Weekends are never long enough now.

Saturday morning we went out and did the sampling we couldn't on Friday. Saturday afternoon I read the rest of the Silvertown and Charlesworth population biology book (which is the next one my grad student needs to read) though it dang near killed me. (100 pages of dense prose about plant competition and the evolution of plant life histories).

I knit some on the simple "Antonia" socks, but wound up putting them down when I realized that they were interfering with my ability to concentrate and read the book in a timely fashion. There's a point where you find you keep having to flip back three pages to re-read, when you've still got 90-odd pages to go, that you just don't want ANYTHING to slow you down.

Sunday afternoon, I worked some on the Clapotis (you thought I had forgotten about it, no? Well, I kind of did. I tucked it away and with it being out-of-sight, I didn't really work on it. Also, I think I had put off working on it because I was afraid I was going to run out of yarn (I know I won't, now) and that often puts me off of wanting to work on something (it's a discontinued yarn, so getting more would be an effort).

But I pulled it out yesterday and worked some on it. I'm a few repeats away from it being finished. (I don't think I'm going to block it, though).

I also worked some on the pillowcases. Again, I'm getting close (but not close enough) to finished on these.

In between, I did something probably ill-advised. I have a lot of catkins and general crud accumulated on my roof from the pecan tree. And I kept thinking about the 4th of July coming up. And one thing I will NEVER get used to in this part of the world is the legality and wide availability of small fireworks. And I'm going to be out of town the evening of the 3rd (going to a baseball game with a church group) and the thought of people shooting off bottle rockets, which might still be ignited when they land on my roof, and a pile of kindling-dry pecan catkins up there, made me more and more nervous.

(And the rain they keep predicting for us? Never comes.)

So, I got out the ladder and tried to get rid of the catkins by standing on the ladder. (Just to remind you, here is a photo of my house - from several winters ago. The arrow and "A" is where the catkins are, the "B" is where I had the ladder)



Unfortunately, my ladder is short, and I was kind of having to lean around backwards and reach blindly with a rake to try to grab the leaves and stuff and pull them down.

I got only about 1/3 of the stuff (and wound up with catkins and half decomposed leaves and who knows what else in my hair and down my shirt and all over me).

Well, that was unsatisfactory. So, I went up from the back of the house - which is a lot easier to climb up on, as it has a lower flat porch-type roof for part of it. And I dragged a push-broom (the longest tool I own) up there.

And slowly climbed up the side of the roof towards the ridgepole. My vague plan was to reach over the ridgepole and push all the crud down off the roof. Of course I never adequately estimate how large the roof is until I'm actually up there.

I scraped heck out of my knee (through a pair of old khaki pants) and at one point thought I was going to lose my grip and slide back down the roof to the flat part (which would have scraped heck out of my stomach and all other frontal regions). At one point I had to stop (as I got near the ridgepole) and tell myself to get over my fear, that I had done this before and not fallen yet, and anyway, if I fell the worst would be that I'd scrape heck out of my frontal regions and wind up on the flat porch type roof.

And then I reached over the ridgepole.

I managed to push all the remaining catkins up into one big ball. But the push broom was too short - and did not exert enough force - to get them down off the roof.

I leaned a little further. I could not reach the ball.

Still further.

As far as I dared - because if I unbalanced over the ridgepole, I surmised I'd go sliding headfirst down the front of the roof - with nothing but friction (or eventually, the abelia bush in the front garden) to stop my descent.

So I reached as far as I could with the push broom.

You can guess what happened next. (No, not the worst possible thing; I'm not writing this from a hospital or anything).

I dropped the push broom. And it slid partway down the roof and stopped, trapped by the big ball of dried up catkins.

That's what I think of as the "Laurel and Hardy point." The point where something sufficiently ridiculous - but yet, not entirely unexpected - happens, and you just want to give up. Maybe even, like in the old comedy shorts, where you throw your hat down on the ground in disgust (and it probably gets stepped on).

I will say I went back around to the front, set up the ladder again, and tried to reach the push broom with the rake from the front of the house. Could I? I could not.

At that point I was getting weak and shaky, which usually happens when (a) it's terribly hot out (b) I've had to have my arms up over my head for extended periods of time (it mucks with my blood pressure, apparently, it makes it drop) and (c) I've been using muscles I don't normally use in the service of making sure I don't die (pulling myself up onto the roof, and getting back down safely).

I wound up having to get off the ladder fast and sit down for a few minutes.

And then I put the ladder away. (I knew better than to try to climb up on the roof again and try even more dangerous maneuvers when I was already shaky and not feeling so good).

So: there's a big ball of dry catkins on my roof, that would very likely flame up well if hit by sparks from fireworks. AND there's a push broom with an aluminum handle up there. (I had a brief, but probably unreasonable, vision of us getting a lightning storm and the thing attracting lightning to hit my house. Probably it's impossible by the rules of physics, but I still need to figure out some way of getting the dang broom down).

I would have said "bag it" and gone to Lowe's and bought a taller ladder, except my current car is sufficiently short that a taller ladder would not fit in it...