Fixing a hole where the rain gets in and stops my mind from wandering

It's been raining for days.
Last night while putting away some towels I heard a wet plop beside me.
Sh*t

I looked around the ceiling.
Nothing.
Looked around the light fixtures.
Nothing.
Another plop.
I leaned against the door to the computer room to think...which felt damp...and looked up and saw there was water on the inside of the frame gathering to...
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.

*sigh*
That had to mean there was a bit of water coming thru the path of least resistance from the attic...through the roof...into the house.
Joy.

We've known for a while there was a bit of leak in the roof - we assumed around the edges of the vents that come out the roof crawlspace. A few years ago I slathered the seams with ridiculous amounts of caulking after a big leak when we had a huge rainstorm. We thought it was good since then...apparently not anymore.

Feeling adventurous (and wanting to know just how much we had to fix) I grabbed a ladder and stuck my head up into the upstairs attic with a flashlight to actually get to see where the water was coming from.
Thankfully, it appears to be just the one centre vent, slowly dripping from one corner. It appears to have just dripped down to the insulation and to the wood below and saturated through slowly over the last few days by the path of least resistance.

And, much to my annoyance, there was a very old cake pan up there under the drip, filled with water.
Which meant the previous owners knew about this.
And failed to mention it.
Typical.

At any rate, I removed all the water I could and dried it out as best I could and put a huge bucket up there underneath it to catch any of the new drips until we can figure out what to do about it. As of this morning after a long night of rain there was only about 3 cups of water, so it seems to be a slow drip thankfully.

Once it warms up a bit I can go spelunking up on the roof and caulk the sh*t out of the vent seams for now. I suppose we must look into having someone properly fix or replace them -I can't just keep coating the vent edges with caulking compound :) It doesn't look too labour intensive to fix, so hopefully it won't cost too much...I'll have to look into it.

So yeah. That was my adventure of the evening...how was your Tuesday? :)