11/2-5/98 I went up to the property for 4 days: Monday through Thursday.

I arrived at about 12:30 after the usual cinnamon roll. The camera wasn't tripped and there was no sign of vandalism. I treated the prepared section of log #125 with Tim-bor and pulled it part way up the building before dark.

When I went in for the night, I found a message on the answering machine from Margaret Neighbors that Tom and Kathy Leitch could not make it. I returned Margaret's call and she said that she and Lyle wanted to come over and visit anyway.

On Tuesday I pulled #125 the rest of the way up onto the northeast wall. I chiseled a fairly big notch in it to accommodate the grid D1 PSL. Then I took a break for lunch. The weather was nice and cool and just right for working, but I had been fighting a cold for about a week and I wasn't feeling up to par.

After lunch, I spiked #125 into the wall and just as I finished, Lyle and Margaret Neighbors drove up. We had a great visit. They toured the property and the building. Just as we finished that, it started raining so we went into the trailer and spent about an hour looking at the photo album of the project and having a nice time talking. They left about 5:00 just as it was getting dark.

It rained most of the day on Wednesday. I scribed and tapered the ends of #125 and then lag screwed the PSLs and the RPSL to the northeast wall. At lunch time, I was feeling sort of sick, so after lunch, I took a nap. The rain let up at about 3:30 so I went back out to work.

I started the job of raising the northeast scaffold by swapping a couple planks. I removed a long 11 footer from the lower scaffold which I need for the high scaffold, and replaced it with a shorter one from in front of the crawlspace door. I will replace this one with one from the high scaffold when it comes down.

On Thursday morning, I was still pretty sick, and it was still raining cats and dogs. I finished securing the ladder which was resting on the plank I swapped and finished by 11:00. I needed to get home early to give Priscilla a ride home from the hospital, so I quit work, had lunch, packed up, and left by 1:00.

11/9-12/98 I went up to the property for 4 days: Monday through Thursday.

I skipped the cinnamon roll and arrived at 11:30. The weather was cold and damp but at least it wasn't raining. I was relieved to find that there was no vandalism and the camera hadn't been tripped.

I started by adjusting the vertical crane pole to make it more nearly vertical. This is so it doesn't interfere with the logs in the northeast gable wall.

Next, I worked on raising the northeast scaffold and got about a third of it done.

On Tuesday, I felt nauseous and weak. I decided to burn the slash pile since that would be fairly easy work. The fire was huge but I kept it well under control. Before I lit it, I strung the new water hose up to the burn site and filled three buckets with water just in case of a problem. All the woods were soaking wet, so there was almost no chance of the fire spreading, but it is better to be safe than sorry. After the fire had burned down, I finished raising the northeast scaffold. It was a little hairy since there wasn't much of a place to stand up there on the wall.

On Wednesday, I started the day by calling an ambulance company that was threatening me with a collector if I didn't pay a bill that Mom owed. I had already handled this weeks before and I got pretty worked up on the phone with them.

After I calmed down, I went out and filled a bucket with the wood ashes for use in the privy. Then I rebuilt the handrails on the northeast scaffold and braced it. After that, I rolled the water hose back up and then cut an 18 foot piece from log #126. By then it was lunch time.

After lunch, the sun finally came out. I used the 12 volt winch to pull the piece of #126 out of the woods and down to the privy. I was just getting ready to gwiz the log when Larry Copenhaver stopped by for a visit. He climbed up on the newly raised scaffold to inspect the work.

I barely finished gwizzing the log before it got dark. In fact, it was very dark by the time I finished at 5:15.

On Thursday, I treated the piece of #126 and then pulled it up onto the northeast wall. It rained the whole time making the logs and scaffolds pretty slippery, but I was careful and got the job done. I left for home at 3:00.

11/16-19/98 I went up to the property for 4 days: Monday through Thursday.

I arrived at noon after stopping for a cinnamon roll. It must have rained an awfully lot shortly before I got there because the puddles were deeper than I have seen them for a long time. Fortunately, it had stopped before I got there.

There were no signs of vandalism and the camera had not been tripped. After moving in, I cut 7 spikes from the rebar that Sid Fadden gave me, and then used them to spike log #126 into the northeast wall. After that, I scribed and tapered the ends with Mother Sow.

On Tuesday morning, I got up at 1:45 AM and went outside to see if I could see any of the Leonid meteors. After sitting down and gazing up for about 2 minutes, I saw one and a little later, I saw a brightness in the sky that must have been another meteor hidden behind the trees. That was enough for me so I went back to bed. I got up for good at about 4:45 and was out working at first light at 7:00.

