They're Falling and I Can't Get Up

In my efforts to reduce my air-conditioning costs, I came up with a brilliant idea that would also help me prepare for any hurricanes that might come our way. On the west side of our house, there are six foot high windows that catch the full impact of the Florida sun. When the sun hits those windows, the heat is magnified, and the result is similar to leaving a your car windows rolled up on a hot summer day. My idea was to put up the hurricane shutters on just those windows, to block the sun and reduce that heat. Since the whole northern wall of the room also has six foot windows, there would still be plenty of light. Besides the heat thing, this would be a good practice for installing the shutters ahead of a storm.

My first challenge was to get to the shutters that are stacked against the house down a seldom used path in the garden. Once I fought my way through all the spider webs, and jungle vines, I proceeded to pick out the shutters I needed. I have them all numbered for ease of installation, the only problem is that I don't stack them numerically. So with one hand holding the stack, which weighs hundreds of pounds, I flipped through them to find all that were labeled number nine. I quickly found out that I can not hold up hundreds of pounds, and as the panels slowly tipped towards me, a thought raced through my head. I was going to be crushed behind the house, where nobody goes, and nobody knows that I came back here. Instead of being crushed by hundreds of pounds of steel, I let go and jumped out of the way. Slowly the panels fell back a few feet, and stopped. It turned out that I wouldn't have been crushed because the fence, that is still teetering from hurricane Wilma four years ago, caught them. It all worked out okay, but next time I'll wait until Mark can help me. He'll be able to run around screaming and drawing attention, if I were to be crushed.