12/9-11/03 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I stopped at Priscilla's on the way up and fixed her towel bar. I arrived at the property at 12:50. There was only 3 or 4 inches of new crusty snow on the ground so I broke the trails with just my boots.

After moving in I went up to check on the cabin. I had covered the pack rat trap with a plastic storage box so he wouldn't get trapped, but when I removed the box I was surprised to see that the trap had sprung. The metal box was down on a piece of plywood. The plywood was there so I could carry the whole thing outside without releasing any animal I had caught. I carried it outside, shut the front door, and looked inside. To my further surprise, and dismay, there was a big dead pack rat. I felt terrible. He must have lifted up that plastic storage box, squirmed under it without disturbing the trap, and then proceeded to go into the trap and spring it. I don't know if he died of hypothermia, lack of water, or what. There were almost no turds on the floor so I suspect he got trapped very soon after I left last week.

The pack rat is really a pretty ugly animal. It has a huge head and no neck. The head makes up about a third of its body. Then the hind legs are extra large, sort of like a kangaroo and the front legs are small. The tail is stout and sparsely covered with bristles. Being so ugly, and the fact that it is called a 'rat' made me feel a little less guilty. Still, I would rather not have killed him even though Earl warned me that if I only evicted him, he would figure out some way of getting back into the building. The way it is, he won't be getting back in and I believe that the building is finally completely free of rodents and other large animals. We'll see if it stays that way.

I went to work on the high scaffold planing and scraping the gable logs above the windows. It is pretty stressful work for my arms and shoulders. It helps to trade off between planing, which mostly stresses my shoulders, and scraping, which stresses my arms and hands and also my shoulders in a different way. I don't work this way too long at a time in hopes to avoid repetitive stress injury.

Toward dusk, Mark Lindstrom stopped by. He had heard from Larry that I had found two cats last week. He had been feeding the cats for John, who said he was only going to be away for a day or two. Unfortunately, John hasn't been back for a month and the cats, a mother and three kittens, had started wandering off. Someone took the mother in a few weeks ago. Mike's grandson found one of the kittens and took it home. And then the other two came to my place last week and I gave them to Mike who found a home for them. Mark was glad to hear that they were all safe and had found homes.

Mark was interested in my building so I spent some time showing him around the place. He is building a cabin with half-log siding just down the road. It was dark by the time Mark left so I quit working for the day.

On Wednesday I took a picture of the building because it looked so nice with the new snow. I am still trying to get a good picture at this stage for the first page of our website. This may be it.

I went back to work planing and scraping the gable logs, the upper part of the RPSL and the Grid B PSL. Even though it is hard work, it is rewarding to see the wood change from the dingy gray color to bright new wood. It is also satisfying to know that it will stay looking nice this time around. There were no new turds on the floor and the peanuts were still in the pipe. That's a strong sign that there really are no more varmints in the building -- unless they are hibernating.

On Thursday morning, the peanuts were still in the pipe and there were no new turds. I varnished a second coat on the logs I had varnished last week and a sealer coat on the logs I had scraped this week. They look beautiful and shiny -- just the way I want them to look.

I left for home at about noon.