5/12-15/03 I went up to the property for 4 days: Monday through Thursday.

I had an eye doctor appointment in the morning and I stopped in to see Priscilla on the way up, so I didn't arrive until 12:45. The weather was a beautiful 60 degrees. I checked the plumbing I installed last week and it looks tight. With that clear tubing, I will be able to see if the valve leaks at all and it hasn't so far.

After moving in and having lunch, I went up and looked at the corner of the deck I had stained last week. It looked great! I was really happy with how it looked even though I had not scraped off all the places that had been discolored by UV. Having a mixture of different shades of color seems to add to the rustic effect. I decided that I would finish the entire deck in that same way.

I got the planer out and started working on the deck. I had only run the planer about six inches when the drive belt in the thing broke. I called the Plain hardware store and they told me they didn't have a replacement belt. I thought I had a spare, but I looked in all the places it might be and I didn't have one. I decided to do the job with old fashioned hand tools so I got out the 18 inch block plane and the 10 inch block plane and tried them. The big one was just too long for such rough planks but the smaller one worked pretty well in some places. I also tried Rasputin, my big wood rasp, which worked pretty well too. The problem was that in order to keep the rasp nearly flat on the deck, I had to be scraping my knuckles on the deck. I had gloves on, but it was still sort of awkward. I also tried a floor scraper and found that it worked very well if I had already smoothed the big bumps down with Rasputin.

So with that combination of hand tools, I worked pretty hard smoothing down the dowels and any edges that were sticking up so you could trip on them. I developed a blister in the palm of my left hand from the block plane, but the blister didn't get too big and it didn't pop.

Worse than that, though, while I was using Rasputin, I drove a fairly big splinter into the second knuckle of the middle finger of my right hand. It was about the size of a half inch of the end of a round toothpick and it went into the knuckle just about where the hinge pin would go if there were a hinge in the knuckle. I could feel the thing separating the bones and when I took my hand out of the glove, I couldn't straighten my finger. I imagined that it felt like a lobster must feel with one of those wooden plugs in its claw. Fortunately, there was a stub of the splinter sticking out and it was pretty easy to pull it out of my knuckle. As soon as I did, I could bend my finger again. It didn't hurt much at all and since I could bend my finger again, I continued working. I tried to get it to bleed as much as I could, but hardly any blood came out.

During the afternoon, I fed the chipmunks several times and I also fed a Stellar's Jay from the window ledge while I was only ten feet away.

After dinner, my finger started swelling and hurting. It hurt pretty bad all night long. I would hold my arm straight up and massage my finger trying to reduce the swelling and get some circulation in the finger. It worked pretty well because it never did get very discolored and it would stop hurting for a while after I raised and massaged it like that.

On Tuesday morning, my finger hurt pretty bad but still wasn't discolored very much.

I finished rasping and scraping all the planks, swept off the deck, and stained the rest of the deck. It looks really good to me. I was very happy with how it turned out. Both my finger and my shoulder hurt pretty much during the work, but it was tolerable and I got the job done. I took a break every now and then to feed the chipmunk who watched me work most of the time.

That evening, the swelling in my finger was down quite a bit and it didn't hurt nearly as much as before. It was awfully stiff though and I couldn't bend it very much.

On Wednesday I hauled about 100 gallons of chips and sawdust from under the porch and spread them on the trails. Then I pulled out the tarps I had under there to catch the chips and sawdust and folded them up and put them away. I went up to the salt block and found that the deer have been licking away at it. They have also dug quite a hole where the old salt block was. I suppose there is quite a bit of salt in that dirt, but I don't understand why they would dig into it like they did.

Before I had lunch, I hooked up a hose and strung it up to the building so I will have water up there for mixing mortar. By that time, my finger was feeling a lot better and didn't hurt at all unless I moved it certain ways. After lunch, I took some pictures of the finished deck.

Next, I set up the scaffolding on the southwest wall by using the same old scaffold brackets but this time I propped them up with the 16 foot 4x4s Doris had given me. Since the brackets needed to be below the log walls, I couldn't use bolts through the wall like I usually do. Just as I was getting ready to install the handrails, Earl stopped by to see what I had been doing. He liked the look of the deck. We noted that there hadn't been too many mosquitos yet this season and he said that was because it had been cool. He expects they will be out as soon as the weather gets warmer.

After Earl left, I installed the handrails and took a picture of the scaffolding. Then I had time to insulate four seams and nail two seams before I quit for the night.

On Thursday morning, my finger hardly hurt at all and after a little work, I was able to completely close my fist. By that time I was pretty sure that there would be no serious problem as a result of that splinter and I was glad about that.

After breakfast, I went to work and nailed two seams. Then I mixed two batches of mortar and chinked a little over one seam. The mortar felt a little sandier than usual, but it seemed to be okay. I had put the left over mortar mix from last year in a plastic garbage bag to keep it dry and evidently it worked. Both batches of mortar were of perfect consistency so it made the chinking nice and easy. It was fun to chink again. I remember that by the time I quit chinking last fall, it had gotten to be a routine and was almost a drag. Now, it was fun again, and I was happy to be back at it. Now that I have all the techniques down, it shouldn't take too long to finish the rest of the outside chinking. I left for home at 1:15.