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I put up Christmas lights over the weekend. The pitch of the roof on our new house is much steeper than the one at our old house. The entire time I was up on the roof, I kept thinking I was going to slide off. I think rubber pants would have given me a much higher coefficient of friction to work with than cotton.
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Bare feet do help give you traction on a roof, but if you're up there in the middle of summer and don't have fairly thick callouses, you can end up burning your feet. I'm a big fan of the rope around the chimney technique, myself.
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For some reason, I usually end up on the roof during the winter. Ice and snow makes for frozen toes. For me, it's winter boots and laying as flat as possible.
Hey, this rope thing sounds like an even better idea.
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Yikes, a steep, icy roof sounds like a recipe for disaster Sara! I heartily recommend the rope.
I had a dog once who could climb ladders, and was quite nimble when it came to walking around on rooves. Scared the living crap out of my cat Mel, who thought that she was well away from pesky dogs, when Lady came running up the incline to see what she was up to.
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My beloved orange tom used to sun himself on the roof. He never could get back down, though. Claws pointed the wrong way, so I'd climb the pine to bring him back down.
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I made the mistake of putting the lights up on the north facing side of the roof first. By the time I got to the south facing side, it was too hot to work on. I could feel the roof burning a hole in my butt while I was working. I guess I need more callouses there.
Oh, and why in the world would I have a chimney in Central Florida?
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If you don't have a chimney, you can always tie the rope to, say, the trailer hitch of your truck, if you've got one. careful that someone doesn't get in the truck and drive off while you're tied to it though. That could be a bad thing.
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In our old house, I always set the ladder up on the sidewalk leading up to the front door because that was the easiest access to the roof. One year, my wife walked out while I was on the roof and decided the ladder was in the way, so she moved it. She then went back in.
I spent about an hour laying on the roof after the sun went down waiting for her to come looking for me. She couldn't hear me banging on the roof.
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I got my hair tangled up in the chain of the swing when I was five, and it seemed like I cried forever until the sun went down and mom came out to find me.
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Not a fun situation to find yourself in, I can say from experience. Of course in my case it was just the one story garage roof that I was trapped on, so jumping down wasn't a terribly big deal.
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Oh, poor 5 year old Sara! I hate the thought of you sitting there on your swing crying, waiting for your mom to come and free you.
When I was about 3 I licked a metal rack in my next door neighbor's freezer. She was babysitting me. It was a little while before I was discovered, but when she found me she just had me yank my tongue off of the rack for some reason. Why she didn't just pour warm water over it I'll never know, but I can vividly remember crying as my mouth filled with blood. Maybe she was trying to teach me a lesson? I certainly never licked a metal freezer rack again, so I suppose the lesson was learned, but damn!
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That was a wig actually. I had much longer hair than that at the time, but I didn't want to dye is black, so I just tucked it up under the wig as best I could.
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I once was working the ER when a little toddler was flown in for treatment. Her mother was a hairdresser and used the metal pointy-picked hair combs. Yep, she was playing with it, went running ... and poked herself in the eye. Actually, it missed her eyeball and skimmed right over it, actually lodging a few centimeters into her brain.
The amazing part is that she came running up to the babysitter with a metal comb sticking out of her face, complaining that her head hurt. Of course, there was blood everywhere.
How that woman had the presence of mind not to pull it out, I'll never know. It was removed in surgery where they could control the bleeding, and, AFAIK, she's just fine.
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Never, ever pull out something that has caused a severe puncture (that's from EMT class 101).
The hardest time I ever had with that rule (while on the ambulance) was when we had a guy fall on a electric-fence post. Went in through his eye and embedded in his head. We had to saw off the post and hold him steady -- couldn't pull it up out of the ground without moving him too much. (He lost the eye, but otherwise had no brain damage - very lucky guy)
Farmgirl (how did we get on this topic again?)
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I know you're not *supposed* to pull things out of deep puncture wounds; I just think that in the heat of the moment that might be something I'd forget.
I have no idea how we got on this...hmm...
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Our new house is an A-frame. I'm thinking hubby won't be trying to put lights on the roof. Last night we were joking around trying to decide how Santa would land his sleigh on it. We decided that 7 reindeers on one side and 2 more with the sleigh on the other side might balance okay.
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This is the best picture I can find online for a similar product. The whole comb is made of metal, and the handle ends in a narrow sharp point (like a thick needle) that can be used to part hair. The handle was what went through the top of the socket in through the fragile shelf of bone back to the brain.
Bizarrest thing I ever saw, hands down. Well, it required the most double-takes -- my brain couldn't process it.
Probably the bizarrest story was when a toddler came in with a sawed-off portion of a truck fender attached to his finger, and I called home to have some dental floss rushed over ... but that's another story for another thread. Posts: 2919 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Gaaaa! That's even more hidious of an injury to contemplate than what I was imagining. How many years ago was that Sara?
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