9/26-28/06 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

The drive over was beautiful. The leaves at the higher elevations were already turned. The sign at the fire station said that the fire risk was moderate, so I stopped in at the station to find out if it would be OK for the scouts to have a campfire on my property. The Boy Scouts are planning to come up to the cabin in a little over a week for a planning session. I couldn't find anyone at the station, but they had posted a telephone number which I wrote down.

I arrived at the property at 12:50. There was no frog in the gate can. There was also no evidence of mice in the cabin. A flock of gray jays greeted me as soon as I parked and I fed them a bunch of peanuts.

After moving in and having lunch, I called the fire department and left a message asking what it would take to get permission for having a campfire. Then I went to work and trimmed the glue beads from the window trim I had installed the previous week. I used a super sharp 3/4" chisel which worked great. Now that I really have the hang of it, I only have one window left to do.

I brought another GFI receptacle with me and wired it into the box where it was needed. Then I wired a plug on the end of each of two cables feeding receptacle circuits. I plugged the one to the bedroom circuit into a refrigerator receptacle and energized those receptacles. Then I plugged the one to the utility room into one of the bedroom receptacles and all the power went out. I had to go down to the temporary power pole and reset the GFI breaker there to restore power. Then I got my meter and went hunting for the short.

By testing the plug with the meter, I found there was a short between the black wire and ground. No wonder it blew. Since there were three outlet boxes in the utility room, I took the middle one apart and isolated one of the black wires. Then testing both sides with the meter, I learned that the short was on the far end. I opened up that box and found the problem. On the last receptacle in the string, one pair of terminal screws was unused. The screws are loose when you buy the receptacle and I had failed to tighten up the two that I didn't use. When the receptacle was pushed into the box, the loose black screw wiggled out enough to contact the EMT coupler inside the box. All I had to do was to tighten up those two loose screws, put everything back together, plug it back in, and everything worked fine. I also learned a lesson about unused screws. I plugged in the refrigerator so the scouts could use it when they come up.

There were three or four chipmunks running around the upper roadway and under the porch, but I couldn't get them interested in taking peanuts. These are the first chipmunks I've had up there that are so shy. I suppose I could get them tamed a little, but I don't want to invest that much time. It's fun to watch them anyway.

On Wednesday I decided to get the two logs off the porch that were lying there. These were the middle and top sections of the tree I had felled on the high rock. I realized I had made a big mistake by storing them on the porch because they were leaking copious amounts of pitch. I had noticed it several weeks ago but all I did was to pile sawdust on the spots to soak up the pitch. Now that the scouts were coming up, I had to get those logs off the porch and I had to clean up all that pitch. The six weeks since my surgery was up so it was officially OK for me to lift logs again.

I lowered the smaller of the two logs just by dragging it to the edge of the porch, pushing the butt end over the edge, and lowering it to the ground by hand. I stacked it up against the foundation wall. Then I rigged up a rope and chain through a snatch block that I hung from the Grid E3 Anchor Hook. I used this to lower the bigger log. I snubbed the rope around a projecting log at the corner of the cabin and fastened the chain to the log. With this rigging, it was easy to take the slack out of the rig, pull on the chain to drag the log across the deck, and then lower it to the ground using the snubbing. It was fun manhandling logs again. I get a real kick out of using gravity to do the heavy work under my control. I stacked that log with the other one and then went to work on the pitch.

I used a metal scraper and sawdust to scrape up the blobs and get the deck so it wasn't sticky. It took me a couple hours to get it all scraped up. Another lesson learned.

Sometime during the work, I got an new idea for the inside staircase. I like the idea of a spiral staircase around the Grid B2.5 column, but there is a problem whether I make it clockwise or counterclockwise. I want the bottom landing to be in the living room rather than in the kitchen, but I think there might be a headroom problem on the way down. The new idea is to cantilever a landing on the top that is halfway between the main loft beam and the column, then run a straight section of stair over to the column and then have a spiral staircase wind around the column from there on. There is no doubt that the idea would look good and would solve the problem of headroom, but there is an engineering problem of supporting the lower part of that straight section. That will give me something to think about. At least I was happy to come up with another alternative that might prove to be a good one. We'll see.

Next, I went to work on the first outside stair tread. I had already notched the left side of the tread and the stringer and I had notched the right hand stringer. I got the chainsaw out and notched part of the right side of the tread. I couldn't lower it into place because I still needed to cut a big hole in the end of the tread for the newel post. The tread was getting hung up on the newel post CB66. I decided to cut the big hole by drilling a series of holes with the 1/2" drill. For that I needed power outside. I also wanted to have power outside for when the scouts do their cooking on the porch, so I decided to string a more-or-less permanent power cord outside.

I had put a few pieces of conduit through the foundation when I built it, but most of them were too small to run the extension cord plug through. There was a 2-inch conduit though that already had a hose running through it and I decided to run the wire through that one along with the hose. I had installed a double screen cap over the end of the conduit and around the hose to keep mice and ants from getting in, so I had to remove and modify that cap to accommodate the wire as well as the hose. Then I had to make and install a bunch of wire hangers to run the extension cord across the crawlspace to the power strip by hanging it from the floor joists.

When I got the extension cord installed, Randy Brown, the PUD meter reader, stopped by. I invited him up to see the place and we had a nice visit as he looked at what I had done. I told him about the two trees that had broken off and fell on my roof and that I needed to find a logger to fall the rest of those trees since they were now dieing and were dangerous. He recommended that I call Robert Ferrell. I was glad to get that recommendation.

When Randy left, I got the drill out and with a 7/8" ship augur bit, I drilled a round pattern of holes in the end of the tread. Then I got a small saber saw and sawed from hole to hole and got the wood plug out. I trimmed it a little, but I got it to where the CB66 will clear so I didn't go any further. I'll trim it better once I see exactly how the tread seats.

To finish the notching, I needed to suspend the tread again from my jig. I had taken the come-alongs out of the jig so they didn't get stolen while I was gone because of my surgery, so I got the come-alongs out and put the jig back together again. I got the tread suspended again, but not aligned. It was getting late and I decided that I wasn't going to do any more on the tread until after the scout visit. I had to do quite a bit to prepare for them so I decided to spend the rest of this week and all of next week doing that preparation.

On Thursday morning, the fire department called me and told me the rules I had to follow to have a campfire. I was happy that we would be able to have one. It makes an outing a lot more fun.

I went to work and built a makeshift set of stone steps up to the porch deck. The stair stringers and the uninstalled tread hanging there were in the way so you couldn't walk up to the porch the easiest way. You had to climb up some pretty steep rocks with bushes in the way. So I took some big flat rocks and made some steps that allowed you to climb up to the porch level. The scouts will be bringing some heavy gear up so I wanted a safe way for them to carry it up. During the winter, I had cut steps in the snowbank to get up there but now there was no snowbank. I hope I can get that staircase done in time for next winter's outing, if they choose to come back again.

When rock steps were done, I did some cleaning up in the cabin. I'll do a major cleaning job in there next week. I left for home at 1:40.