8/8-13/13 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 6 days: Thursday through Tuesday.

Because of scheduling challenges, I combined two weekly visits back to back. That essentially gave me an extra day by eliminating one round trip of travel.

After taking Tianna to her counselor and then delivering her to Big Blast, I proceeded on to Priscilla's where I loaded up a queen-size bed we had stored in her basement. From there, I proceeded on to Monroe where I had lunch with Uncle Charles.

When I arrived at Camp Serendipity at 2:50 the temperature was 90º. I was super happy that I had gotten the air conditioning fixed in the truck the previous week. Ellen had insisted that I get it fixed before I haul the family up in the truck to visit Camp Serendipity next week. I was glad she did.

I was dismayed but not surprised to find one mouse in a trap. It was the same trap near the front door that had caught mice before, so the hole must be somewhere near there. The good news, though, was that there was no sign of frass at the base of the Grid B2 PSL. I concluded that I don't have powderpost beetles in there after all. Since I had already had lunch, I took my nap right away.

When I got up, I tied up Rosy, the rose bush, and drove the truck up to the upper roadway. Then I used the porch crane to lift the box spring and mattress out of the truck bed and set them down on the porch. I brought them into the cabin and stored them temporarily by leaning them against the Grid B2 PSL.

Then I backed the truck down the hill and parked it. I hooked up the electronic rodent repeller under the hood as I usually do, but I also set two mousetraps on the floor inside the cab. I never did figure out how mice got in there, but if they did again, I wanted to trap them.

Since it was so hot and uncomfortable inside the cabin, I got the coil of 3/8" copper tube from the crawl space and started thinking about how I might make an air conditioner. I got the big window fan and set it behind the kitchen sink. It didn't fit perfectly, but it fit well enough to suggest that setting that coil of copper tube in front of it, with cold water running through the tube, just might work.

Since it was time for dinner, I decided that I would move my cooking operation from the living room into the kitchen. That would be for the final time and would mark a major milestone at Camp Serendipity. I brought the microwave oven and the toaster from the living room and set them on the granite countertop in the kitchen where they should remain indefinitely.

It was a wonderful new experience to scrub my potato in the kitchen sink instead of in the bathtub. I also moved my DVD monitor from the living room to the dining room and after cooking my dinner in the kitchen, for the first time, I ate my dinner in the dining room which was all set up with table and chairs just like a dining room should be. Cooking in the kitchen and eating in the dining room were both new milestone experiences at Camp Serendipity which I fully appreciated and relished.

On Friday I started out by going into the woods and watering all the giant sequoia trees. While I was up there, I checked on the spring and was happy to see that my temporary dam was holding up nicely. That kept the pressure up on the leak and took the pressure off of me to do any immediate work on the springbox. With the family coming up next week and the scouts coming up the week after that, it is a relief not to have to be working on the springbox, or running the risk of not having a water supply for my visitors. The springbox work can wait.

Back in the cabin, I cleaned off and put away all the stuff that had accumulated on the big table in the loft. Then after lunch and a nap, I dismantled the big loft table and put the pieces away. Then I vacuumed the entire loft floor.

Next I set up in the bedroom a bed frame I had gotten from Uncle Charles and then I set up the box spring and mattress on that. That is intended to be the permanent bed in the bedroom, so getting it set up marked another milestone at Camp Serendipity. I made the bed with the bedding Ellen had supplied, including a new bedcover with images of bears on it that she had bought specifically for the cabin. It looks great, like it belongs in there.

By the time I finished, it was getting pretty warm in the cabin so I decided to try to make an air conditioner. If not now, when?

The first challenge was to figure out how to connect the copper tube to the faucet spout in the kitchen sink. The spout ends with a 3/8" elbow so the 3/8" copper tube fits right inside. I wouldn't be able to solder it, nor would I want to, so the question was how tight was the fit if I just shoved the tube in. I tried it with a short piece of 3/8" tube that was crimped nearly shut on the other end. I turned on the water and there was no noticeable leak at the fitting. That's one advantage of low water pressure.

So all I had to do to make my air conditioner was to solder one 90º elbow between the coil and a short piece of tubing so that the short piece could be shoved into the end of the spout and the coil could be propped up in front of the fan sitting on the countertop behind it. The other end of the tube just discharged into the sink. Fortunately, the diameter of the coil was just an inch or so smaller than the diameter of the fan blades. Just perfect to sit in the airstream from the fan.

As soon as I turned the water on and turned the fan on, there was a blast of cool air blowing over me. Of course just the fan by itself felt like it blasted cool air, but this seemed noticeably cooler. I felt the tubes and they felt very cold. The water coming out of the faucet is about 54 or 55º.

I shut the faucet down so that there was little more than a trickle going through the coil, and you could easily feel that each successive loop of the copper coil was warmer as you went toward the discharge end. If you increased the water flow, the temperature of the back loops went right down. It was clear from that that there was a lot of heat being transferred from the air in the room into the water that was running down the drain. I suppose I could have done some measurements and calculated exactly how much, but I didn't really care. It was good enough that this thing that took about 15 minutes to make actually made the cabin cooler. That was all I cared about.

In the evening when I went to bed, I passed yet another milestone. I slept in the new bed in the bedroom for the first time. My days of living in the loft are over. It was wonderful and a lot cooler than sleeping in the loft.

At about 1:00 AM, I was awakened by a pretty energetic thunderstorm. There was a lot of lightning and thunder and at times there were brief downpours. I felt cozy in my bed and it was fun to watch and listen to the spectacle.

On Saturday we were in for another hot day so I set up my air conditioner in the sink and let it run all day. The place stayed nice and cool all day. But in the morning, before the loft warmed up, I used a long rope attached high up on the loft wall at Grid C1 to help me pull the extra big table up to the loft from the living room. Since I was now eating in the dining room, and since there was now space in the loft for that table, that was where it needed to go.

I spent the rest of the day working in the cool first floor hanging doors. I hung the linen closet door and then the pantry door, which were the last of all the doors to hang. Another milestone.

In the late afternoon, Ellen called and was seriously distressed by Qdog's behavior. He had an episode similar to one I had observed some months ago that seemed to us might be a stroke. But this time he was unable to walk and Ellen didn't know what to do. I felt rather helpless being as far away as I was. She called back later in the evening and told me that a neighbor had helped get the dog into the car and she then took him to a vet. The vet did some tests and Quincy seemed to recover. We decided that I didn't need to hurry home the next morning.