Eye level with a Canadian Goose

Alternatively titled: One of us is a Wuss.

Do you want to know what this is a picture of?

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This is a picture of me, petrified.

And I’m not generally a wishy-washy person. I like spiders and snakes and guns just fine. I’m not a huge fan of playing with electricity or losing a finger to the router, but generally my fears are few and far between. And I was half-monkey when I was a kid, climbing trees left and right, so I don’t have an irrational fear of heights per se… But I find more and more that being without support twenty or so feet of the ground while standing on a sharp incline is not among my favorite pasttimes.

MysteryMan (whom I have a deep and abiding affection for, despite this) is really good at taking something I’m moderately uncomfortable about and making me scared shitless of it. Like when I say “Do you really think if I get up there that I’m going to fall off and hurt myself?” And he says “Um, yeah.”

So it’s totally his fault that for all of Saturday my ass was firmly planted on the ladder, or better yet, solid ground, while he started tearing the old shingles off of the gas station. I felt so ashamed of wussing out that I sucked it up and took my life into my own hands Sunday, which is how I found myself on the peak of the roof with a death-grip on a hammer. Because for some reason, the hammer made me feel better.

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MysteryMan took off an entire side of shingles in the time it took me to remove 23 nails from the peak of that roof. And I don’t think it’s totally irrational– being a little person who is constantly using her entire body to leverage tools into working the correct way– to be a little afraid of accidently leveraging myself off of that roof when trying to remove a stubborn nail.

I actually did much better when the shingles were off and I got to staple the felt into place. I much prefer constructing to deconstructing when I’m two stories off of the ground. So I’m determined to be much more useful when we’re actually putting the new roof into place.

There’s actually quite a bit of construction (which I am good at) to be done before that point, because all of the boards are rotted out about 2 feet from the ends of the roof.

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3 Responses

  1. You forgot… leveraging tools… death grip on a hammer… AND carrying your camera. Thanks for thinking of your readers while you’re risking life and limb! 🙂

  2. Hm, I had you pegged to be fearless with a roofing shovel. That’s OK that roof is small enough for MM to tackle himself, right? Did you decide what kind of roofing material you are going to use?

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