10/28-30/03 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

It rained most of the way up but the sun came out after I crossed the pass. It kept raining, though, so there was a gorgeous rainbow that followed me almost all the way to the property. A couple times I thought I should pull over and take a picture of it because the fall leaves were brilliantly beautiful and I think I could have composed a nice picture with the leaves and Nason Creek. But there was a car behind me that seemed to want me to keep moving, so I did. Now I regret it because I probably won't have that opportunity again.

I arrived at 1:30 and it was still raining a little. I filled a glass with water from the hose spigot to see if it looked and tasted all right. It did. There was no hint of the Clorox and it didn't taste any different now that it was flowing through the copper pipes. That was good news to me.

After moving in and having lunch, I went to work screening the vent openings and other cracks between the rafters as they go over the walls. I had given quite a bit of thought to how I would do this, and I finally decided to plug all the openings with a combination of 1/4 inch hardware cloth to keep out the rodents and fine mesh window screen to keep out the ants. I learned from experience that neither screen does both jobs and I couldn't find any screen in the store that would either. Small cracks I would fill with caulk.

It took me a while to decide exactly how to make the screen parts and bend them to fit. I started with the rafters on the north corner of the building. That was where the rafters were shimmed, so there were extra irregular spaces at the bottom. That took extra pieces of screen that had to be fitted. I got two rafter spaces done, each one taking about 10 pieces of screen, when Phil Leatherman and a friend came by.

I showed them around the place and we talked about log houses, how to keep rodents out, and ants. Phil said that he had seen a couple bobcats recently. He also said there had been a swarm of carpenter ants at his place this year and his friend told a couple of stories of carpenter ant infestations he had been through. I felt good about not seeing many at all this year. Maybe the treatment I gave my logs has discouraged them. I also used ant spray any time I saw very many of them in one place and maybe that has helped keep them away.

It was pitch dark by the time they left so I followed them down to the trailer in the rain because I didn't have a flashlight with me and they had a small one. After they left, I went back up with a flashlight and closed things up for the night. In the evening, I took the trailer screens off.

On Wednesday it didn't rain and the temperature was about 40 degrees. There was new snow about halfway down Nason ridge. I went back to work screening rafter openings. There are a total of 42 rafter openings and each one takes a minimum of six pieces of screen that have to be cut and fit. I got 3 more openings screened and by that time I had figured out a pretty good way to make the parts and screen off the holes. I am confident that they will be completely mouse-proof and ant-proof when I am done.

Before going down for lunch, I cleaned and loaded up four pieces of marble that we plan to use for a leather project in a Cub Scout meeting. After lunch, I checked the peanuts I had put in the stovepipe rodent valve. They were all gone which means that some rodent has been up in the pipe. That means that if he gets desperate enough, he should be able to figure out how to get out of the building that way. He needs to know because soon that will be the only way out alive.

Before quitting for the day, I screened 8 more openings for a total of 11. That's about a quarter of them so I felt pretty good about the progress. I felt sort of headachy, though, so I quit a little early. Before I went in, I recessed the strike plate on the privy door. When I installed it, there was a big enough gap that I didn't need to recess it. Now, probably due to the humidity, the gap was small enough that the door was hitting the strike plate. It worked a lot better after I recessed it. I also rolled up the hoses that I had going from the trailer to the building and stored them in the crawlspace. Now that I have a hose bib in there, I won't have to run hoses like that any more.

On Thursday morning I got into mass production mode and made a bunch of screen parts. I screened over another 8 openings for a total of 19. That is only two short of half which made me feel pretty good about the project. I'll soon have the place rodent proof. Before I left for home, I looked under the trailer and sure enough, there was a kink in the hose. I straightened it out and the flow into the creek was much stronger. I left for home at 1:20.