And that is after a double dose of  “Vitamin I”….I must be gettin’ old….

So yesterday, we had a work party to recoat the metal roof of the indoor range building. I try to get it coated every 5 years, but we were two years behind…..Both of our 2019 work days had been rained out, and we won’t bother discussing the dumpster fire that  was 2020. But this job had to be done soon….The metal roof is 45 years old and it has no rust yet, but we gotta keep it cared for.

(Caring for infrastructure of something like a range is an ongoing task…..paint, roof coating, general maintenance, it has to be done…..or it can cost you. Ferisntance: a new roof has been quoted at $64,000 without replacement insulation…And, frankly, the range doesn’t have that kind of money….so we gotta take care of what we got….)

I spent a few hours by myself on Friday cleaning a portion of the roof of old coating material in order to have one portion ready for coating while another part was being cleaned so we could stagger people in order to not have them all on top of each other or just standing around… That put my arms and hands at a pretty high fatigue level at the start of Saturday….

Saturday was a beautiful day for doing such work. at 8 AM the temp was 68 degrees. The sun was out and the roof dried of morning dew quickly. People showed up we had jobs for them. Brushing the roof of detritus, scraping the loose material, brooming and blowing it off, brushing on the new coating. I handed out gloves to some of them (who shows up to work without gloves???? At least they showed up though).

We had just enough volunteers show. Not any extra, but enough. One team cleaning the roof, the others brushing the new coating on.

Having said that, by 11:00 it was getting fairly warm and there was no breeze and people were getting hot . 3 or more hours of spreading roof coating or scraping the roof gets tiring. I made sure that everyone had enough cold water and stayed hydrated. Fatigue had caught up with me as my arms had not recovered well from my work Friday, but I pressed on

Soon enough, it was 1 pm and the temp was 84F…and we were cleaning up.

Everyone was hot and tired, but we should be good for at least another 5 years….My thanks to those other Range members who showed up and worked hard…when they could have chosen to do something enjoyable on a beautiful Saturday.. It is volunteers like this that keep the Range operational.

I am glad that things went as well as they did. My logistics and planning came off well, as there was mixed material there when it was needed and there was little waiting for clear space to work and such. I’ve done this 4 other times on this roof, so I had the plan worked out, and it worked out well. Experience pays.

My arms are still tired though, as I type this on Sunday Morning, and mostly my hands are a bit stiff… (I just don’t recover like I did 10 years ago. )