9/9-11/08 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at 1:10. When I was opening the gate, I spotted a couple King Boletas mushrooms at the base of the gatepost. As soon as I moved my gear in, I harvested those mushrooms plus a few other big ones I found and went to work fixing them for lunch. The big ones were too buggy already, but I got a whole pan full of good ones that I sauteed. They were yummy.

After lunch, I strung the #10 wire from the cabin to the trailer. This turned out to be a fairly big job. The wire had a plug on one end, which I remember being hard to install and which I didn't want to remove. The other end was just the three wires. I wanted to plug it in to an inside receptacle in the living room and feed the wire down to the crawl space and then out a pipe through the foundation wall. Since the plug wouldn't fit between the wall and the floor, I fed the entire length of the wire down to the crawl space from up above so that the plug end was upstairs and could be plugged into the receptacle.

The pipe through the foundation led right into a huge pile of firewood under the porch. I had stacked a lot of the form material there also, so getting the wire under all that was a problem. I solved it by shoving a 10 ft. length of 1" PVC conduit under the stacks of wood and then running the wire through the conduit. Both of these took some doing.

Getting the conduit under the stacks of boards required the help of the big steel bar. I used it to probe for a path for the conduit, and then to lift boards up out of the way in order to force the conduit through. After considerable struggle, the conduit ended up under the woodpile and coming out a few inches away from the pipe through the foundation.

Then to run the wire through the foundation and into the conduit took many trips in and out of the crawl space to straighten, shove, pull, and otherwise coax the wire through, sometimes only an inch at a time.

The conduit ended under the front staircase so I used the piece of left-over conduit that, on 5/24/08, Brian had removed from the line of conduit I had glued up for the feeder conduit. I had glued two 45s together and Brian thought they would present too much resistance. I placed this piece of conduit under the staircase and proceeded to pull the entire length of the wire through the foundation wall and these two lengths of conduit. That took some doing, but I got it done.

Then I laid the wire out from there to the trailer in more or less of a straight line down the hill, and I wired up a receptacle in a handybox at the end of the #10 wire. I unplugged the trailer from the old #14 wire and plugged it into the #10 wire. The trailer was now powered from the permanent power in the cabin.

On the wildlife front, I was happy that there were no signs of mice in the cabin. I am hoping that the latest hole is the last hole, at least for a while. Charlie the chipmunk came around for peanuts during the wiring work. It looked like the ants were licked. I only saw two single ants and they looked slow, sick, and disoriented. I think the whole colony got wiped out, wherever it was. The powderpost beetles in the Grid F.5 beam were another matter. The frass accumulated on the tarps just as quickly as ever. I still needed to do something about them.

On Wednesday, I disconnected the phone wire from the trailer and rolled it up up to the point where it met the #10 power wire. Then I laid the phone wire out alongside the power wire back down to the trailer. I plugged the phone wire back in, and got dialtone in the trailer.

The wires crossed the driveway twice, so I dug two trenches and buried the two wires. The upper trench is in the same trench I maintain to divert the runoff water from the roof across the driveway and down the hill. The lower trench is just a few feet below where the propane tanks are on the trailer. After backfilling the trenches the job was done. I checked again and was pleased that I had both power and dialtone in the trailer. I am now ready for snow, at least with respect to power and phone. I fed the gray jays and Charlie the chipmunk some peanuts during the work.

To complete the wiring change-over, I rolled up the #14 wire and stored it in the crawlspace. Half of this job was easy because I had already pulled half of the wire out from under the duff to gain the slack I wanted last week. So for that section, I was able to simply pull the wire out of the woods without going in after it.

Next, I put a half gallon of clear water in the sprayer and sprayed the water into all the cracks and holes I could find in the Grid F.5 beam. Then I mixed up a half pound of Board Defense in a gallon of water and sprayed that in the same cracks and holes. By spraying clear water first, you get better penetration of the borate chemical. The information I read about combatting powderpost beetles said not to panic but to apply the borate over a rather long period of time to see what works. Fortunately the infested beam is very big and it has almost no structural load. It won't hurt much if it is weakened. Since it will always be dry, if I keep applying borate to it, it should eventually become inhospitable to the beetles and they will quit trying to live there. At least that is the hope and the strategy. We'll see if there is less frass next week.

The next project was to backfill the last of the conduit trench. That was the section closest to the building where the conduit was vaulted with a couple inches of concrete. The last dirt pile was in a tarp so it was pretty easy to shovel most of the dirt and rocks into the trench and to drag the remaining dirt over in the tarp. There wasn't quite enough to fill the ditch, so I'll probably have to haul some dirt over there from someplace if I want to get the grade up a little higher. That's a project for a later time.

With that tarp freed up, I used it to replace the tarp that was covering the firewood pile up by the privy. The old tarp had deteriorated quite a bit and needed replacing. Now with the new tarp, the firewood will stay dry and protected from the snow during the winter. I put the old tarp in the pickup to take home and throw in the garbage.

Next, I checked out the drainpipe we had placed under the back stoop. I had stuck a length of 2" PVC conduit under the stoop to serve as a drain pipe for any water that accumulates between the stair stringer pads and the stoop. We had taped over the ends of the pipe so now that the form boards have been removed, it was just a matter of using a mason's hammer to break away the thin flash of concrete that covered the end of the pipe. With both ends open, the pipe should now work as intended. Charlie and the gray jays came around during all this work too.

On Thursday morning I wasn't feeling too well. I felt like I was getting a cold. It was the stuffy head and runny nose type without much of a sore throat. I took Zicam in the nose anyway and slept in. I did go up and putter around the cabin doing some odds and ends and cleanup. I put away the last of the planks and form boards that were still lying out. I still felt tired and sick so I took another nap before I had lunch and went home. I left at 1:30 feeling pretty good about the cabin but feeling pretty crummy in my body.