Los Angeles has been getting a lot of rain lately and we had incurred no trouble at Cruft Manor. When I was in Vegas last week for CES, I have to brag about the soundness of our roof.

Shouldn't have done that. On Monday I got a call from Michele that the ceiling was dripping. She was concerned that the rest of the ceiling was about to give way, so I came home to find out what's going on.

I crawled around in the attic space looking for water and found nothing. Up on the roof in the rain, I found the problem. There is normally some sealant between the chimmney and the tile that joins it to the roof. The upper edge was exposed and over the two weeks of rain, the water had worked itself down along the chimney and into the ceiling plaster.

Like any man faced with a weather issue, I got out my blue tarp and bungie corded it to the chimney to prevent more water from getting in. We're lucky, some people had much worse leaks.