Adrenaline, anyone?

So I'm hanging up my laundry this morning,
and poing!
the line breaks.
Crumb.
I pick up clothes from the back fence to the house,
rewash the pieces that landed in the garden,
and rehang everything else on the second line.
I have a lot of laundry to do today.
So I decide that I should try to restring the clothesline.
Except the blooming pulley is about five meters off the ground, at the back of our garden.
My husband is the monkey who usually climbs the ladder to do stuff up there.
Me? I'm no monkey. Not with my dizzy brain.
But there's a lot of laundry to dry.
So I call my daughters and set up the ladder.
It's wobbly.
But I can do this.
Can't I?
I take the end of the clothesline and up I go...
The top of the ladder (one of those extendable ones) is really shaky though the girls hold its base firmly.
I can't quite reach from the double rungs, so I have to step up on a single rung.
And one more.
I can just barely hook the curled end of the clothesline over the pulley...
but to get it through, I'll have to let go of the ladder.
My heart is pounding and my knees are wobbly.
But I'm so close, I can't give up now.
I let go of the ladder, grab the pulley with both hands, and the line slips around it.
I grab the end of it, and tremble my way back down the ladder.
Whoo hoo!
I did it!
Good to be back on terra firma, and that's an understatement.


The only problem is that I'm not strong enough to pull the two ends of the line back to the clip that holds them together, sigh.
Still a lot of laundry to dry...