9/25-27/12 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

On the way I stopped at Priscilla's to drop off some things Ellen had made. Then I visited with Claude McVey before stopping at the Haight warehouse in Woodinville where I picked up the flooring for the loft and the bedroom.

I arrived at Camp Serendipity at 1:50. After turning on the water, and tying up Rosie the rosebush, I drove the truck up to the upper roadway in front of the front porch.

When I entered the cabin I was elated to find that none of the mousetraps had gone off. I was now pretty well convinced that I had closed up the last of the mouse holes and that I could now breathe a little easier. It was a great feeling.

There was less smoke in the air than there had been last week. You could see Nason Ridge pretty clearly although there was still smoke in the air and a helicopter was still carrying buckets of water from the lake past the cabin and up the valley. The fire up there must still be burning.

I moved my gear in, had lunch, and then had my usual nap. Afterward, I went to work unloading the 32 boxes of flooring and carrying it into the cabin. I used the porch crane to lift 6 or 8 boxes of flooring at a time and set them on the tall sawhorses on the porch. Then I carried each 40 lb. box into the cabin, most of them all the way up to the loft. The work was interrupted a few times by a chipmunk who took peanuts from my hand.

I got all the flooring offloaded in time to back the truck down before it got too dark. I didn't want to leave the truck on the upper roadway all night for fear that the packrats would chew up my plug wires again. When I parked the truck down below, I put the electronic rodent repeller under the hood as I always do.

On Wednesday morning I was greeted by Bert and Ernie as soon as I went out to work. They got their usual hugs and biscuits. I went into the woods and watered the giant sequoia trees but this time I brought a wheelbarrow with me. When the trees were all watered, I wheeled out a load of firewood and stacked it at the cabin.

Next, I carried a few more boxes of flooring from the living room up to the loft. I left enough in the bedroom to do that job. Then I secured the porch crane by hooking the hook to the porch rope rail and by coiling up the electrical cords. I had left that undone from the night before.

Then I began erecting a steel scaffold tower under the Grid A3 corner of the eaves. When I went to install a frame on the second tier, I discovered that the frame was bent so that it didn't fit over the frame below. I knew I had one frame that was bent like that and I usually used it for the bottom tier where it doesn't have to match anything. But rather than dismantling the tier I already had set up, I decided to straighten the frame instead.

I lowered the frame to the ground and used 3 chains and a come-along strung between the Grid A3 anchor hook in the foundation wall and a tree down toward the concrete staircase. I cranked on the come-along, spreading the legs apart, guessing how much to pull them so that when the come-along was relaxed, the legs would be the right distance apart.

I guessed right the first time and the frame was straightened. After lifting it back up onto the first tier, it fit in place perfectly. I put the chains and come-along away. By then it was time for lunch and a nap.

Afterward I set up the third tier and found that the platform was too high by a couple feet. To fix that, I got two rebar S-hooks and two rebar C-hooks that I use for this purpose. I hung the hooks on the second rungs from the top of the top scaffold frames and placed a 2x6 horizontally in each pair of hooks. Then I moved the deck planks down to rest on the 2x6s and I now had a platform at the perfect working height. This would allow me to reach the corner of the eaves that is out away from the log walls.

Next I did the measurements and the geometry necessary to design the scaffold brackets I will use against the Grid A log wall. The plan is to use the same 5-foot 4x4s for the horizontal supports that I used on the Grid 1 scaffolding and to fasten them to the log wall in the same way with lag screws. But since there are no purlins sticking out over that wall, and consequently no anchor hooks, my plan was to use screw eyes attached to the Grid A purlin, or cap log, and then run rebar S-hooks from the screw eyes to the other end of the 4x4s. I had to figure out the length of these S-hooks.

After figuring that out, I used Dr. Dick's extremely handy rebar cutter/bender to cut 5 pieces of #3 rebar to length and then to bend a hook on each end of all of them. All the while I was cutting and bending the rebar I felt grateful to Dr. Dick and wondered how I would have done the job without that tool. It would have been tedious.

Before I quit for the day, I installed an electronic rodent repeller under the front porch and another one on the workbench on the front porch. I had used them inside the cabin trying in vain to keep the mice out, but now that the mice were finally closed out, I decided to use the repellers to try to keep the packrats off the porch and out from under it. We'll see if they make a difference.

During that work, a chipmunk visited me for peanuts a few times.

On Thursday morning, I decided to stain a bunch of boards so I'll be ready when I get the scaffolding put together for the Grid A eaves. I got 20 boards stained before quitting time and I made a video of the process of staining one board. I have a pretty efficient way of staining them, and I thought I would record it for posterity.

I left for home at 1:20 feeling very good about the progress and especially the turn of events in the rodent wars. I'm also glad to have all that flooring in the cabin before the first snow falls.