I Hate Hitting The Ground

It has come to that time of the year again. The days are getting short. The temps are getting low and I am getting tired. No more new projects. Just scrambling to finish what I have started. And being realistic, that’s not going to happen. I am just focused on protecting what I have done from the wet winter ahead. Namely, get the roof screwed down and the walls wrapped in plastic paper.

I have all the precarious second story work fall protection gear. It’s a pain in the ass to get anything done tied onto a rope but so is gravity if you aren’t. I am not sure how well it will stop me if I fall or how I will extricate myself from hanging 15 feet above the ground if I do but I am staying diligent. Imagine my shock when I took a tumble at ground level.

I spent the day cutting all the roofing paper on the deck. It’s easier and safer than trying to hold on to the heavy rolls on the roof. I laid down some plywood across the deck joists giving me 14 feet of flat space to roll out the paper and get a nice straight cut. I got complacent and didn’t nail the plywood down to the joists. The plywood must have slipped off a supporting joist as I was walking back and forth on it all day. At least that was what came to mind in the split second between standing up and when my face and a joist kept me from falling to the nice soft dirt a couple feet further down.

So I am laying there tangled up in the joists, dazed and confused. Trying to figure out which way was up. Luckily the stream of blood pooling in the dirt below and myvery recent experience with which way is down I figured that out pretty quickly. Allowing me to move on to the next dilemma. Where exactly is that blood coming from? An existing orifice or an entirely new one? Somehow I pulled myself out of the joists and rolled onto more solid plywood. Not exactly sure how long that took because those gymnastics were done between bouts of unconsciousness. 

I gathered myself enough to stumble over to the Wintershed and laid down on the deck for a long while. I think. Comforted in knowing that I had just the day before swept the deck of all the squirrel turds that I have been gifted in exchange for all the insulation the little bastard has been stealing over the past few months. 

Realizing that I was probably done for the day, I slowly made my way up the hill to the trailer, had some dinner of microwaved pizza bread. If it wasn’t for using unsecured deck boards, that dinner would have been the worst idea of the week. Definitely on the list of “eat only in case of apocalypse” and there are no bugs to be had. It could be an old wive’s tale but I seem to remember something about not falling asleep with a concussion. Just in case, I decided to put off going to bed by spending a few hours updating the safety poster. It was no easy feat with my head between my legs for a good bit of the time.

I finally crawled into bed around 2am thinking the worst had passed. And it had. A morning perusal of the damage. Black and blue marks matching the 16″ on center joists up the the left side of my body. A big flap of skin on the inside of my lower lip still hangs there 2 weeks later. A couple cuts on my face are almost healed up. It could have been worse. I came within a half inch of losing my front teeth.  My left pelvis bone took a good smash but it didn’t break. My left arm has a good sized knot in it still but that is softening up with time. So a cheap painful lesson was learned. 

Although I wasn’t too damaged, I was moving slow for a few days.  few very valuable days as I am running out of nice weather. As the month draws to a close, I have all but one metal roof panel left to do. I am holding off putting it on because it is too hard walking on the slippery metal. I am not sure how I am going to finish wrapping the house because I have left the high walls for last.

The weather has dropped into the low 20’s here this past week. My batteries can’t be charged when the temperature is below freezing. It has taken until lunch time this week to warm up enough. Even with the sunny days we have been having, the short days don’t make enough electricity to have power all night. So I have to run the noisy generator a few hours a day now.  We probably got an inch of the 4″ to 8″ of the predicted snopocalypse last week. It melted out by lunch time. Bearing that in mind, I am taking the El Nino weather forecasts with a grain of skeptical salt.  Early pre3dictions are that it is going to be a big factor in our winter weather this year. Exactly, or even remotely. how remain to be seen. Probably waiting until the ski resorts sell all their season passes to make the call.

Doesn’t matter, It is almost time to shut it down. I would like to have gotten further along but I think that I am in a good place to be able to lock everything down over the next month or so. The neighbors got together this summer and worked on grading and graveling the road. We didn’t get all the way to my place but as long as the snow doesn’t pile up, I might be think the updates are going to let me park just a quarter mile away instead of the having to hike the mile and a half in. That will be helpful when I have to haul in the 5 gallon gas cans in to keep the lights on.

Stay tuned for a big wrap up next month.