When the Smoke Clears

When a female couple calls to say, “We really need you to come over. Sometimes we have to have a man’s muscle…” well, it gets my attention.

“Besides,” one said, “we haven’t had you out here yet. It’s not quite as nice as your cabin so I don’t know what we can do to entice you other than promise you something really good to eat.”

“It’s two chicks, right?” I asked plainly.

“Yeah,” I could hear her sigh while trying to suppress a giggle, “it’s two chicks.”

“Well there you go.”

So rather than working on my own cabin this morning, I high-tailed it out to their new home in the woods. Turns out they were putting in a wood stove and had completed all the stone facing and mortar, new pipe shielding in their chimney, etc. But they were having trouble getting in the liner and as long as I was there, maybe we could move the 400 lb. stove up into the house.

You know, it was such a beautiful day this was a treat. Granted I had to crawl into a tight space with no room for leverage and muscle the pipe up their shaft for over an hour (they said they had tried going down but it just wasn’t possible with only the two of them) but we managed to get all but the last little part of it in there. I was pushing hard but apparently the liner was a bit tight and it caused the pipe to bunch up a touch. That made my base way too thick to go any farther up their hole.

We’ll get some rope and my harness and other gear and get up there tomorrow to pull the last bit through. We’ll put one lady on top and the other down at my knees to give me a hand with the angle.

But once we were done they sat me in the recliner and attended to me with Gatorade and ice. Sweet. (I’ll be honest, for a guy that used to be as skinny as I was, it’s nice to be called on for muscle strength. I’m tired of only being called for my geeky skillz… in the last 2 days I’ve fixed 3 personal computers… I think I only have 4 friends who regularly call me for something other than tech support now… Butterbar, EODGuy, the Geek, and the Mac)

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