Well, there must be something about the outdoors that just lends itself to adventure, right? Yesterday we went down to our land again -- Jack, me, Jill, John, Michael, Hank, Dianne & Rebecca Horton. It had been raining steadily south of us (yes, we had to remind ourselves what that stuff falling out of the sky even WAS), and we got there to discover that our cabin was leaking. In several places. John & Jill had sheet rocked most of the inside, and some of the rock was wet and there were some wet places on the plywood flooring. The roof has felt on it, but hadn't been shingled yet because:
1. Jack broke his rib and couldn't climb up and help yet; 2. We kept forgetting to take our long ladder down there; and 3. It was dry as a bone anyway.
Famous last thoughts.
We now realize that a good thing to remember is that unless you HAVE shingled the roof, you can't expect roofing felt to keep out the rain for very long. Because, drought or not, eventually the water returns. So, yesterday the guys had already gone down to the river to fish when the women & children discovered the leaks. Jill and I knew we needed to put something over the roof, and we had a couple of great big tarps on hand. Unfortunately, we only had a 6' stepladder with us, and the floor of the cabin itself is three feet above the ground, making the roof of the cabin something like 10 feet above the ground. Ten-foot roof, six-foot ladder...you do the math.
We tried climbing as high up on the ladder as it was safe to go, but couldn't push the tarp onto the roof from there. We tried pushing a corner of it up by using a weed-trimmer tool, but the serrated edge of the blade kept catching in the fold of the tarp and pulling it right off the roof again. So then we had the bright (I use the term loosely) idea of tying an empty paint can to the rope running through the grommets in the tarp and trying to throw the can over the roof, thinking it would fall over the other side and pull the tarp with it. The thing is, you stand there and look upward to toss the can over, and while you're looking upward, the rain is pouring into your face, which causes you to close your eyes, which means you can't see where you're throwing the can. Now IF you're gonna be throwing a can up into the air, it's most likely a good idea to keep an eye on it in case it comes back down on your head. Which it kept doing, because it wasn't heavy enough to pull the tarp up. We were getting nowhere fast.
About that time the guys came trudging up the hill and saw us, and John shouted, "What the HELL are you doing?" as they all began laughing. I explained what we were trying to do and John said we needed to weight the can with a big rock. That was effective, and we actually got it over the roof to the other side, but unfortunately the tarp was kind of folded over on itself and we couldn't get it completely straightened out because (see paragraph above for reference) we couldn't get high enough to reach it.
So we had a tarp on the roof, somewhat folded on itself, and then a gust of wind caught the back side of it and nearly pulled it off the roof. I think we all screamed out loud at that point. In desperation, we tossed some fence pickets up on top of it all to keep it from blowing off.
I forgot to mention the fact that we'd already nailed one tarp onto the back side of the cabin to cover the uncovered plywood.
Meanwhile, it kept raining.
The guys wanted to keep fishing. The women had a different plan, which involved putting everything and everybody back into the three vehicles and getting the heck out of Dodge. The women -- the cold, soaking-wet women--prevailed.
(this was from an email written in about 2000 about our land on the Bosque River in Meridian, Texas)
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