2/18-20/03 I went up to the property with Andrew for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

Andrew had spring break so we took this opportunity to have him visit the log house with me. We stopped in to visit with Marilyn on the way, but neither she nor Sydney was home. Then we stopped to feed our apple cores to Bert and Ernie and saw that Shirley was out in the yard. I was glad to see that she was on her feet after breaking her ankle so badly. We drove in and chatted with her and her little grandson for a while.

We arrived at about 12:30, moved in, and had lunch. Then we carried a bunch of yard waste up to the compost pile. I forgot to bring a sled so we looked around for something that would work. We found a sturdy piece of plastic that worked pretty well, but the corners kept digging in so Andrew gave up trying with it after a while.

So we went to work instead. I showed Andrew how to run the remote winch control on my commands and we used the winch to lift all nine planks from the ground up onto the deck. We also lowered the two logs I had stored on the deck so they are on the ground on the roadway and out of the way. The work went a lot faster with Andrew helping than it would have working by myself.

When the work was done, we had a snowball fight which was not good for my shoulder. Throwing snow aggravated it quite a bit and I think I set the healing process back by a few days or weeks. We had fun, though, even though we both got snow down our necks.

In the evening, we went out for a walk along the road. We noticed that there were people at the house across the road but we didn't want to disturb them at dinnertime. Back in the trailer, we played some cards, did some reading, and told a lot of jokes. It was after 10:00 before the talking died down and we went to sleep.

On Wednesday, it was a beautiful sunny day and we could hear the people across the road. We went over there to meet them after breakfast and learned that they were getting ready to leave to go skiing. A couple of the girls were way out in the flood plain so we decided to go visit them. The snow was firm enough to hold you up about 2 steps out of 3. But on that third step, you broke through and sank up to your thigh. That made walking very slow and difficult. We both worked up quite a sweat trying to get to where the girls were and then getting back to the road.

When we got back, Andrew collected samples of rocks for a Cub Scout achievement project. While we were doing that, we heard the gray jays so I hurried down to the trailer to get the peanuts and the camera. Andrew has never fed the jays from his hand. While I was walking back up, one jay landed on my hand and took a beakful of peanuts. One of them started to land on Andrew's hand, but for some reason got scared and flew off. Even though we could see them in the trees and hear them, none of them ever came back. Maybe little kids scare them, or maybe Andrew needed to wear a big hat like mine.

Next, we set up the telescope and I showed Andrew the fire lookout on the ridge across the valley. Then Andrew wanted to climb the cliff above the parking space. I took some pictures of that and he got his boots filled with snow. We went in for lunch and a change of socks.

We each ate a big baked sweet potato for lunch. My back was really hurting for some reason. It might have been the post holing we did in the morning.

After lunch we did a little more work. We spread about 40 gallons of wood chips on the trails, but that got too boring so we decided to work on putting the planks in the deck. Andrew helped me for a while moving planks around and marking them with a chalkline for cutting. He was also a great help in getting big tarps spread out under the porch deck to catch all the sawdust. But then he got interested in sliding off the roof, over the snow bridge to the pile of snow under the eaves. He had quite a bit of fun doing that while I ripped the edges of a couple planks straight.

I used the skillsaw for the first one and it worked pretty well. The second one was slower because I had to cut through more wood and there were more knots. I decided to try it with a chainsaw to see which worked best. Since the gwizard was still on the .032, I used Mother Sow. It acted up a little, but finally started and ran well enough to rip the second plank. There is no doubt that the chainsaw is faster and easier. I'll just switch bars and use the .032 from now on.

On Thursday morning, we slept in until 8:00 and started packing things up right after breakfast. There was a light rain and a big winter storm was forecast for the late afternoon and evening. We would be well ahead of it going over the pass but we decided to leave early anyway and try to visit Marilyn and Sydney on the way back. We left about noon, stopped at Marilyn's, but they weren't there this time either. We didn't get a whole lot of work done this week, but at least I got the first two planks cut to fit and it looks like they are going to work great for a deck.