2/12-14/08 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

The road was bare and wet the whole way over the mountains so the driving was easy. I saw the remnants of 4 or 5 huge avalanches that had closed the pass for most of the previous weekend. There were high snowbanks on both sides of the road with tree trunks and branches sticking out of them. I've never seen anything like it before.

I arrived at 12:40. There was about 10 inches of new snow in my parking place that hadn't been plowed out. I was able to park using 4WD without any shoveling or chains. By the time I got parked, Bert and Ernie showed up for dog biscuits. Then I went up and shoveled off the back porch of the cabin and the front steps. I fed two gray jays in the process.

After lunch, I went up to the cabin and noticed that the mousetrap in the crawlspace had been sprung. I expected to see a shrew in it, but it was empty with the bait still intact. I didn't know if an animal had had a near miss or whether the trap went off by itself. I was hoping for the latter.

I sanded the log surfaces that were due for another coat of varnish including four logs in the gable wall. I used the power sander and the vacuum cleaner and blew the breaker down at the power pole. I was surprised at that because that had never happened before. Later on, I blew the GFI breaker down at the power pole, and another time, I tripped the breaker in the power strip I use as the main distribution point in the cabin. That breaker has a mechanical problem, so I replaced the power strip with another one. I think that old one might have been the source of all the problems. Now that I have replaced it, we'll see. It rained pretty hard off and on before the end of the day. The snow has shrunk down quite a bit as a result of recent rain.

On Wednesday it was a sunny and pleasant 32 degrees. I scraped and gouged another four feet of that third log in the Grid A wall. It is a tough log to do and it really is hard on my shoulders and hands. After lunch, I decided to give my shoulders a rest and work on another project.

I have been thinking for many years about how to install the light switches for the dining room and for the loft. The reasonable place for the switches is in the log column holding up the corner of the loft above the dining room. The problem is how to conceal the wires inside the log. I really don't want any wires showing on the outside.

After a lot of thought and reading, I have decided to mount a handy box in the column and mount two switches in it. The one for the loft will be a 3-way with the other 3-way up in the loft, and the one for the dining room will be just a standard SPST switch. I bought, some time ago, a long drill bit that I planned to use to drill a hole from the inside of the hole for the handy box down through the log so that it comes out between the floor joists.

So I started to chisel the hole for the handy box. This turned out to be as much of a strain on my shoulders and hands as the scraping and gouging had been. I guess now that I am getting to be an old man, my joints are going to be complaining no matter what I do. I'll just have to put up with it.

I finished chiseling the hole and then started drilling down through the bottom of it. I had to stand on a table while holding the drill almost as high as I could reach. The drill bit is over 4 feet long and the switch box is 44.5 inches off the floor at the center. I also had to pull the bit completely out of the hole each time it bore in an inch or two. Otherwise, the sawdust would build up behind the bit head and I wouldn't be able to get the bit out at all.

This meant that I had to lift the drill high overhead, drill down an inch or two, then lift the drill back out and scrape the sawdust out of the hole. Then I had to lift the drill back up and start over. Needless to say, that was hard on my shoulders.

This wasn't too bad when I was making good progress. But after I got down a couple feet, I hit a knot. The wood in the knot was gummy with resin and it would coat the screw tip of the drill bit. Then the bit would just sit there and spin without digging in. If I let it spin very long, it would heat up the resinous wood and burn it so that I had a heck of a time getting it off the bit. I had to laboriously pick out the burned wood with the tip of my knife.

I learned not to let the spinning bit dwell long enough to burn the wood. If I pulled the bit out soon enough, I was able to get the wood off the bit by using a stiff wire brush. Then after many trips off and back on the table, I learned that if I kept the wire brush in my pocket, I could withdraw the bit, clean it off, and stick it back in without having to get down off the table and climb back up. That saved a lot of energy, but it meant that I had to lift that drill up overhead a lot more frequently. It probably took 50 to 100 iterations like that in order to finally get through that knot.

I was greatly relieved to get through the knot and make progress again an inch or two at a time. This relief was short-lived, though because in another four or five inches, I hit another knot. The bit was now only six or eight inches off the floor so I was getting close to being done. I spent probably an hour working on getting through this second knot using the wire brush technique and finally quit drilling for the day without getting through it. I used the rest of the day to sweep and vacuum up in the loft to be ready to varnish up there in the morning.

When I went in for the night, my little electric heater finally gave up the ghost. The switch on it had been going bad and I had had to wiggle it in order to make it work. It now dawns on me that it might have been that heater that contributed to my electrical outages. Anyway, I had a spare electric heater that Laura Henry gave me. I threw the old heater in the garbage and started using the new one. It has a thermostat on it so it will be a lot better. I can leave it running all night on a low setting rather than turning it off completely like I used to.

On Thursday morning I was greeted by Bert and Ernie who were eager to get their dog biscuits. I went up into the loft and installed two screw eyes in the Grid B purlin and fastened the stovepipe guy wires to these screw eyes. I snugged the wires up pretty good so I think it will work. I'll pay attention to whether this will keep the stovepipe plumb and not cause other problems.

I varnished all the prepared surfaces and cleaned out my brush. When I went down to the crawlspace to lock up, I noticed that there was a mouse in the trap. That was a disappointing find.

I dumped the mouse outside, reset the trap, and then went looking for how the mouse got in. Since the peanut was still on the floor upstairs and those traps were untouched, I figured this mouse must have come in from down below. I checked all the screens and pipes and didn't find any obvious hole. There is one big drain pipe that didn't have a screen on the inside. It is supposed to be screened on the outside, but that end is now under dirt and snow so I can't easily check it out. In the interest of doing at least something before I left for home, I placed a peanut inside the end of this pipe and then screened it over with hardware cloth. You can see the peanut through the screen, so if that is the way the mouse got in, the peanut should be gone the next time a mouse tries to get in that way. If not, then at least I can rule this out as a possibility. Let's hope that peanut is gone next week. I left for home at 12:30.