3/18-20/08 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at 12:20. There was new snow in the pass but no new snow at the property. The driveway was clear so I decided to make a run further up the driveway which still had a foot of fairly dense snow. In the process of backing up for another run, I slid sideways so I was pretty near the left snowbank and I got stuck. I couldn't get out the driver's door so I had to crawl across to the passenger door. After several attempts of shoveling snow away and gravel under, I was able to get unstuck and get the pickup halfway up to the trailer using 4WD. By then it was 1:00. Bert and Ernie were right there during the process collecting their usual dog biscuits.

It was a beautiful sunny 40 degrees outside and I could hear frogs croaking. It was good to hear them. I spent the rest of the afternoon sanding the logs that were due for another coat of varnish.

On Wednesday it was another beautiful day but I wasn't feeling too well. I had been having some kind of stomach trouble and I didn't have much energy. I took a fairly long morning nap.

I went to work and cut up a dead tree that had fallen during the winter. It was poised on the high snowbank on the east side of the parking place leaning right over the parking place. As the snow shrank, the tree was going to fall over the driveway. I decided I had better remove it.

The tree was 33 feet tall and fairly skinny. Moving pretty slowly, I used an axe to cut it loose from the stump and then to cut off all the branches and buck it into three pieces. I threw all the branches into the woods and dragged the two bigger logs up the hill and stored them on the upper roadway. I might use the smaller piece as a railing if the wood is sound, otherwise both pieces will end up as firewood. At least the tree won't block the driveway or fall on the pickup.

After lunch I was still feeling pretty sick. I took another nap and then went up to work in the loft. I heard frogs croaking again, and I made many visits to the privy during the afternoon. I didn't have much energy so I worked slowly.

I set up a one-tier scaffold tower, decked it over with planks, and lashed a ladder to it to make it easy to get up and down. It is placed under the gable peak. In two weeks Andrew and his friend Jeremy are coming up to work with me and I want them to place insulation in the cracks between the loft wall logs to help get them ready for chinking. We will start at the gable peak and then work down from there.

The plan is that if they can place the insulation without my help, I will follow behind them and drive in the galvanized nails. Hopefully we can get all the rest of the walls ready for chinking by the time the weather warms up enough to allow it. Getting the inside walls finished with varnish and chinking has been a long, long process. It is exciting to finally be approaching the end of it so I can move on to other projects.

Late in the afternoon, the power in the cabin went off. The trailer still had power, and both power strips supplying power to the cabin were out, so I knew it had to be a problem down at the power pole with the wire supplying the cabin. Both the cabin and the trailer are supplied by the same breaker at the pole but the supply wires are plugged into two different receptacles.

I went down to the pole and discovered that the plug on the wire to the cabin was arcing in the receptacle and both the plug and the receptacle were fried. What had happened was that the deep snow, as it compacted and shrank, had slowly pulled on the wire so that it had gradually pulled the plug out of the socket. When it got to the point of breaking contact, the arc was established. The load on the circuit was unchanged so the breaker didn't trip and the arc just heated up and melted the nearby plastic parts of the plug and receptacle.

Since I had finished setting up the scaffold, and I wasn't feeling too well, I just unplugged the burnt plug and went in for the night glad that the problem wasn't any worse and that I still had power in the trailer.

I was still feeling pretty sick. I measured my heart rate at over 100 beats per minute from the time I went in until I went to bed. I don't know what I had, but I was pretty uncomfortable.

At 3:30 AM, I woke up having to make another trip up to the privy. But to my dismay, I discovered that the power to the trailer was out. When I got back from the privy, I put an extra blanket on the bed and went back to bed. Earlier I had been thinking about possible strategies for fixing the electrical problem with the receptacle and plug, but now I was lying awake trying to imagine what had happened to the trailer circuit and how I was going to fix that new imaginary problem.

At 4:30 AM I was overjoyed to hear the electric heater come back to life and the answering machine click a few times as it reset itself after the power outage. At least this last problem was with the PUD and not anything I did.

On Thursday morning, after another trip to the privy and after breakfast, I went down to the power pole to assess the damage and determine what to do. I could have varnished the logs in natural light but I still needed to restore power at least before the boys come up in two weeks.

What I found was that the plug and one of the four receptacles in the service panel were smoked. My plan was to find a spare plug, if I had one, or if not, to borrow a plug from a circuit in the cabin, and install it on the end of the cabin service wire and plug it in to one of the two remaining good receptacles. But when I looked at the smoked plug, it seemed to be OK except that one spade needed to be scraped clean. The metal was all sound; only the plastic had been damaged. And since the wire was AWG 10, it was still plenty stiff even without the plastic. I pulled the wire up out of the snow to get plenty of slack, cleaned up the spade, plugged it in to a good receptacle, and the cabin was energized. It was a quick and easy fix, although I will have to get a new plug and make a more permanent fix later on.

The experience increases the priority of getting permanent power supplied to the cabin. That just might be my next major project assuming that I will be allowed to supply and energize my distribution panel before any of the branch circuits are installed and inspected.

From the power pole, I went back up to the trailer, grabbed my can of varnish, and went up to a nicely lit up cabin and varnished the prepared logs. That was the last coat of varnish on the Grid A wall, and leaves only a single coat yet to do on two logs in the Grid 1 wall. It is a good feeling to have the varnishing phase come to an end. I really like the way the logs look.

Bert and Ernie came around for biscuits while I was packing up. I left for home, still feeling pretty sick, at 11:30.