Newton's First Law

So... I just read my last post and realized how much it kind of stunk, therefore I'm aiming to redeem myself a little with this. Don't get your hopes up.

In Sunday school the other day the teacher asked for examples when we required assistance. It made me think of a couple amusing (in retrospect) times when I needed a life preserver thrown my way. Ironically, like 9 out of 10 jams I thought of involved Mark Evans being there. You'd think I would learn.

Last summer I was working on a house with my construction company (the rare pinch without Mark as accomplice). It was crane day and Christian, Gary and I were working on removing the roof of this 2 story Orem home. It went like this: get on top of the roof and cut the roof into strips which ran the same way as the roof trusses. Then attach the crane to each section and remove the roof piece by piece- truss, sheeting, shingles and all. So I'm up on the last section to be craned, about 25 or 30 feet above the concrete garage floor, but Gary had it all braced so I had no reason to worry about it falling. Mistake 1: trust Gary, the guy who almost falls through the roof himself about every other day and uses words like "sidewards" and "slonch wall." (sp?) My boss Blake would later that day tell me what a blockhead (or something similar) I was for relying on Gary for something like safety. Duly noted.

So I'm up there chillin, ready for the crane cable to come my way so I can hook up the roof and crane it. And then the roof started to fall. But what was kind of cool is that it didn't give way by falling straight down, but toppled sidewards like how a dining room table with 4 very wobbly legs might go. So anyways, roof started going, falling away from the existing wing of the house and so I started running for that. I felt like a cartoon when the character starts running really fast on a rug but instead of going anywhere the rug just bunches up behind him while Wile E. Coyote stays stationary. Yeah, it was something like that. Fortunately I got enough speed to jump off and grab the existing roof and hang on to the side of the house, pretty much double fisting a rain gutter 2 1/2 stories up.

That's when I got myself into the predicament where I needed some help. About 2 seconds later after the dust had settled below and Gary and Christian realized they weren't crushed I called down, "hey! I kinda need a ladder here!" It was quite the scramble to get a ladder over that heap of roof which had suddenly appeared in the garage, but Christian managed it somehow, and I was pretty glad for that. Oh, and the crane guy- the only one to witness the spectacle- thought I was just about superman after that, which made me feel a little less stupid for falling off a roof.