5/22-24/12 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I stopped in and visited with Claude McVey on the way up. I arrived at Camp Serendipity at 12:45 and was promptly greeted by Bert and Ernie. It was only 50º outside so after giving the dogs their hugs and biscuits, and after moving my gear in, I started a fire in the wood stove to take the chill off inside the cabin.

After lunch and a short nap, I went to work on the ceiling over the front porch. I finished up the last gaps between Grid G and the roof edge. In the process I discovered a good method for filling the last gap that I will use from now on. The method is to make the final strip in two pieces, one with a tongue and the other with a groove. Since ripping the groove side off, as I did before, destroys the board anyway, you might as well rip off the tongue too. That way, the two pieces mate at their respective saw cuts, which can be made fairly tight, and the tongue and groove joints are complete on both sides. I'm glad I figured this out before I got any further.

I also installed a few ceiling boards between Grid F and Grid G before I quit for the day.

On Wednesday it was raining so I decided I didn't need to water the giant sequoia trees this week. Instead I went right to work cutting and installing ceiling boards. A chipmunk came onto the porch at one point for peanuts.

A little later I got a phone call from Earl telling me that he would be over to visit in an hour or so.

After nailing up a few more boards, Earl showed up and we had a nice visit. He told me about his awful medical experience which had him hospitalized for the entire month of April. He has been recovering and gaining weight since his release and was feeling almost back to normal. I took a couple pictures of him before he left shortly before noon.

After lunch and a nap, I went back to nailing on ceiling boards. By the end of the day I had used up nearly all of the ones that I had stained.

On Thursday morning, I took some pictures of the ceiling as it was completed so far and then set about staining more boards. I stained and stacked 15 more boards before I quit for the week. The boards are 16-footers so that amounted to 240 lineal feet of staining.

After having my lunch and packing up to leave, I was visited by Dave Bradburn who wanted to know whether I had any work for him. He is in the remodeling business and was interested in my project. We discussed some of my upcoming projects and he had a look around the cabin. I told him I would think about it and let him know. I left for home at about 1:30.