I used the 12 volt winch to pull log #8 out of the pile by the privy. It took me about 3 hours to move it about 60 feet into a position where I could gwiz and work on it.

The ID numbers I wrote on logs #8 and #9 were written with a pencil, and after the three years they have been lying out in the weather, the numbers are gone. As a result, I am not exactly sure which is which. I think the one I pulled out is #9, a grand fir, and the other one is #8, a Douglas fir. The story of #8 is in this journal from the 4/26/95 entry to the 5/16/95 entry. That of #9 is from 9/18/95 to 11/2/95. I'll probably know which log is which when I start working on the other one. I should be able to tell the difference between a grand fir and a Douglas fir once I have them side by side to compare them.

Next, I tried to use the bench grinder to sharpen the gwiz blades, but the grinder kept blowing the GFI breaker. I took the grinder into the trailer and took it apart to try to fix it, but after an hour or so I gave up. I will take it home and work on it. I sharpened the gwiz blades by hand with a hone, and then gwizzed the new log. The log seemed to be a Douglas Fir, so I am pretty sure this is log #8.

On Wednesday, I scribed #8 and then used Mother Sow to flatten it for use as the grid D purlin. I was finished before lunch. The weather was still dry and the temperature was about 45 degrees.

After lunch, I made some measurements and then went into the trailer to do the calculations to find the locations for the bearing notches on the grid D purlin. I got a little start on cutting these notches before it got dark.

Late that night, I was awakened by a thump on the roof of the trailer. Next I heard the pitter patter of little feet running around on the roof. The footsteps could have been mice, but the thump was definitely from some larger guy so I concluded that it was my friend the packrat, and I rolled over and went back to sleep.

On Thursday morning, I finished cutting the bearing notches in the purlin. The temperature was 35 degrees, which is too cold to treat the log with Tim-bor, so instead I worked on the bearings on the walls that will hold up the purlin.

First, I made cardboard templates representing the cross section of the purlin at the two end bearing notches. Then I used these templates to cut the PSLs to the correct grade and to cut notches in the walls so that the purlin will be in the correct position when it lies in the notches and bears on the PSLs.

By the time I finished, it had started to snow. This quickly turned to rain, and I decided to quit for the week. I left for home about 2:30 and it was snowing above 2600 feet on both sides of the pass. It was pretty slippery going over, but I made it with no problem.

12/1-4/98 I went up to the property for 4 days: Tuesday through Friday.

I skipped the previous week because of Thanksgiving and also because Gus had some heart trouble and I took him to the hospital for tests on two separate days.

There was snow on the road all the way over the pass and down to Rayrock, but I had no trouble getting over. I stopped for a cinnamon roll and arrived at 12:45. There was about a foot of dense snow on the ground and it took me about an hour to shovel out a parking place. I guess I am done driving up to the trailer for the season.

After I moved in, I used a scaffold frame and a come-along to take the log gate apart and move the log back out of the way. The gate is unnecessary in the winter, since you can't drive up the driveway anyway. Without taking the gate apart, it would have blocked my parking place when it was shut, and it would have stuck out too far for the snowplow when it was open. I'll just put it back together in the spring.

Next I lugged three garbage cans full of yard waste up to the compost pile. It was mostly wet pine needles and the cans were pretty heavy. It was a lot of work to drag them through the deep snow to dump them. When I finished, I went for a short walk out on the road and ran across Harry Metzger. He had high centered his pickup up the road and was walking down to Mike Tutino's for help. We had a short walk and talk as we went back down to our driveway.

I was feeling pretty sick with a new cold and since it was about 4:00 by this time, I quit for the day, had an early dinner, a dose of cold medicine, and went to bed early.

It snowed a foot over night, so on Wednesday morning, I started shoveling snow again. I cleared off the pickup, the driveway, the new grid D purlin and the area around it, the mixer, the winch shed, the cement storage box, the snowshed in the crawl space, and the ramps and scaffolds. My back wasn't used to this much shoveling and I could feel that I almost overdid it.

It drizzled rain mixed with snow the whole day which made kind of miserable working conditions, especially feeling as sick as I was. When I finished shoveling, I drilled holes in the grid D purlin and installed the four anchor hooks. I also drilled the hole in the center for the spike to fasten it to the grid D2 PSL.

I had to skip treating the purlin again because it was too cold. The temperature was about 35 degrees and the log was covered with ice and snow. Instead, I rigged the crane up to pull the log up onto the building and got the purlin pulled about 8 feet before the end of the day. Before I went in, Karen Arnold stopped by and said that she had found a lost dog and wanted to know if I knew whose it was. I didn't.

