Skip to main content

I painted my roof

Before:
After:
This was a pretty amateurish effort on my part. I didn't sand down the rust very much—well, cutting through the rust might have just worn new holes in my roof—I broke my brush halfway through and had to finish clutching the raw bristles like a Lascaux caveman, and I foolishly didn't start at the far edge and painted myself into a corner. Still, all things considered, the roof is significantly whiter than when I started.  More importantly, it is so far a lot cooler inside than yesterday.  By this time during the average day the roof metal would be so hot on the underside you could almost hear the sizzle touching it with your finger.  Now it's barely warm to the touch.  I reckon it will still be pretty hot during the late afternoon as the wall bricks absorb sunlight, but I think overall it's going to make things much better in my little shack.

I bought five liters of paint, which cost R250 and turned out to be way too much.  I still have about two-thirds left, so I might be traveling to neighboring volunteers to use up the rest.  When painting, the importance of getting an even coat was quickly replaced by just getting enough paint on the surface.  I found the best method to use a little can as a dipper to pour the paint directly on the roof, then smear it around with a brush.  It's not pretty, but the albedo is hugely improved.

Comments

  1. Looks like you could fall through there pretty easy. I assume you used lots of safety equipment?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that

The Conversational Downsides of Twitter's Structure

Over the past couple years, as I've had a steady writing job and ascended from "utter nobody" to "D-list pundit," I find it harder and harder to have discussions online. Twitter is the only social network I like and where I talk to people the most, but as your number of followers increases, the user experience becomes steadily more hostile to conversation. Here's my theory as to why this happens. First is Twitter's powerful tendency to create cliques and groupthink. Back in forum and blog comment section days, people would more often hang out in places where a certain interest or baseline understanding could be assumed. (Now, there were often epic fights, cliques, and gratuitous cruelty on forums too, particularly the joke or insult variety, but in my experience it was also much easier to just have a reasonable conversation.) On Twitter, people rather naturally form those same communities of like interest, but are trapped in the same space with differe