10/29-31/13 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

On the way, I stopped and visited with Priscilla. I got her radio working again and I fixed a broken section of baseboard. From there I proceeded on to Monroe where I had a nice visit with Uncle Charles.

It was another gorgeous drive over the pass. I arrived at Camp Serendipity at 12:35. When I entered the cabin, I found one mouse in the trap in the living room. There was a small amount of new OSB debris again behind the wood stove directly under where the chimney goes through the roof. A pattern is beginning to emerge.

After raising the flag, starting a fire in the stove, and having my lunch, I called Mike Dickinson and talked with him about him coming to size up my excavation project and also to have someone come and help me move boards after they get delivered. He said he would stop by after work and that I should call when the lumber arrives.

After a short nap, I finished nailing up the 3rd course of ceiling boards. The boards had to be fitted around the phony log at Grid E2 so the work involved many trips up and down the loft stairs, out to the porch, and up and down the scaffold ladders.

I finished that work from the ladder scaffold and from that experience, I decided not to try to nail up another course without a safer scaffold system. Nailing over my head with my heels on the edge of a plank 12 feet from the floor with nothing behind me didn't seem safe enough for me.

When I took my shower, the water pressure was at about 80%. It worked fine. As I was stepping out of the shower and reaching for a towel, Mike Dickinson knocked on the door. He came in and warmed up in front of the stove while I dried off and got dressed.

There was a little light left outside so we went down to the woods at the end of the hairpin turn and I showed him where I wanted the trench dug. He said to give him a call next Tuesday morning and if the weather and his schedule permit, he would come over and dig.

On Wednesday morning it was 30º outside. It was only 60º inside so I started a fire in the stove. It was only later that I realized that I had left both loft windows wide open all night. After shutting the windows, the place got cozy warm right away.

I think my mind was preoccupied with the upcoming lumber delivery and my need to get some help on short notice because I made a steady stream of mistakes when I tried to work on the ceiling. I was trying to fit a ceiling board around the top of the phony log so I made a paper, and then a cardboard template of the cutout. Once I got the cardboard one to fit I made a reference mark on it and measured from the mark to the last board I installed. I wrote down 48 5/8 on the cardboard.

Then after cutting out the notch in the board using the template, I measured 48 inches from the mark and cut the board off. I forgot the 5/8 so of course the board was too short.

I discovered that as soon as I tried to fit the board in place. I also noticed that the cutout for the log was so bad that it was unacceptable anyway. I decided to make another one. I used the ill-fitting board to make a more accurate template and then went back down to the porch to cut it out. This time I made sure to subtract the 5/8 of an inch from the length. And, of course, I should have added the 5/8 so this board was an inch and a half too short. I was not in the mood to make a third one.

Instead I cut the short end of the board to match a rafter closer in and I cut the long end of the board to match the rafter on the other end. Then I nailed it in place happy to be done fitting around the log. I cut a short board to fit the two rafter spaces between this and the previous board.

At one point during the work, I caught a wasp that had somehow gotten into the cabin. I had him in a small yogurt container with a piece of cardboard serving as a lid. As I was carrying him out to the porch, I decided to take a board with me that I was working on. I needed more than two hands to handle the board, keep the lid on the wasp, and open the door. The wasp somehow took advantage of my fumbling and stung me in my left side. I got a nice welt that sort of took my mind off the board fitting problems and the anxiety over the lumber delivery.

Around 3:30 I called Ken at Marson & Marson to see if he could give me some kind of estimate for the lumber delivery. He said that he couldn't be specific but that the load had gone out about an hour ago and that my material was among a couple other deliveries. I called Mike Dickinson and told him that if he had a couple guys available to have them come over. I figured that if they beat the lumber, I could always have them help me erect scaffolding until the lumber got there.

Next, I started working on scaffold reconfiguration. I dismantled the ladder scaffold, took one ladder outside, put away the hangers, and stacked the planks. Then I brought up two steel scaffold frames and cross braces from the crawl space and set up a one tier scaffold tower in the living room between Grid D3 and E2.

At 4:00 I heard the lumber truck so I went out to greet the driver. When I got down to the gate, Mike's son-in-law Ian and his friend Jerry Muscat showed up. The Marson driver parked his truck on the road and told me that he was going to take the lumber up to the cabin in his forklift. Since the lumber is 16 feet long and he was going to have to carry it crosswise to the road I didn't see how he was going to do it.

I left him with that problem and the two guys and I went up and worked on the steel scaffold tower. They hauled in and set up the planks on the first tier and then brought up the frames and braces for the second tier and set that up.

By then the forklift driver had maneuvered the load around the many trees and had gotten it right up to the front porch where he set it down. I was amazed.

Then Ian and Jerry took the boards from the stack and leaned them up against the porch two at a time. I was up on the porch and took the boards and added them to the stack behind my staining rack. We finished the job by about 4:40. That was a lot of work accomplished in a short time. I'm not used to that.

The guys took a look at what I had done inside the cabin. Jerry had never seen it and a lot had changed since Ian had seen it last. They especially liked my wooden kitchen faucet. Before they left, they told me that snow was forecast for this coming weekend.

When I took my shower that evening, the pressure was up to 100%. It is back to normal.

On Thursday morning I rigged up an intermediate platform on the second tier of the scaffold tower and then used it to nail up the 5th and part of the 6th course of ceiling boards. I left for home at 1:00 pleased with the week's work.