On Thursday, it was finally clear although it was overcast. It made working a lot more pleasant even though I still wasn't feeling very good. There was also no new snow overnight so I didn't have to do any more shoveling. I started right out lifting the grid D purlin, log #8, up onto the building. This is a big 42 footer and I had never lifted such a big log from the uphill direction before.

I had a throbbing headache at noon, but after a couple aspirin and lunch, I went back out and got the log up on top of the purlin walls laying sort of kitty corner across them. There was about a half hour of daylight left when I called it a day.

On Friday morning, I still felt crummy and had no energy. I dragged myself out to work on the new problems facing me. I had to get the new purlin lifted up off the purlin walls where it was and onto the gable walls. I figured that I could use the crane to lift the small end of the log onto the southwest wall because the crane can reach that wall. The only question was whether I could lift the log high enough to clear the RPSL and its batterboard. I did some crude measurements and decided that it would work.

There was also the problem of keeping the big butt end of the log from sliding off the southeast wall when I lifted the small end of the log and swung it to the east. To prevent this, I attached a come-along between the butt of the log and the northeast wall, and I also fastened a log chain around the new purlin and the purlin on top of the southeast wall.

After rigging everything up, I started executing my plan, and to my relief, everything worked great and I got the small end of the purlin resting on the gable right next to the notch that was to receive it. The only problem was that as the log rotated, it tightened up the log chain I had used to keep the butt end from slipping off the building. Even using a come-along to pull the butt of the log up, I was unable to get the chain unhooked; there was just not enough slack. Fortunately, the hook on the chain was fastened with a clevis pin which was held in place with a cotter pin. I removed the cotter pin, hammered out the clevis pin and that released the hook and the chain. A pretty easy solution, but it took time to do.

The next problem was a little harder. How to get the heavy butt end of the log up onto the northeast gable since the crane wouldn't reach back there. I decided to use come-alongs to slide the purlin up the slanted gable wall although I wasn't at all sure this would work.

At the outset, the log had to be pulled up over the end of the scaffold plank which was resting on the southeast wall right where the purlin had to go. I figured that if I tried to brute force the log up, it would just push the scaffold plank right off the wall, and me with it.

Instead, I used a trick I had used many times before on big logs. I fastened the cable of a come-along to the northeast wall just above the scaffold plank. Then I ran the cable over the plank, off the end of the plank, down under the log, around the log and up over the top of it. Then the come-along was also hooked onto the northeast wall. This way, when the come-along was cranked, the cable caused the log to roll up over the end of the plank without pushing the plank out of the way. It also gave me a two to one mechanical advantage so it was easy to pull the log up past the plank and onto the gable wall.

Then I decided to slide the log up the wall with come-alongs by brute force. I used two come-alongs just to be safe. If the log were to break loose and slide down the gable and off the building, it could cause some awful damage. I was pleased to find out that I had no trouble pulling the log up the gable with the come-alongs. The logs were wet and covered with ice and snow so there wasn't much friction.

A minor complexity was that I had to remove part of the scaffold handrails in order to get the purlin past, but that was easy to do.

With the weather being cold and wet, and being sick, and being anxious about the unknowns of getting this log into place, my spirits had been sort of down all week. That all changed in one exhilarating instant. As I was cranking the purlin up the gable, one click at a time, I reached a point where I knew I was one click away from the log rolling over onto the flattened bearing surfaces and falling into the notches that were supposed to receive them.

When I slowly pulled the come-along handle and heard that last click, the log all of a sudden fell into place with a thud and a shudder. At that time, my eyes just happened to be lined up in the plane of the roof and I could not only see the new purlin lying in its final place, but I could see the three purlins below it and the gables as well. All of these lined up perfectly to within the accuracy I was able to perceive with my naked eyes.

I laughed out loud and I remember exclaiming "Perfect pitch!" as I closed one eye and sighted down the succession of purlins. The flattened rafter bearing surface of the new purlin was aligned perfectly with the pitch of the roof.

I had left a one inch play in the notches so that I could adjust the purlin if need be. By sliding the purlin lengthwise, I could adjust the projection of the eave so that all the purlin ends would line up. By sliding the purlin in the perpendicular direction, I could adjust the height of the rafter bearing surface a small amount. As it happened, the way the log fell into the notches, it was lined up as perfectly as I could have hoped for.

I felt elated for the rest of the day. It had been sunny all day and now the sun was pretty high in the sky. Everything looked beautiful. I took some pictures, had lunch, put away and locked up the tools, and left for home a happy man at about 3:00.

