadly, should be won by the All Blacks, that is unless the French can turn on their Blanco. DC and I were in Sydney at Mary-Anne's house to watch the semi-finals and that All-Black team looks as though there isn't much room to get through. They are even a very exciting team. The French need help for the final... I now have two Makita drills, the second one recommended by Stephen B. who has a fair bit of building experience himself: the second one makes a swift job of drilling into the crawl space concrete to install wire mesh over the vents. It has a hammer mode! I am beginning to get fascinated by these tools. It is amazing what you can't do without them.