Sunday night in Cumming, Georgia 30041

0 comments

On Saturday, we left Orlando at 6:00am and arrived in Atlanta around 2:30pm. I saw the movie Jarhead later that day - it was OK. This morning I woke up early and had three eggs for breakfast at Waffle House. Three eggs, toast, grits and coffee for less than $4. Not a bad deal.

I have a nice Sony Vaio laptop (model VGN-S170B) that is a little over one year old. Surprisingly, it has never been reformatted. Old applications fill its registry like ghosts in the Savannah night. I like to reformat my Windows every six months to keep the system lean. So, today I cleaned up my laptop, backed up my data files to an external hard disk, and used Sony's nice restore function to bring Windows new again.

It felt good to be clean. I cleaned out my car after going to Sawnee Mountain for a quick jog and a mini-boulder climb. Vacuum and Armor All did the Jeep trick. As I was cleaning, a neighbor asked me to help him move a refrigerator that he had just purchased. We carried it off of the rental truck and rolled it into his garage. I remembered that his basement had large 14- and 16-foot ceilings. I asked him, "What do you do with those ceilings?" Imagine my surprise when he showed me the rock climbing wall that he built. It's really great and I was sore after only a few minutes of monkeying around.

We got to talking and my next-door neighbor, the lawyer that I'd never really met who has a rock climbing wall in his basement, pitched me an idea he had been considering: Could an agile person rappel from suburban rooftop to clean third-story gutters?

Within a few minutes he had ladders mounted, ropes strung and belay harnesses on. The answer, I'm afraid, is no. You cannot clean third-story drainage pipes by yourself using a rope and harness to rappel down the side of your roof. There just isn't enough horizontal leverage to make it efficient.

I helped him slide down the front of the house, me standing in back with rope wrapped around my waist. We shouted back and forth over the house, "Matthew, HOW MUCH ROPE DO YOU NEED?" and him, "Keep it TIGHT NOW" while his wife sweated the forty foot drop from their kitchen. I do not think that she appreciated our teamwork.