I've been painting the exterior of my house. It's not an especially big house and I've been promising The Lovely Mrs. Taylor I'd paint it for years. It was time.

I knew it was time because Mrs. Taylor went to the hardware store, purchased all the paint, brushes and rollers and stacked them up in a pile in front of my fishing boat.

She's subtle, but I can take a hint.

At any rate, I started painting early in June and have been at it ever since. The job has taken most of my weekends and free time, but as of last weekend, it's almost done. There's just a little piece of trim near the roof in back that still needs doing.

Now if I can only get rid of the 75-foot sculpture in my back yard I'll be all set.

What 75-foot sculpture? Maybe I'd better back up a bit and start at the beginning:

It's early June, and the pile of paint, brushes and rollers sits in front of my boat, reminding me every time I walk past that the house needs painting. I look at the paint, the brushes, the rollers. I look at the house. The tall peaks, the overhanging eaves, the little curly-cue fiddley bits that so enchanted me the first time I saw the place; none of these features look all that enchanting from a house-painter's point of view.

What they DO look like is hard to paint.

I borrow my neighbor's aluminum extension ladder. It's much better than mine, but even so it wobbles like Queen Latifa's backside, especially when I'm standing near the top rung. This is especially bothersome for someone like me, who is extremely agoraphobic, which is, as you no doubt know, a fear of agora. Or I might be acrophobic, or ablutophobic, aerophobic, ambulophobic or even anablephobic.

Let me level with you, I don't know from phobias. But I do know that when I stand on top of that ladder my knees start shaking like an epileptic ferret on crack.

So I stand at the top, wobbling, shaking, trying to paint. Trying not to think about the ground w-a-a-a-y down below somewhere. In the end I give up and crawl shamefacedly back down the ladder.

"I can't do it," I tell Mrs. Taylor.

"You can do it," she tells me.

"It's too high," I say.

"You will do it," she says.

"I will do it," I say. Mrs. Taylor would have made a great Marine drill sergeant.

But I won't go back up that ladder. Uh-uh, no way. Call me chicken if you must, but I'm not putting my life on the line for a little fresh paint.

Fortunately, my father-in-law is part owner of a construction company and has an armory of special equipment at his disposal, including a "sky crane," a gas powered crane with a passenger box on one end.

I ask to borrow the sky crane, picturing the device as a relatively small unit that nestles nicely into the back of a pickup truck. What my father-in-law drops off the next day is a house-sized behemoth capable of lifting girders to the tops of skyscrapers or moving a space shuttle onto the launch pad.

It weighs nine tons.

NINE TONS.

I'm not exaggerating here.

After unloading the sky crane and giving me a brief primer in its operation, my father-in-law leaves. Considering what happened to his chainsaw when I borrowed that a few years ago, I can't quite believe he's trusting me with the sky crane.

But there it is. Sitting in my front yard. Completely covering my front yard, in fact.

I gather up the paint, brushes and rollers and load them into the sky crane's box. I fire her up, move the box s-l-o-w-l-y up, then down, then back, then forth. Then into the roof of the porch, where it tears out a hole about a foot across. I patch the hole with some spare roofing tiles and decide not to mention it to Mrs. T.

As the days go by, my skill level with the sky crane improves, until finally I can move it around like a pro. I can squeeze the box into the tightest corners and navigate the heavily weighted base without bringing down nearby trees or crushing any parked cars.

I paint the front of the house, then the sides. The sky crane is, as far as I'm concerned, the greatest labor saving device since the wheel.

Best of all, my neighbors Dave and Jerry are both jealous as hell. I can tell. After years of feeling inferior in the lawn tractor/snow blower department, finally and at last ... I, Mike Taylor ... have the biggest piece of equipment on the block.

Riding around in my diesel-belching, lawn shredding yellow monster, I've never felt more manly. I find myself taking my time with the painting, just to hold on to the sky crane a few days longer.

But finally the day comes when the whole house is done, except for the back.

Now, the sky crane is exactly 9-feet 2-inches from side to side. The gate leading to my back yard is 9-feet 4-inches wide. However, by this time I'm a sky crane expert. I manage deftly to negotiate the space without turning the fence into sawdust.

I park the sky crane in the middle of the yard, then - just for the heck of it - elevate the box (with me in it) to its highest level. I rise above the roofline, then above the treetops. When I come to a stop 75 feet later, I can see the next town over. I can see the rings around Saturn. I can see the storm blowing in from the west that causes the sky crane to sway violently from side to side. Lightning flashes nearby and the sound of thunder rips across the sky. I nearly faint.

I manage to get back to the ground before the rains starts. It rains for three straight days, which makes the ground soft, softer, softest.

Nine tons of sky crane slowly sinks into my back yard.

That was two weeks ago and the sky crane is still there, waiting for a miracle.

I've considered several possibilities: I could paint it a rust-colored orange and tell people it's a sculpture by Alexander Calder. I could install a ticket booth at the gate and charge neighborhood kids 50-cents each to ride in the basket. Or, I could just wait for the next rain, when what's left above ground will likely sink below the surface like a woolly mammoth into the La Brea Tar Pits.

Or - and this is my last choice - I could call my father-in-law and admit that what happened to his chainsaw a few years back was nothing compared to what I've done with his sky crane.

When the house paint starts flaking next time, I'm having siding installed.