Dam ice!!!!

I mean, ice dam!!!  We have stupid ice dams on our roof!!  This winter has been crazy, snow, warm up, snow, re-freeze, repeat.  Thus this cycle has caused us to have ice dams.  In the almost 7 years we've lived in our house we've never experienced it this badly until this year.  And then we get this:



spot above my head in our bedroom....

  Which means we have a BAD ice dam.  We called up a company to come get on the roof and break up the ice.  Which they did.  For a few hundred dollars.  Of course I asked how they did it.  (because there were more ice dams forming on the roof and darned if I was going to be shelling out more dough if I could get up there and take of it myself!!)

Ice picks!

Duh!

So I went out and got me a roof rake and some ice picks! 

Where was the hubby during all of this?  Out of town. 

So after work this week I've been going home, changing into my "winter attire": smartwool tights, ski pants, ski parka, "baklava" the hubby got me for Christmas (or as most people call it, a balaclava...), smartwool socks, ski gloves, hat and most importantly, a head lamp!!!  'Cuz by the time I get home it's getting dark out there folks!!!  I then bring out the extend-able ladder, and get up on the roof and start chiseling away.  I need that headlamp because otherwise I wouldn't be able to see what in the world I was doing!!

Go ahead.  Make a mental image of me in this get-up.  And I wonder why our neighbors think I'm weird.  I think I'm finally beginning to understand...  Add the boob-flashing incident and I'm clearly the neighborhood crazy!!  (and I was SO sure it was the lady in the house with the yard full of flowers and plants and NO grass... humph....)

Never fear!  I have informed my next door neighbor of my antics important homeowner work so he can come outside every 30 minutes and laugh at me check on me to make sure I'm ok. 

By myself it is slow going.  I have a few more tricks up my sleeve but I will need to wait until the weekend.  I was trying to get a lot of snow chunks off before the "HUGE winter storm" hit last night.  Luckily it petered out when it got here.  We got about 4 " (so far) and for us that's nuthin'.

Apparently I'm not the only one in town with this idea.  The single prong style ice picks are all sold out in town so I had to settle for the multi-prong style, as seen here:

 I purchased 2 for less than $4 each.  However they each now look something like this:

Dont' get me wrong!  They still get the job done!  But I think I'd probably have better luck with the single prong style, since these ones are apparently aspiring to that style.  I guess that's what all the "cool" kids want to be...