12/16-18/14 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

On the way I stopped and visited with Uncle Charles for a short while. Then I proceeded on over the pass to make a few deliveries of Ellen's jam. The Dickinsons and the Tutinos were not home so I left the jam on their porches after feeding seven dogs, including Ernie, a lot of biscuits.

Then I went to Barb and Byron Williams' place to give them a jar of jam. They invited me in for lunch and a nice visit. Byron fixed some really good soup. It started snowing a little when I left but it didn't amount to much. I arrived at Camp Serendipity at 3:30.

I couldn't start a fire in the wood stove because the scaffold bridge I had set up so that I could reach the ceiling fan was right up against the stovepipe and there wasn't room to move it away from the pipe. I would have to use electric heat until the fan was installed and I could move the scaffolding out of the way. The temperature in the cabin was 60º which made it perfect for working in the loft. I set the thermostats up to 65º so the cabin would warm up a little before I quit to take a shower.

I started by rigging up a fishing line running from the ceiling fan switch in the living room up to the scaffold where I would be working on the ceiling fan. Dave had told me that when I get to balancing the fan, I would need to turn the switch on and off a lot and I didn't want to have to make a trip up and down the scaffolds each time. When I pulled on the fishing line, it turned the switch on. When I let go, a weight pulled the switch back off. It worked great.

Next I got the box of fan parts that needed to be installed and brought them up to the loft and unpacked them. Unfortunately I couldn't find the instructions. The installation is complicated enough that I needed those instructions in order to proceed and I just couldn't find them. I finally gave up and quit for the day trying to figure out a plan to get a new set of instructions.

But after my shower and dinner, when I was in the loft working on Dave's jigsaw puzzle, I found the fan installation instructions. What a relief.

On Wednesday I called Robert first thing and told him I had a jar of Ellen's jam for him. I volunteered to bring it to him but he said he would be over my way later in the day and he would stop in.

I spent the morning installing the fan. To start with I had to remove the top scaffold cross brace that was directly under the ridgepole to make room for the fan blades. Then I got the instruction book and followed the instructions to install the blades and the rest of it.

It was a little tricky but after a few minor mistakes I finished the installation. I was very happy that the fan not only worked perfectly but it didn't need any balance adjustments at all. It just runs smoothly and quietly at any speed, either forward or backward.

With the fan working, I dismantled the scaffold bridge, getting it away from the stovepipe, and I lit a fire in the wood stove switching to wood heat instead of electricity. Then I had my lunch and a short nap.

I spent the afternoon moving the 3-tier scaffold tower in the living room. I left the deck on the top so the thing was pretty heavy but I was able to slide two of the four legs across the floor an inch or two at a time just by pulling by hand. The tower had been positioned with one short (frame) side against the Grid D3-C3 wall and a long (brace) side directly under the ridgepole. I moved it by rotating it 90º so that a long side was against the Grid C3-B3 wall. The fan stayed running inside the top tier the whole time but the cross brace that had been removed was still out. I finessed the legs of the bottom frames over the top of the marble hearth, over the stair treads, and up against the Grid C3 RPSL. There was barely enough clearance for the move, but it was possible and I did it. The scaffold tower ended up not being pulled all the way under the ridgepole so there was still room for the fan to turn without hitting the frame. I was very happy when the tower was in its new place.

I worked on Dave's jigsaw puzzle for a while before I had my shower. Just as I stepped out of the shower, I heard a lot of loud banging. At first I thought I had a serious plumbing problem, but then I realized it was people outside the cabin. I pulled on a pair of pants, put my slippers on and went out onto the porch to see who was making all the clatter.

It was a bunch of Christmas Carolers with kids, drums and other instruments. I hurried back inside to get my camera so that I could shoot a video of the end of their performance. Barb and Byron were among the carolers and they told me they were from the Tall Timber Ranch. I thanked them and invited them in but they had other places to go so they left wishing me a Merry Christmas. That was a nice surprise.

On Thursday morning I went down into the crawl space and scraped up a bunch of mold that had grown on the damp ground. I had smelled a sort of musty smell in the utility room and I figured it was coming from that mold. I am going to have to figure out how to seal up the floor underneath with a vapor barrier to prevent that from happening, and also some way of drying out the crawlspace floor in spite of not being able to stop water from oozing in. There are always more challenges.

Next, since my ladders were freed up, I took a ladder out to the front porch and replaced the burnt out light bulbs and cleaned the dead bugs out of the porch light fixtures. Then I went back to the loft and rigged up cantilever brackets on the scaffold tower so that I could reach the ceiling boards up against the Grid 3 end of the Grid B purlin where I would be starting the next section. In order to provide a rigid support for the brackets, I replaced half of the cross brace I had removed to provide clearance for the fan. As it turned out, I could collapse the cross-brace pair and connect it to one pair of pins and still clear the fan blades by about an inch. I couldn't fasten the second brace because it would interfere with the blades.

Finally I had my lunch and left for home at 12:45 feeling pretty good about making some progress however slow.