11/19-21/14 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Wednesday through Friday.

On the way I stopped and played a game of checkers with Uncle Charles and got beat again. I'm going to have to pay more attention when I play him from now on. It was about 26º out when I arrived at Camp Serendipity at 12:35. The spraying discharge from the hose had built a huge and beautiful ice sculpture all the way across the creek.

Ernie showed up as soon as I was parked so we both went up to the cabin where I got him some left-over gravy to go with his biscuits. He also got his usual hugs.

I changed my clothes and went out to get the fires going as soon as I could. I started a fire in both the upper and lower fire sites. I figured that this would probably be the last week I could burn before the snow covered everything so I wanted to burn as much as I could this week.

With the two fires outside stoked up, I went inside and started a fire in the wood stove and then had my lunch and a nap. When I got up, I went back outside and piled brush on both fires and got a lot of it burnt. I also piled on all the big wood I had set aside so that there would still be burning coals left to get the fires going the next morning.

On Thursday morning there was about a half inch of snow on the ground and it snowed lightly for a short while. I revived both fires outside and got them blazing again. Part of the hose that I had tried to "thaw" (not "unthaw" as I reported last week) had thawed and drained so that I could coil the entire hose up and set it between the rock wall and the lower fire. I figured that the entire hose would thaw that way and I could drain the entire hose and put it away.

The scheme worked so that before I stopped for a late lunch at 1:00 I had drained and coiled up the hose and brought it in to the crawl space. After lunch I took my usual nap and after about 45 minutes, I was awakened by the doorbell.

It was Byron Williams who stopped by to chat and catch up on things. He told me that he had been called by someone and asked to check on Phil Leatherman's pump house. Water was gushing out of it and running down the road. Byron said that he saw that a PVC pipe elbow had frozen and burst. He shut the pump off and tripped the breaker for the water heater.

After Byron left, I went back outside and finished burning brush. I got my chainsaw out and diced up some bigger branches, including the top of the pine tree that could have killed me during the 2012 ice storm. Until recently, I had thought that it was just a big branch, but Robert had informed me that it was the entire top of a very tall pine tree. It had fallen right over my trail shortly after I had walked on it.

On Friday morning it was snowing and I made the decision that I wasn't going to burn any more brush until we do some more logging. Instead of doing any work on the cabin, I spent a couple hours going over some financial records in preparation for meeting with our new financial advisor. At about 10:00, Phil Leatherman stopped in for a visit. We chatted about my flooring and his plumbing. After he left, I had my lunch and left for home at 12:45 eager to proceed from logging related activities to the resumption of my long-delayed ceiling installation.