7/15-17/08 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at 1:15. It was hot and there were a lot of mosquitoes. I was very happy to find no evidence of mice in the cabin.

I carried a load of yard waste to the compost pile, and I carried a couple of plastic chairs from home up to the cabin.

On 7/4/08 I had built two spreadsheets to make the calculations for the two staircases based on the measurements I had made two weeks earlier. In the process, I discovered that there was an error in the measurements I made for the pitch of the lower staircase: the Pythagorean Theorem didn't work out. I went into the woods, and using a different method this time (a plumb bob rather than a level) I re-measured the pitch angle a little more carefully and got a better answer. The mosquitoes were thick and fierce in the woods, and since it was getting late, and I was dead tired, I decided not to do any more work and I quit for the day.

On Wednesday I smeared on the mosquito repellent and went to work in the woods. I screwed plywood skirts on the outside stringer of the lower staircase. Then I installed one 12-foot stringer at the bottom of the upper staircase. Before I could install the skirts on that stringer, I needed to do quite a bit of excavating. I ran into a big root running across the top of the bedrock from one side of the staircase to the other. I used a drill with a spade bit to cut through each end of the root so that I could break it out. The root was about 4 inches in diameter.

The work was hot and dirty and the whine of the hordes of mosquitoes was constant. More aggravating than the dirt and the mosquitoes was the sweat that constantly poured off my brow and over my glasses. Since my shirt was also soaking wet, I didn't have any way of easily cleaning off my glasses, so most of the time I couldn't clearly see what I was doing. In spite of these annoyances, it was gratifying to finally scrape all the dirt off the bedrock in that spot. The work was interrupted from time to time by a chipmunk and gray jays who came by for peanuts, and by Bert and Ernie who stopped by for dog biscuits. Judging by the way my heart was pounding, I think I needed those breaks.

With the bedrock exposed below, I got a start on installing the skirts on the newly installed stringer.

On Thursday I installed the matching 12-foot stringer on the other side of the upper staircase and I finished skirting both of those stringers. Larry stopped by for a look during the process and we both remarked about how much concrete the stairs will take. He told me that Roberta is not doing too well and that there isn't much he can do about it. I told him to give her my best wishes.

We walked out on the road to get away from the mosquitoes so we could talk, and I told him about the big limb I had seen fall last winter. We looked up in the tree and discovered that there was another big limb 20 or 30 feet up that was broken completely off but was just hanging up there on another dead limb. I thought about throwing a rope up there to try to get the limb down, but after Larry left I called the Department of Public Works and got the advice that I should let them handle it. That suited me fine. I left for home at 2:30.