[special-K]

Now that I'm not up on the pump jacks every day I have a hard time. I put siding on a house a friend built for his daughter, with him helping. A big wide and tall end wall that took 36' of pole for a 30' walk board in the middle with 30' poles at each end with 12' planks. So about 50' of wall I guess. With this set-up you go up until you don't need the shorter stuff at each end and drop those down.

This wall was so high I had to crank it all down, to remove the shorter planks, then pump back up. Once up I had to reach off the ends to get some of the siding up. And this was LP Smartside, a wood siding and heavier than vinyl, plus there was soffit to run out there. It was a weird feeling because you ran out of walk board at the ends. Plus high enough for the poles to be swaying. And a 30' one man walk board with poles at the very end is a very springy twisty thing.

I got the heebie jeebies up there. I got to where I had to keep one hand on the wall. Impossible to hang siding with one hand. Also the tall cypress trees not far next to the house screwed up my perception, plus window wells below with rebar sticking up didn't help. I told Larry I had to come down before a panic attack froze me and the fire dept would have to rescue me. I had an awful time making my way back to the ladder at one end and a hard time climbing down the fully extended 32 footer. We sat for a good while but I was still all upset, so I said time to call it a day and try again tomorrow.

I really didn't want to go back up there but I conjured up all I had a went on up, fighting fear the whole time. It was a race against anxiety catching up again. Once the ends of the walk board were above the roofline and too close to the pole brackets to go past I felt better. But now I was higher yet! I had to stand on my tippy toes to reach the peak.

I think I left out one other come back down to settle my nerves session in there somewhere. The thing with doing that work off of pumpjacks is you have to run all the way up before coming down. You stay until the wall is done. Taking lunch or going home for the day is not a good thing. You adjust as you go up. To climb up and start fresh is a very hard thing to adjust to. These days they build them so big that's not possible. So screw that!!