12/8-10/98 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

There was a lot of snow on the road over the pass, but chains weren't required and I had no trouble getting over. After a cinnamon roll, I stopped at Earl Landin's and gave him a jar of jam and a drawing by Bob Owen of a bewildered, weightless dachshund in a '49 Ford. I snapped a couple pictures of his reaction when he opened it.

I arrived at the property at about 12:45 and spent the entire afternoon shoveling snow. There was 10 inches to a foot of new fairly heavy snow on the ground. I was still pretty sick from a cold and didn't feel like working too hard.

On Wednesday morning there was no new snow so I could get right to work. It took almost all day to align the grid D purlin and about an hour to spike it into place after it was aligned. In the evening, I got a call from Gus who said that he had to go to the hospital on Friday for an angioplasty. I told him that I would go back to Seattle on Thursday and give him a ride to the hospital.

On Thursday morning it was snowing gently and I spent the morning erecting a four tier steel scaffold tower so that I would have something to stand on to spike the grid D purlin to the D2 PSL. I was just finishing this up around noon when Larry Copenhaver stopped by for a look. We chatted while I put the tools away and got ready to leave. After he left, I had lunch, packed up and left at around 1:30. There was about 3 inches of new snow on the ground by that time but the road over the pass was well plowed and sanded so I had no trouble.

12/15-18/98 I went up to the property for 4 days: Tuesday through Friday.

After a cinnamon roll, I arrived at about 12:15. To my dismay I discovered that my scoop shovel was missing from the pickup. There was about a foot of wet snow to shovel before I could park the pickup and I was outraged that someone would steal a $2.00 garage sale shovel out of the back of the pickup. I was fuming as I shoveled the driveway out using a spade, which was far from the ideal tool to use. All during the work, I was thinking about how to prevent theft and how to get along in a world that contained so many dishonorable people.

After parking the pickup and moving into the trailer, I continued shoveling snow and harboring negative thoughts. After shoveling off the privy roof, I went into the log house to shovel things off in there, and lo and behold, there was my scoop shovel. I had forgotten to take it with me on the last trip.

Needless to say, I felt foolish and embarrassed, even though no one but me knew about the incident. I learned a few lessons about jumping to conclusions, and letting my feelings get control of me. With my faith in humanity restored, I finished shoveling things off. Then I carried two planks I had brought with me up to the site.

On Wednesday, I used the crane to lift the two planks up on top of the scaffold tower I built last week. This gave me a place to stand to reach the top of the D2 PSL that would be placed next.

Then I went searching for log #88 which I had earmarked months earlier as the top D2 PSL. I knew it was up on the roadway and I got lucky in my search. After digging straight down through about 3 feet of heavy snow, I uncovered the end of the log with the #88 tag on it.

Another pleasant surprise was that #88 was already gwizzed. I knew that of the 3 logs earmarked for PSLs that were more or less in the same place, two of them were gwizzed and one was not. In the interest of getting the PSL up as soon as possible, I was glad this one was already gwizzed.

I had to do quite a bit of digging to free the log, and I had to use the crane to move two other logs that were on top of it, but finally, I pulled #88 out.

Next, I climbed the high scaffold tower with a tape and measured for the length of the PSL. When I went to cut #88 to length, I couldn't start Mother Sow. It hadn't been started for a while and the weather was cold and damp so that was probably why. In frustration, I resorted to the big crosscut saw and cut off each end of the log by hand. Then I drilled the hole in the bottom to receive the rebar stub sticking up out of the main loft beam. There was just enough daylight left to raise the log up and through a window and leave it laying on the temporary snow roof inside the cabin.

On Thursday morning, I was up early and out working before it got light at 7:00. It was very windy, dry, and about 35 degrees out. I was concerned that some of the big trees might break off in the wind, but fortunately none did. It only took an hour or two to raise #88 up and spike it into place as the top D2 PSL.

By that time, the sun was out and the temperature was up to 40 degrees. The snow was melting pretty fast. I felt good about the new PSL and I took a few pictures of it.

Next I went to work freeing up, and pulling log #9 out of the pile between the privy and the woodshed. I decided to pull it out by hand using a come-along because I figured it would be easier than setting up all the rigging in the snow to use the 12-volt winch. This is a big 42 footer which will be the grid B purlin and it slid pretty easily across the snow. By mid afternoon, it was in gwizzing position. Before it got too dark, I had it half gwizzed. It is a beautiful, straight, sound grand fir. Lying there in that rack for over three years didn't hurt it a bit.

On Friday I slept in until 7:30 but I was out working by about 8:30. There was just a skiff of new snow. I finished gwizzing #9, packed up, and left for home by about 2:30.

12/28-31/98 I went up to the property for 4 days: Monday through Thursday.

