Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Practicing My Diving

March 10, 2015

It's a good thing Linda was taking a nap. Yesterday our friend Dean Houser had come over to help chop the ice off the eaves, and when we were done, I started shoveling the snow off another part of the roof while Dean and Linda talked for a few minutes. As they were talking, the fire siren went off. Dean, retired from the sheriff's department, had an app on his phone that told him what the call was about. Someone on the other side of the village had fallen off his roof and thought he broke his ankle. So when she had to go to volunteer at the after school ministry, she made me come down.

Today it was time to finish the job. I had about a third of the family room roof, and the long stretch on the back of the house that took in the family room, a bedroom, the kitchen, and the bath, about thirty feet. The ice on the eves was about a foot and a half thick, so my little hatchet wasn't going to be adequate for the job. Time for the axe! It actually worked quite well, and I managed to do the entire job without cutting a hole in the shingles. The ice dam formed a flat surface on which to stand, so I measured off about two feet and began chopping a groove perpendicular to the eve. When I got about a half dozen good swings on the axe, that section would pop loose and drop over the edge, and I'd move back a couple steps and repeat the process.

It occurred to me that I might be able to get a larger chunk of ice loose if I chopped parallel to the eve, so as I passed the chimney for the wood stove in the back room, I changed my tactics, which turned out to not be the smartest move of the day, even though it was hugely successful. I whacked away at the ice, when suddenly it gave way. Sure enough, it was a bigger chunk than I had been getting with my previous method. Much bigger. You know the old routine of the guy who saws off the limb he's sitting on? The entire piece I was standing on suddenly gave way with me still on it. Well, maybe not exactly on it; after all, it did hit the ground before I did. I threw the axe away, and did a nice headfirst dive into the snowbank. It should have rated at least a 7.5 if it had been judged, although I did break form when I hit the snowbank elbows first. It really wasn't bad at all. The snow was deep where it had piled up, with the extra I had been throwing off the roof. The eves are normally about 8 1/2 feet from the ground, but with the snow nearly waist deep, I don't think I fell more than five. Of course, headfirst off a roof is not the ideal way to dismount, but doing so into a three foot pile of snow makes it manageable.

I waded through the snow back to the front of the house where my ladder was leaning against the entry room roof, climbed back up and finished the job. Had Linda been sitting in the back room folding clothes and watching TV, she would have had a front row seat to my gymnastic acrobatics, and probably would have protested my climbing back up. As it was, she missed the excitement and the entertainment. Before I finished the job, she woke up and came upstairs to talk with me from the bathroom window. Since I was already at work again, I felt it was safe to tell her. She didn't even freak out, which probably would not have been the case had she actually witnessed the show instead of hearing about it after the fact.

So today, I am grateful for the heavy snowfall we've had that made my landing quite comfortable, and that Linda was snoozing on the couch in the living room while I was practicing my swan dive.

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