Construction Journal Entry Week of 7/23/06

7/25-27/06 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

On the way I stopped at Marilyn's to deliver a book and to see the progress on the big dig in Skykomish. I arrived at the property at 3:00. There was no frog in the gate can and there weren't nearly as many mosquitoes as there were the week before. It was 85 degrees which was cooler than last week but still too hot for me.

After moving in I went up to the cabin and filled the dispenser with ant bait. It was empty and I had started to see carpenter ants around. Inside, there was a mouse in the trap in the crawl space and the peanut was gone from the floor upstairs. Both traps up there were still baited and set. I still hadn't figured out how they got in this time.

I went up to the drainfield to check on the trees and found that the first of the sequoias was brown on the bottom, the middle one was brown and dead on the top half, and the third one looked OK.

Next, I mounted the gwizzard on the .032 saw and rigged up to gwiz the two stringers hanging the sling from the anchor hook on the Grid E purlin. I gwizzed the right-hand stringer and then swapped positions of the logs. The truss I wore for my hernia kept me feeling normal and I had no trouble gwizzing or wrestling with the logs.

On Wednesday the peanut was gone from the first floor and the bait was gone from the downstairs trap. I reset the traps and put out another peanut. I hope I find the hole pretty soon.

I gwizzed the left-hand stringer and then hoisted it into position. Next I aligned the left-hand stringer carefully and scribed it for the cuts to fit it against the header at the top and in the CB66 at the bottom. After a little trimming, the stringer fit perfectly. I was very happy with the result. I took some pictures of the progress.

On Thursday morning, I scribed and cut the right-hand stringer and got it to fit where it belongs. I took some pictures of the two stringers in place. I also scraped some of the dirt off that had accumulated during handling. I was very happy with the way the stringers looked. I was also happy that the worst of the mosquito season was over. There were so few mosquitoes that I used only two drops of Ben's repellent each time rather than the four I had been using.

When I left for home at 2:20, there was a little green frog in the hole in the gate log. He hopped out when the rebar in the post came poking up through the hole.



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