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Roof Woes, Party Parties and Tree Climbers

   Written by on September 8, 2016 at 9:40 am
The stories in this column are true. Averett lives a dull life in rural Southside Virginia with his wife Management, two children and a rotating assortment of goats, dogs, cats, snakes and other local fauna.

The stories in this column are true. Averett lives a dull life in rural Southside Virginia with his wife Management, two children and a rotating assortment of goats, dogs, cats, snakes and other local fauna.

I have to say it was all my fault but all of it really wasn’t my fault. What we had was a failure to communicate. Last week I almost finished my new (I’ve only been working on it for a year) back porch roof. I picked up some color charts for the tin and got some prices, which I gave to Management. She picked slate gray.

Now my position on a roof is that if nobody, including me, can see it, it really doesn’t matter what color it is or how bad it looks as long as it keeps the water out. I already had dozens of sheets of used tin in inventory. I have green, brown and an attractive rust color. All of this I received at my favorite price of Zero Dollars and Zero Cents and have been saving until I needed it.

Nothing in my inventory passed the Management Approval Program (MAP) so I went to order the Management-approved tin. In placing the order, I was told they no longer had Slate Gray, they had Dove Gray. Now my understanding was that the name of Slate Gray had changed to Dove Gray. This was a reasonable assumption considering that we have painted the inside of the house with Cream, Alabaster, Eggshell, and three or four other names for the same color of paint.

The tin arrived; I picked it up, took the day off and installed it. I didn’t pay much attention to the color; after all, I hadn’t looked at the color chart and I would have been happy with green, brown and rust striped.

Management arrived home after a particularly difficult day. I was expecting her to be pleased with the progress. She was not. How was I to know she would hate Dove Gray tin? She likes the Dove Gray Doves that eat at her bird feeder.

As I said, it was a failure to communicate. She thought I had asked her what she wanted and then ignored it. I won’t even think about pointing out that I have a 25-year history of attempting to comply with her smallest desire with the exceptions of her time frames and attempts at civilizing me.

After an unpleasant evening we resolved the issue. Somehow I will find some tin roofing in Slate Gray even if I have to kill and skin the Slates myself.

In the past week I have attended fundraisers for both of the candidates for Congress. I made my position perfectly clear. I am an Independent. I would attend as a reporter not a supporter. I would eat their food and take pictures or take pictures and eat their food. I also told them I intended to vote for the candidate who fed me the best.

Both teams fed me well. Both had a nice variety of little sandwiches, stuff on crackers, fruit and tasty things you could probably identify but I can’t. On the other hand, I am more of a “meat and taters” sort of guy, both gustatorily and politically. I have to say the Republicans had more substance. They had a big pot of Brunswick stew. They even sent a quart home with me.

Yesterday I received a call that Moses was walking down the highway near town. Never having met Moses and having a few unanswered questions for him (like that deal with breaking the tablets with the 10 commandments; I have never met anyone who broke all 10 at the same time), I went looking. Let’s face it; a guy dressed like Moses walking down the highway is going to be crazy or interesting.

It turned out it wasn’t Moses, just a guy dressed like Zacchaeus. He is walking 3300 miles as a way to meet people and witness for Christ. He isn’t crazy and his wife is driving the support vehicle. We had a nice visit.

Then I called Management. “Honey, I met a nice couple on the side of the road and invited them home for supper but I won’t be there.”

Management was delighted, as I knew she would be. How often do you get the opportunity to invite Zacchaeus and his wife home for dinner?

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