OT- H-O-R Anonymous, anyone?

Hey, guys, I have a question. I'll get to it later.

First, I was at work on an evening-shift a few days ago. I got the details of the 'incident' that happened at home, later on.
Here's how it transpired:

A storm, alternating sleet and snow, begins late afternoon. Slippery roads, couple of local fender-benders over the evening, not a huge accumulation.

The Redhead, at home with the kids, notices that the satellite reception is deteriorating, and after talking to her mom, hatches a plan.

Probably just wasn't sufficiently long in it's incubation, is all.

Anyway, her mom tells her that when snow accumulates on their satellite dish, she goes out with a broom and brushes it off, and all is back to normal. The problem is that mom's satellite dish, (they of greater altitude than us), happens to sit on the railing of their deck. We, whose signal must clear a line of trees, have our satellite dish on the peak of our highest roof of our split-level.



Mind you, it is pitch-black out, 8:30 PM, and all the snow and sleet and wind and stuff.
And the Redhead is phobic of heights.
If she looks at a picture in a magazine of a riveter on an I-beam, her palms start to sweat.

No matter. Home-entertainment is my baby's wish. So she enlists the daughter to hold a flashlight, and with broom in hand, she uses a [u:343be7e041]stepladder[/u:343be7e041] to climb up on the roof.

[b:343be7e041]THIS[/b:343be7e041] stepladder, still [i:343be7e041]in situ[/i:343be7e041]...



No mean feat right there! As she climbs, without gloves, toward the peak of the right-hand roof, she begins to realize how slippery it is, and that she cannot head back down the slope for fear of losing traction, pitching off the roof, and landing on the deck.

Gone, now, is any consideration of reaching the 3-story-high satellite dish, with her fear of height, in the black of night, to reach [i:343be7e041]around[/i:343be7e041] it with the broom to clean it off.



So she sends the daughter in to mobilize the boys. Meanwhile, as it is easier and seems less risky to climb rather than to descend, she abandons the broom, and proceeds to the peak of the high roof. But at least, she has an 'out', for at the bottom of the downslope on the other side... a chimney.



So she slides down and grabs the chimney, lowers herself to the lower roof, uses the rain gutter to descend that roof to the window where the boys have raised the sash and removed the screen from the inside, and makes good her escape.

The broom, however, continues to lay where it was abandoned.



This was so wrong, on so many levels, that 5 days later, I still can't get my head around it.

Which leads me to my question...

Any of you gentlemen ever hear, in your travels, of a [b:343be7e041]Husbands-of-Redheads Anonymous[/b:343be7e041]?
I need a couple of meetings.

BTW, her nickname of 15 years?

"Runamuck".

Man, do I love my farm-bred woman!!

You were lucky she didn"t wait for you to get home from work or that she didn"t slide off the roof..-Bill

Exactly, Bill. That"s why I can laugh now.

Anyone lucky enough to be involved with a redhead should not
complain, a blonde would have called you home from work or
you would be in the doghouse

P and R Pete, I had a really bad day at work, fought with a balky computer till I was blue in the face, just got home and was trying to decide wether to kick the dog or beat the wife. I read your story, the photos were a must by the way, and havent' laughed so hard in weeks.

My deepest gratitude.


Gene

Really enjoyed the story glad it had a happy ending tell her to use cleats next time. You will have holes in roof but she will get there.

You were probably just minutes from a visit by the fire department. It's pretty amazing that she got onto the roof without tipping that ladder, getting down that route was not going to happen. Worst part is that she and the kids now know that they can get onto the roof from the window...

Nice looking house. Wish I had one like that.

My farm bred but afraid of heights redhead and I were on the roof where she's employed shoveling snow when she slipped and slid down the roof in her nylon insulated bibs. She went shooting off the roof and lit in a deep snow drift.

After climbing out of the drift she brushed herself off and climbed back up while I steadied the ladder. When we were finished shoveling she thought sliding off was so much fun she sat down and slid off into the drift again to get down. I chickened out and went down the ladder.

Her place of employment is a large preschool daycare where she is the program director with forty employees under her. The news about her being on the roof shoveling snow and then sliding off into a drift went through the building like wildfire. None of the employees under her had the ambition or the guts to go up there with her but some of them did have a new sense of respect for her.Jim

Great story, well told, and without an unhappy ending.
I know what you mean about the redhead thing. Many years ago we had two kids in diapers (real ones, not disposables), a second hand wringer washing machine, and clothes line strung across the kitchen ceiling. Well the gearbox for the wringer was dripping oil into the water, messing everything up. I was told of the problem and invited to fix it. As I had to get to work I simply tied a rag around where I thought the leak was coming from and left for the day.

I came home for lunch. Lying out in the yard on its side was the washing machine. There was a 12 inch screwdriver driven through the side which also impaled a note to me suggesting that my priorities needed adjustment.

I never went into the house for lunch but hopped back onto my BSA straight to the appliance store where I arranged that a new washing machine be delivered before I got home from work.

My redhead is not a big woman but she must have thrown that washing machine 15 feet.
Karl

LOL, you guys!

I was only able to post those pics because she DIDN'T hurt herself. I was aghast when she first told me the details, but I understood what made her do it. No shrinking violet, she. She's a take-charge and if you don't like it she'll kick yer @ss two ways to the middle from here to Sunday kind of attitude, and I wouldn't have her any other way. Buddy, she's a live wire, and ain't no household wiring, it's a high-tension line with no insulation. She pops and buzzes and fizzes, and she doesn't beat around no bushes. What's on her mind comes out her mouth, and you know exactly where you stand in the grand scheme of things, and I wouldn't have THAT any different either. And she's the funniest woman I ever met, and there's hardly a day goes by that we ain't laughing til the tears roll down. And she's farm-bred to boot. She'll pick up hairy-@ss spiders with her bare hands and carry them outside rather than stomp on them, and she feeds every stray animal that wanders up, and she probably feeds the damn groundhogs when I ain't drawing a bead on them, but if a Texas longhorn ever threatened her kids, he'd be the sorriest-@ss bull that ever thought to snort.

It's just that, every so often, ya gotta expect and get used to the idea that she's gonna run a litle amok. And hope that nothing gets too broke in the process!

Wouldn't expect that from somebody so petite, would ya?



You guys with redheads... you know. I know you know. You KNOW that I know you know!

Oops. This is better. Me and the Redhead!

Maybe you should invest in a satellite dish heater.
Satellite Dish Heater

Wasn't there a TV show about a red-head like this?
"Lucy - You got a lot of 'splanin' to do!"

P and R:

She's obviously a keeper. You're a lucky man.

Myself, I've been married for 21 years (but who's counting?) to the Great Red-Headed Money Vacuum. Sometimes I call her by her other nickname (Mean Old Wife). Good thing she has a sense of humor! Except for Jesus, she's the best thing that aver happened to me.

Mark W. in MI