Sometimes I just don’t know when to quit. I’ve been trying to be “productive” on a computer today and so far I’ve managed to completely mangle two computers within a five hour window.

I also got stuck on a ledge in my house. The ledge is in my bathroom, and my goal was to put some Christmas lights up there. The ledge itself is about thirteen feet off the ground, and I have no ladder.

I tossed the lights up to the ledge where there’s an outlet controlled by a switch in the room, then put a barstool below the ledge. When standing on the barstool, the ledge is about a foot above my head still. Not exactly high enough to simply lay out the lights and plug them in. I wasn’t going to succeed unless I got on the ledge.

So I pulled my self up, using nothing but my impressive arm muscles and cat like instincts. The edge of the ledge is rounded, between and inch and a two inch radius, which makes it difficult to really grab hold of, so that was scary. The ledge is also about a foot deep, and 2 feet high, leaving little room to do anything once there.

I laid out the lights, plugged them in, then realized I was thirteen feet off the ground, the closest object being a barstool about 7 feet away. I weighed my options. I could jump, which might either hurt really bad, or not a lot. There was going to be some pain if I jumped, and possible damage to my condo (hole in floor). My other option was to try and jump off and land on the bar stool, reducing the distance I’d have to jump. I’d either land on it, then have to jump off again to the floor immediately, or my weight wouldn’t land right and it would shoot off in one direction while I ended up horiztonal on my way to floor. The idea of doing a belly flop on a hardwood floor wasn’t tops on my list.

 I took the third and final option. I put my trust yet again in my impressive arm muscles and cat like instincts and began to lower my entire body from the ledge to the bar stool. At one point when all my weight was being supported by nothing but my hands, they began to slip on the rounded ledge corner. I thought I was a goner, so rather than react to a fall I was preemptive and pushed off the ledge with the intentions of missing the barstool below me, and landing with my feet square on the floor. I forgot about the counter top behind me, and ended up taking a seat in the bathroom sink, which suprisingly didn’t hurt at all (I’d just fallen about 5 or 6 feet into it).

By the way, before thinking of the third option, I spent about 45 minutes trying to figure out what to do. I’m a big dummy sometimes.