Up a Rope

Re-roping this deck umbrella turned into a bit of a mental and physical tug-of-war. As a matter of fact, this is the third time the rope has frayed and snapped. The last occurrence was at the tail end of last summer and we just stopped using it altogether instead of fixing it, opting to use its smaller and much older predecessor, a table mounted model (seen folded up resting on a chair in the photo).

But this warm May spurred me on to fix the off-set big brother umbrella this year. It provides so much more shade, and it's more adjustable too. But I'm still not sure it was worth the 4 hours of frustration it bestowed upon me yesterday. This was even after I looked it up on Youtube to try to save myself from throwing the whole assembly off the deck. Because of course this particular model isn't featured on Youtube; probably because no one's re-strung one as they are so so difficult to figure out.

And yesterday the damn thing just seemed to have to have the last word. I'll blame it on the late afternoon sun beating down on my un-sunscreened neck, but I forgot the very last step before testing it by trying to crank it up; I neglected to knot the rope under the umbrella mechanism. I pulled the rope right back through into the spool, thus taking me right back to where I'd started 4 long hours ago. At that point I was ready to throw something, so instead I packed up the tools and went for a nice, cool evening walk with Tannah.

I finished the job in about half an hour this evening after dinner. Perhaps I should have had Shauna film me doing it so I'll remember when the rope snaps at the end of this season.

Tannah seems to be thinking, "Why did this take you
two days to fix? What's the big deal?"