I have a weird relationship with heights... No problem at all being a thousand feet up on a TV tower, but I hate climbing to the top of a 15' ladder.

 

maybe you have a problem with lack of engineering?

But yes, my neighbor's ratty old extension ladder gives me a serious case of the *******.

 

I don't like ladders either. A couple experiences stand out in my memory:

1. In junior high, we had a basketball gym with the big hanging light fixtures on the ceiling. I guess the maintenance guy normally replaced the bulbs, but for some reason we had to do it when we were prepping for some kind of school function, maybe a student play, in the gym. In order to reach those lights, the school had a wooden A-frame ladder -- in my memory it was at least 60 feet tall but probably was a 20 foot ladder. Regardless, it scared the **** out of me, as it creaked and wobbled with increasing volume and intensity the higher you climbed.

2. One summer in college I decided to work with a friend-of-a-friend roofing a house in the neighborhood. It was a 2 story house in front, but in the back it was 3 stories down as it was built into a hill and had a garage underneath the main house. I tried not to show any fear but climbing up the ladder on the front of the house with a 40 lb toolbox was not fun at all. I lasted a couple days working with them. On the third day we had gotten all the old shingles removed, and my foot slipped on the bare wood. I slipped a couple feet down the backside of the roof before catching myself. I quit about 20 minutes later.

 

Oh god, no. I took a friend on the tour of this amazing Frank Lloyd Wright building a few weeks ago.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_Tower


At one point in the tour, you go out onto the 18th floor balcony, to go up to the 19th floor. This was the entrance to Mr. Price's office. The 19th floor.

Just turning the steps and having the wind hit me and looking over the side..................ugh. Couldn't handle it.

 

Yes, there's certainly an element of that. When I'm up on a stick, I'm wearing a harness and climbing something designed by Engineers, assembled under the supervision of other Engineers, and tested by yet more Engineers.

When I climb a ladder, I'm standing on something designed by Fred and assembled by Karen.

Still, I work with guys that'll scurry up that same ladder like a stripper on a pole, with a Source Four in one hand and a coffee in the other.




We had that exact same ladder at Charlotte High, in the auditorium which I (as the resident nerd of the drama dept who understood how lights and electricity worked) had to climb to re-lamp and adjust the instruments on the stage.

Hated it. Hate, hate, hate.

When I got a job at a real theater, with a scissor-lift, that was a whole different universe.




No ****? I had no idea FLW had ever done anything like that. Way cool.




Anyway, it turns out that Velveeta fan-fiction is a thing: The Velveeta Rabbit

 

I just watched the documentary "In search of Sugar Man" and was pretty impressed. It was about a man who wrote good music in the late sixties and seventies but never sold any albums here, was a huge seller in South Africa, but he lived in poverty in Detroit until comiting suicide on stage. Pretty cool documentary.

 

I've seen that too. It was quite interesting. I most most struck by the flagrant ripoff of his royalties by the guy behind the record label. Even when presented with seemingly irrefutable proof of what he was doing, he just shrugged it off and continued the practice. I had never even heard of the musician (Sixto Diaz Rodriguez) though, or his music, before the documentary.

The bit about his {spoiler redacted}.

 

I get to spend the rest of the week on a boom lift. Heights are not my favorite, I'll be sure to post pics 😉

 

I generally have no trouble with heights; ladders, roofs, trees, mountain ledges, makes no difference to me, as I have excellent balance (and ex hang glider pilot), but my wife won't even get near an edge. She claims she suffers from an irrational fear that she will spontaneously, but subconsciously, throw herself off. I just don't get how you could not trust your own mind/body.

 

The "song" is garbage, but the title is amusingly relevant.

 

She already has a history of mental illness because she is a woman. Not kidding. I would imagine any woman who has spontaneously cried, thought of breaking objects, or thought of inflicting harm on others when experiencing hormonal fluctuations associated with menstruation might be able to shed some light on this. Y8s? Postpartum depression often generates thoughts of suicide or infanticide in otherwise average women. Women have a lot more reason to distrust their own minds and men have a lot more reason to distrust women.

Similarly alcoholics and junkies know they are engaging in self-harm and are still drawn to act in ways counter to their well being.

 

I get to climb **** like this all the time:


My department has a 100 footer, which is tame compared to this monster I saw at a conference.

200+ feet of ladder attached to a truck.

 

I once responded to a call from a man who thought he was suicidal.

He was a bit down on his luck having recently been laid off, but he wasn't in a terribly precarious financial situation. He said he wasn't having thoughts of killing himself, but was afraid that one day he'd be driving along the freeway and would involuntarily swerve into a bridge abutment to end his life.

We had to convince him that he wasn't actually suicidal - a little depressed maybe - but he seemed to be in good spirits while we visited with him.

I once laid on the edge of a 2-story roof - probably a 6/12 (though my mind says "that had to have been an 8/12"), in order to look over and paint the fascia board below a gutter which was inaccessible by ladder due to some pretty obscene vegetation/shrubs/trees. I ended up with some temporary scarring on my belly where the skin (which offered a more confident grip than my cotton t-shirt) had pulled downward across the asphalt shingles while I was cantilevered over the edge. It went away after about 2 years.

After several years of working as a framer, painter, gutter installer, and finally glazier, I'm pretty sure I've overcome most of the fear of falling from injurious, though generally less-than-lethal heights.

 

Presumably you're asking me if I'm familiar with pregnancy and postpartum-related hormonal changes in women's brains and not if I have menses-related mood swings.

It is a science fact that women's brains shrink during pregnancy.

It is also a science fact that people who are sleep-deprived even a few days will have severely impaired mental faculties. When you consider that new parents are often sleep deprived for weeks or months at a time, you see how mental people (men and women, but women typically lactate at night and men do not) will become.

That said, men can get "hormonal" and crazy too. Ever heard of roid rage? High levels of testosterone--even naturally occurring--can affect mood.

 

It was originally designed for NYC, but no one would build it. It's in Bartlesville, a town of about 35,000. The apartment side of it was an abysmal failure. In the late 50s/early 60s the apartments rented for $300/month, when you could rent a 3 bedroom house with a yard and garage for $75/month a block away.

FLW also built this house in Tulsa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westhope

 

What's up with the forum not fitting to screen?
Does this on my tablet and phone.
Haven't tried it with the laptop yet.

 

Crummy CSS?

Or your stuff has the AIDZ.

 

Nah, my tablet was doing the same last night. And from my laptop this morning, the width is fine but something with the User box (top right where it says "Welcome, xxxxxx" and shows the number of PM's) is messed up.

 

Bar talk related... lol

So last night another 'regular' tried to call me out saying I'm a mooch. I'm thinking, wtf?

Had the ability to count my drinks on one hand and name all of the free shots that were given to me by others. When I tried to ask him what his example was that made a mooch, he couldn't answer. Then played victim and was saying to his buddy behind him "why is he in my ear?" because I was confronting his bs claim.

Thoughts?

 

I can't imagine where in NYC it would have been practical. The ratio of footprint to height and footprint to useful floor space seems quite poor. Maybe if you just built the tower part, without the rest, it would be useful to sneak some condos into a tiny corner lot uptown or something...

Cool looking building, though.