I fought the war, but the war won

I've appreciated this year of respite from grown-up living, I really have. Staying with my family for free right after college, saving up some money, going on auditions and interviews while spending some solitary (read: friend-less) time to figure myself out has been a real blessing. I've enjoyed the quiet.

Unfortunately, we live in a real house. With a yard, and a garage, and gutters. And I, as the largest and oldest male in the house am expected to contribute my physical strength and stature to the upkeep of these more brutish aspects of real home living.

Hence the reason for this writing, my war with the gutters.

When I woke up, my grandmother asked if I'd clean out the gutters. They hadn't been cleaned out since fall, and as we're expecting some heavy rain, we don't want them to get too heavy and fall. She was smiling as if she'd accomplished something big and couldn't keep it to herself. I said, "sure I will." As if she really couldn't contain it anymore, she beams at me and points to the space by the front door. Lying on the ground is a long silver hook with a spout at the end, wrapped in that abominable plastic that makes Christmas presents (headphones, Rubix cubes) so damned hard to get into without inflicting serious harm on oneself. "It's a gutter cleaner!" she says, "it's going to make it so much easier for you!"

After she leaves to take my brother to the doctor and then to get a haircut (he recently attempted to cut his own hair in the bathroom...he looks kind of like this now) I decided to throw on some clothes and do the dumb gutters.

The gutter cleaner hooks up to a hose. You can turn it on after you've placed the hooked end in the gutter, and it will pressurize the water to spray out the nasty things caked in the gutter. Those are its supposed functions, at least. Our gutter cleaner failed in that it didn't pressurize the water NEARLY enough to blast away all of the leaves and such, and the cleaner doesn't hook up to the hose cleanly. So in hooking it up, the seal broke a disc of water sprayed out. As as I was trying to spray things out of the gutter after finagling the hookup, a seal broke in the MIDDLE of the cleaner, and all of the stored up pressurized water poured out and soaked me. The top half of the cleaner got stuck on a branch, pulling it apart, sending water into the air (and then back down onto me.) I thought I'd get closer to make things easier and not have to reach so far, and pulled out the ladder. The continued seal breaking soaked the ladder, and while doing the back gutters I slipped on the top rung and fell from it into my sister's new garden. I crushed a few herbs (don't tell her) and ruined the jeans I was wearing in that really dark fresh bumper crop soil. Finally, one half of the front gutter just...fell...down.

I wouldn't consider myself physically unable to do outdoorsy work, not by a longshot. I've done tons of yard work, tons of garage cleaning, tons of weeding and sweeping. Add to that, I'm 6'4" and 200 lbs of dude. We all sort of figured my height would make this project easier for me than the others. We were wrong.

I'll stick to raking the leaves, thank you very much.

Edit: I just found out that my brother had already cleaned the back gutters. Oh God. Someone kill me now.
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