Desultory Thoughts

Yesterday evening I decided to help my neighbor tear the roof off his house. I was going to town on the removal of thousands of nails that needed to be either pounded flush with the framing or pulled out. I was using a cool nail removal tool that had multiple claws. I worked like a machine on top of that roof for two and a half hours. A few times I looked down over the edge of the house and wondered what type of injuries I might suffer if I slipped and fell. I think everyone who works on a roof has similar thoughts pass through their minds. I had the similar thoughts just a couple of days earlier when I had to get up on my own roof to fix the swamp cooler.
When I first started working on the roof I heard some people on the other side making some excited comments.

Whoa! Careful! Holy cow!

Someone working on the same side of the roof as me asked, “What? What’s going on? What happened?”

They yelled back, “You don’t want to know!”

Turns out that maybe we wanted to know. They had just discovered that the portion of the roof over the porch was very unstable. In fact, one of them was standing on the section and “testing” it by bouncing on it. (They probably weighed a hundred pounds less than me which makes all the difference, apparently.)
A couple of hours passed and the roof was nail free. We could now start laying down the particle board to keep the impending storm from drenching the house.
As I searched for some way to continue to lend a hand I said, “Someone give me some direction. I don’t have anything to do.” Rick Chevalier looked up from his task (pulling off some sheet metal that lined a section of roof where one side met another) and said, “You can help me. Start down on the other end and we’ll get this ripped off.” He was at the top so I headed down. It led me right to the section over the porch.

I stepped down into the unstable roof section (though I had no idea it was unstable) and turned around to get at the flashing and start prying it off.

No sooner had I turned around then I started falling. It happened so quick I didn’t even have time to grab for something to stop my fall. The whole section came down with me and I fell with my lower back landing on the porch and my head hitting a section of the roof that came down with me. I saw black and then white flashes of light (commonly referred to as stars) and the next thing I clearly recall is people telling me to stay down and stay still. I was still trying to catch my breath and at the same time trying to say, “I’m ok, I’m ok.” Despite what everyone was telling me to do all I wanted to do was get up and let everyone know I was ok. Then I remember seeing again. Rick was grabbing my hands and helping me up.

I was pretty shocked that I had fallen through the roof and broken it. I started apologizing for breaking the roof and telling everyone that I didn’t know it wasn’t stable. I also continued to let everyone know that I was fine. (I found out later that one of the kids in the living room was about to step out onto the porch.  Thank goodness that nobody was on the porch when I fell through the roof!)
I went into the living room and sat down. I was beginning to feel the effects of the fall. I had several cuts on my arms and my lower back didn’t feel good at all. It wasn’t long before Heather came to pick me up. I thought maybe I’d continue to help with the roof, but it was becoming clear to me that I wasn’t up for it.

Once at home and after a shower to clean all the roof debris out of my hair and ears I laid down in bed. It was becoming more and more clear to me that I wasn’t feeling quite right. Several people had suggested that I go to the doctors to get a tetanus shot. Others suggested that I get checked out just to make sure nothing was wrong. I started to think maybe they were right when I was feeling nauseous and having a hard time focusing my eyes.

Heather took me to Mountain West Medical Center in Tooele. It turns out if you complain about your neck hurting when getting checked in at the ER, they’ll put a neck brace on your neck which doesn’t make it feel any better. In fact, afer they put the neck brace on (which only made my neck hurt even worse) I was beginning to wish I never came.

The doctor determined that I would need a CAT Scan to make sure nothing was seriously wrong internally. Thankfully the scans came back normal. The doctor said I had had a mild concussion. She also gave me a tetnus shot.

Once home, I slept all night and all all day until 5pm, except for a break for lunch. My back and neck are very sore and I’m on edge. My kids have been bothering me with the slightest things, so I can tell I’m uptight because of the pain. I’ll be glad when the pain has subsided. I hope that after all the sleep I got last night and today that I’ll be able to sleep tonight. I got more than 14 hours of sleep! Thank goodness for Ibuprofen. Actually, I think I might try some Tylenol PM tonight. I saw a commercial for Lunesta today. That looks like good stuff, too.

I’ve been poking around at the yard work ever since the snow melted off the lawn the first time.  But since then (probably February) snow has found its way onto the ground several times since, the latest being just two days ago on April 6.

I use Scott’s Annual Program [scotts.com] for my lawn and the first application should go on in early Spring, March through April.  It should normally be applied when temperatures are generally above 60 and on a day that’s dry after the lawn has been mowed.  I’m running out of days to apply it, so I may just do it today before the forecasted three or four days of rain that is ahead of us.

It’s been especially wet this year.  I wondered how much I should water my lawn (not that I’m worried about it at all right now) and found that if I use the 1/2 inch rule (make sure your lawn receives 1/2 inch per week) I’ll save a lot of money and water.  You can download a very imformative PDF customized for your Utah area by visiting conservewater.utah.gov.  Hopefully I’ll be able to follow the guidelines and save a lot of water.  Last year when we moved in we had to water a lot to revitalize our dead lawn.  Our water bill was pretty big as a result.  But we probably wasted a lot of water, too.  I found out that if your water is running onto the sidewalk then you need to split up the watering into smaller increments.  That’s good to know and it makes sence.  Sometimes I just have to read it on a website first to believe it.