This week I experienced the worst working conditions so far on this project. Stevens Pass was closed when I left home, but I figured it would open around noon and I wouldn't have to wait too long. On the drive up, I heard on the radio that it would open at noon, so I figured I would have to wait about an hour and a half. I had a book ready so I could spend that time reading.

A few miles past Skykomish, the troopers had the traffic stopped and the ‘chains required' sign was posted. I pulled up and got in line with the waiting cars at about 10:40 and put on the chains. Then I started eating an apple and reading my book. I didn't get a page read by the time the line ahead of me started moving. My timing was almost perfect.

There was an inch or two of wet, glare ice on the road going over the pass, but the pavement was bare by the time I got to the railroad tunnel portal. I stopped there and took the chains off.

After stopping for a cinnamon roll, I arrived at the property at about 12:45. The White River Road hadn't been plowed, but at least one other vehicle had made a track in the wet snow and slush. The bottom of the pickup was scraping off about an inch or two of snow, but I was able to drive to the property OK. It took quite a while to shovel enough so I could pull the pickup over enough so other cars could pass. Jim and Karen Arnold had to wait for the last 5 or 10 minutes of this activity.

After they got past, I shoveled about 2 feet of the heaviest snow that I have ever shoveled out of the parking place. The bottom 2 or 3 inches was gray instead of white because it was so saturated with water. It rained the whole time and I was working so hard that I wore only a T-shirt on top and no hat. I was soaking wet but I wasn't overheated or too cold. It took me until 3:15 to get the pickup parked and I had to put the chains back on in order to get the pickup into the parking place.

While I was shoveling, Mark Byer stopped and introduced himself. He had met Dave at Coy's birthday party and they had talked about our cabin project.

When the pickup was parked, I used the snowshoes to make a trail to the trailer, the compost pile, the building site, and the privy. This was enormously hard work because the snowshoes would sink in about knee deep and a load of heavy snow would fall on top of the snowshoes. Then to take a step, I would have to kick off about 5 or 10 lb. of snow. Once the trail was made, the return trip wasn't nearly so bad. On the second trip to the trailer, I figured that the trail was packed down hard enough so I could walk on it with just boots. Wrong. About every third or fourth step, I would sink in up to my crotch. I was exhausted by the time I got moved into the trailer, and by that time it was just starting to get dark. I quit for the day.

On Tuesday, it rained cats and dogs all day. Larry Copenhaver told me later that he had never seen it downpour like that before. I dressed in my rain suit and shoveled off the privy roof, the mixer, the winch shed, and the ramp to the doorway. I couldn't open the door because of the snow on the inside, so I had to climb up through the back doorway to get inside.

I found that one of the drains was plugged and there was a large lake inside the building. I shoveled the snow away from the door so I could open it and went outside to look at the drain. I had to dig about a 3-foot hole in the snow to get down to the drain. The drainpipe was filled with solid ice. Since this was under 3 feet of snow, the ground must have been very cold before the snowfall to freeze the pipe like that. I poured a couple teakettles of boiling water on the pipe trying to thaw it out but to no avail.

I went back to work shoveling snow. I shoveled off the ramps, scaffolds, the cement storage bin, and the snow roof. Since the rain didn't run off, but just soaked into the snow, the added weight might be too much for the snow roof. It wasn't designed super strong. Fortunately it held the weight and I got it all cleared off. I finished by about 4:15 and quit for the day with a lot of sore muscles.

Wednesday was a cold, calm day with a few sun breaks, but no rain or snow. What a pleasure. I started off by sticking a short length of hose into the top of the frozen drainpipe and pouring boiling water into the hose. This did the trick and the lake started draining. Then I spent a few hours shoveling snow off the workbench and the deck in front of it, and then cleaning snow out of the tools and things that were under the bench. Normally they are protected from rain and snow, but the snow was so deep that it had avalanched under the workbench and made a mess.

There were quite a few open coffee cans full of nails mixed with snow. I tried to get them as dry as I could so they wouldn't rust. Same with the tools.

While those things were drying, I went to work digging log #9 out of the snow. I dug quite a bit of workspace on both sides of the log which I will need in order to scribe and rip the flat rafter bearing surface. Then I went back and put the tools and nails back under the workbench. Just as I finished, Larry Copenhaver stopped by and gave me a plate of goodies that Roberta had made. Then we went down to the trailer and I gave him another jar of blackberry jam from Ellen.

On Friday morning it was raining again. Ellen had the day off and there was a snowstorm threatening to come into the pass in the afternoon so I decided to pack up and go home without doing any work. That's what I did and I left at about 11:15.

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