3/7-9/06 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

It was raining lightly when I arrived at 1:00. There was no new snow on the ground. I brought a bunk bed and a dining room table of Kalimba's. It wouldn't fit in her new apartment so we will store it in the log house. The mattresses were covered with a tarp and my plan was to go up to the cabin and get a smaller tarp which I could use to cover each mattress as I carried it up. When I got up there and opened up the cabin, it stopped raining and it looked like it was going to stay clear. That was a lucky break. I carried all the things up to the cabin without worrying about them getting wet.

I fed a few gray jays in the process, and when everything was hauled up, I had lunch. Then I went to work and sanded all the logs that were due for another coat of varnish. Since I didn't need the scaffold to reach those logs to varnish them, I moved the scaffold out of the way. I set up sawhorses, planks, and my riser so I could reach the Grid D1-E1 gable logs. I got a start planing them. Before I went in for the night, I swept and vacuumed the loft floor except for a big pile of chips inside the tarp where I was working.

On Wednesday it snowed lightly all day long. I spent the day planing, scraping, and gouging the next four logs in the Grid D1-E1 wall. I started using a small diamond sharpening stone I bought at the Scout Shop to sharpen my scraper. It works great and it saves me time by not having to go down into the crawl space all the time to use the grinder. It speeds things up too by always having a super sharp tool to work with. It's still a lot of hard work, though and my hands are always sore and stressed from working with the scraper.

Before I quit for the day, I broomed off and then vacuumed the wall logs so they would be ready to varnish. When I went in, there was about 4 inches of new crunchy snow on the ground. The old snow had gotten pretty dirty, so the new snow made everything look clean and beautiful again. I love walking in snow that crunches under your feet.

On Thursday morning, there was about 8 inches of new snow on the ground. I varnished all the prepared logs and then made some measurements for the outside front staircase. I left for home at noon to try to get over the pass before another storm came in. I heard on the radio that I-90 was closed because of avalanches and I figured the roads would be getting worse over the course of the day. There was a lot of snow in the pass, but I made it over with no problem.