Other things I need to do is to remove two dead trees in my yard.  One is in the front yard and was dead when we got here.  It turns out the neighbor kids had their way with it when the house was for sale and vacant.  It was reported that they took a hatchet or machete to it “for fun”.

I’m glad that they at least didn’t do what another neighbor kid did to a vacant house directly behind our house.  He decided it would be fun to lob rocks through three windows in the back of the house.  Heather saw him do it and called the police to report the property damage.  A week later the kid and his whole family moved out, much to the delight of the entire neighborhood.  Apparently that was only one of many incidents of hellionism that he had committed.

Now we have two ugly vacant houses behind us.  We need some big 6″ privacy bushes planted all along the back of our fence to conceal the eyesores.  (Add that to the list!  But I’m not doing that today.)

Heather was reading the Tooele Transcript Bulletin tonight and pointed out some interesting facts about an article entitled “Does Your Family Eat Together? That Could Say Alot About You”.

We’ve been eating together as a family nearly on a nightly basis ever since we got into our home just over 7 months ago. I’ve really enjoyed it and I’m glad Heather enjoys cooking now. (She didn’t used to.)

Of course, we have two small children, so that makes it much easier to do. I’m sure it will become more and more difficult as our children grow into teenagers. But it will be something that I hope we continue, because based on the article several good things come of it, according to studies.
For example:

• Children who eat frequently with their families tend to do better in school.
• Children tend to be happier with their present life and their prospects for the future.
• Teens who regularly eat meals with their families are less likely to get in fights, think about suicide, smoke, drink, do drugs and they’ll have better academic performance.

I’ve noticed that I look forward to being home with my family more now that I have dinner time to look forward to. I’ve always been a very social eater. It’s good to sit down with my family and bond with them over a hearty lasagna or a spicy chili. (Heather makes a mild batch for the kids. What a good mom!)

I enjoy eating lunch with my friends. I actually don’t take a lunch unless I’m going to eat with somebody. Eating socially might actually be considered a bad habit in my case. I’m contantly finding people that will go to lunch with me. Luckily my friend Clint joins me quite often. He works where I work, so that makes it even more convenient.

Today we ate lunch with at one of my favorite lunch joints, The Five Star Restaurant [visitsaltlake.com]. It’s really good and pretty dang cheap for the amount of food you get. It’s mixed Thai/Chinese food. The people there are very friendly and I wish more waitresses/waiters were as good as these are. The only thing about The Five Star is that you have to get there before noon (we usually go at around 11:15 or so) because the lunch rush is kind of crazy. But even if you go during the rush, the service is always awesome.

We first went to the restaurant because of the $9.99 all-you-can-eat crab on Tuesday and Thursdays. It’s not too bad, although every once in a while a plate of cold crab will come your way. I’m not sure how that happens, but cold and water-logged crab isn’t too good. But due to the great service, the low price and the majority of the plates containing wonderful, seculant, hot crab…it’s well worth it!

After 21 posts you would think that I would’ve mentioned my wife by now! Her name is Heather and she’s absolutely awesome! That’s why I married her almost 9 years ago. We’ll have our 9th anniversary in March.

Come to think of it, I mentioned my wife in a previous post entitled “Advertising Clutter”, the the post dealt more with her magazine than it did her. But she was my inspiration for that post, and don’t forget it!

She’s not only just a great wife, she’s a wonderful mom to our two beautiful children. I love her a lot. She was able to quit her job at LDS Hospital earlier this year and I’m reallyglad that she’s able to be a full-time Mom. I’m not only glad that she’s able to, I’m glad she WANTS to. There are some women that are able to stay home (in fact, sometimes it’s economically a wash that they go to work after paying the babysitter, paying for gas, insurance and car payment on a second car, paying more taxes because of the higher tax bracket, etc) but would rather go out and have a career. Of course, there are situations where it is necessary and I don’t speak of these situations. Several people at my work do it because they have to; usually single moms.

In the last seven months I haven’t seen too much by the way of nasty storms, although there have been some stronger winds than I’m used to. Last night what I’ve been waiting for finally came.

We got clobbered with more than a foot of snow! I nearly didn’t make it out of our neighborhood. The further north I drove, the better it got. When I got to Salt Lake where I work, there was nothing. The difference, as described in a Tooele Transcript Bulletin article, was not lake effect. The storm that rolled through just decided to linger over our fine city of Tooele. We’re supposed to be getting some more snow tomorrow night and into Saturday. How exciting!

The kids had fun in the snow today. They made snow angels, waded through the deep stuff and slid down the driveway on sleds. It’s the most snow Griffin or Sami have ever played in. They had fun playing with their friend, Logan. They also “helped” shovel the driveway, but the true heroes of shoveling were the Barths (our fine neighbors to the west of us) with their monster snow blower! They saved us all a lot of work.

I should note, however, that when the snowplows came by, they covered the sidewalk and the driveway again, and Heather (my awesome wife) did second clean-up.  And if you’ve ever shoveled the snowplow crud, you know it’s extra heavy.  So good job, Heather!