One of the disadvantages of owning a home and being home for the Holidays is outside Christmas lights. Christmas lights are an abomination invented by a woman whose original intent was to collect on her husband's life insurance policy. It is an unnatural act to climb up on the roof of your home after reaching a certain age. The actual chronological age varies from individual to individual but can be determined as being that age in which reason becomes part of a person's cognitive makeup. At my house I have this gable on the front over the garage and the roof line then precedes from the front of the house back over the deck to the main outside wall. That means that in the event of a fall, the two surfaces available to catch me are the concrete driveway or the wooden deck. This really makes it a choice between instantaneous death or fatal injuries with splinters.

Just before Christmas…..Thanksgiving, I think it was, I noticed that all the regular dishes in the house had disappeared and we were now eating off of the holiday china. We only have the two kinds of china. Knick knacks started being replaced with candles and small porcelain Santa's and Angels appeared on almost every level surface. Even I could tell that the task of putting the lights on the roof line wasn't that far off. I don't even like the lights we have. They are those hanging icicle lights….all the same color. After the first year they are kept in a tangled mess in a drawer in the garage along with the clips used to attach them to the shingles. Rather than have to endure the "you never do anything until I beg you" speech, I decided one warm November day to put up the lights without being told and with the element of surprise, perhaps get a jump on that insurance money.

My role as a consultant here at TSC is to find solutions to problems faced by my clients. I have come up with several solutions to this particular problem. First solution: Convert to a religion that doesn't do Christmas lights. Second solution: Leave the lights up year round. Solution three: Sneak out of the house in the middle of the night and using a hammer, break all the little bulbs on the strands of lights. But every year, these ideas are nixed, and I have to do my manly duty and climb up on that roof.

I have a step ladder. Not a tall step ladder but a regular six foot step ladder. The kind with all the labels on it telling me that the top is not a step and that I shouldn't put the ladder on ice, in a fire, on glass, or use it for sky diving or as a floatation device. The only place I can use this ladder to access my roof is from the deck. I also have to climb to the very top step and stand on it. That very step where the manufacturer specifically tells me not to step because it is not a step. I then have to lean at the waist over the incline of the roof and swing my leg up and sort of roll up the roof.

As I have pointed out in other articles….my stature (6ft.7in., 320 LBS) is not exactly conducive to feats of athletic dexterity. Only wanting to make one ascent up on the roof, one of the things I make certain of is that I have everything I am going to need before I climb the ladder. I have thrown the untangled and checked-out light strands and the bag of clips up on the roof. When I my second leg clears the roof line I am up there amongst the lights wallowing to get up on my hands and knees before the god of gravity and I become better acquainted.

Since the roof slopes down to a 90% angle on the side of the garage, there is no way to start the lights from the roof without lying down face towards the edge. So, before I threw the remaining lights and clips up on the roof I hooked up the extension cord, ran it out of the garage around the frame of the door and standing on the step ladder, I used three clips to start the first strand. I also have all this plugged into power so I can be certain that the lights work and I won't have to remount the roof later. My specialty here at TSC is distribution and logistics and TSC didn't hire no fool. Before I worked for TSC I once used a big staple gun to attach the lights. This was before the vinyl siding. I discovered that if you have power running to the lights and you don't line up the staple just right, you might start a fire and get a shock.

So anyway, I clipped my way up one side of the gable and down the other, plugging in the new strands and watching as they lit up. Then I turned the corner and clipped my way over to the other wall. I was done with lights for 2001. All that was left was getting down. My wife had gone shopping because she said that seeing me up on the roof makes her nervous…..I think it is simply an alibi. The only way for me to get down is to scoot down the incline of the roof on my stomach, dangle my feet over the edge, find the top step of the ladder, turn around and walk down the ladder which is free standing on the deck. Fear is not a word I like to use. Terror is more the term that fits the situation.

The people who make these ladders, despite all their concerns with warning labels, do not understand simple physics. The ladder is rocking back and forth on four legs that never touch the ground at the same time and the ladder, warning labels and all, weighs about 12 LBS. I weigh in excess of 300 LBS and am taller than the ladder by about 7 inches. When I am standing on the ladder the center of gravity for the entire mechanism is about 11 feet off the ground and four feet above the apex of where the legs of the ladder would theoretically meet if not for the top step which is not a step preventing them from coming to a point. Such a structure cannot stand without help. Luckily for me, I failed to open the ladder all the way and the distance from the front to back was actually shorter than the distance from side to side and when the ladder fell, it went backwards away from me and from the house. I was able to slide down the incline of the roof, and catch myself at my elbows and then drop to the deck which wasn't more than a few feet.

So I survived another Holiday Season of putting up home decorations. It is January now and I will have to start thinking about taking them down soon. I am pretty sure I can remove them without making the ascent onto the roof by pulling on the stands and hoping the clips come out and the strands remain linked where they are plugged together. Next year I am going to run that conversion thing by the family again.