Now that I've said yes to a trip to Cartagena, Colombia I need to brush up on the little I know language-wise in Spanish. I can speak enough German and French to get me into trouble, and a smidge of Dutch, but Spanish? Nope.

When we took our trip to San Miguel des Allendes, Mexico a few years back I spent some time before we went with the Rosetta Stone software for learning Spanish and did pretty well. But of course, now that I haven't spoken any Spanish in a few years I've pretty much lost all that I knew, which wasn't that much to start with. I can speak in pleasantries with como está, buenos dias/noches and the usual please, thank you, etc.  And, the important one: asking for a glass of vino tinto. 

Our roof is original to the house which was built in 1998, (oops, I meant around 1988: see Rick's comment below) so it had pretty much come to the end of its life span. Superstorm Sandy helped us out by ripping chunks of shingles off on the back side of the house. When the insurance adjuster came he said our roof was in such bad shape that more damage would be done by patching it than by replacing it. So, Sandy paid for the back side of our house which helped out a lot. Roofs are expensive! Plus, ours is a hip roof and labor costs more than a more normal roof with less pitch.

~ Where is she going with this?? ~

The crew working on our roof are all from Ecuador. They are a happy bunch and hard workers. They dangle from the peak of the roof on their ropes like monkeys on a vine. And by that I certainly don't mean any disrespect nationality-speaking, only that they look about as at home on their ropes as monkeys do on their vines. They speak a little English, but not much. They sing while they work. 

When one of them showed up at the front door, I said ¡Hola! in a perky tone of voice and was quickly rewarded for my efforts by a rapid dump of Spanish. I'm sure he could tell by the blank look on my face that ¡Hola! was the extent of my extremely limited Spanish, and that he had lost me with hello. He switched to broken English and asked if they could they please have some water. 

The whole process of taking the shingles off was pretty interesting. They tented the house with large pieces of fabric screening and slid the shingles down to the ground as if on a big slide. The noise they made as they slid sounded like the sky was falling and the dogs didn't like it one bit. I ended up putting them down in the basement where they were happy to stay. All day long I couldn't hear myself think and it was hard to concentrate on much of anything. First from the sliding shingles, then from huge booms that shook the house as the packs of shingles were dropped on the roof. After that came the pneumatic nail guns. 

They worked from 8:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Like I said in my previous post, they cleaned up pretty well by running a magnet over the grass and driveway to pick up the nails and blew pieces of shingle and other debris off the decks. 

Here you can see the new shingles against the old ones on the sun room and the garage. We think the darker color looks really nice, and we hadn't realized how much red was present in the old shingles. The new ones are high-definiton too, so they give a 3-D effect.

I will be glad when it's all over and done with! To be continued … hopefully today!!