4/26-28/05 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at noon. It was a warm 69 degrees. Since I had brought the wheelbarrow back with me I figured it would be a good time to use the old broken concrete someone had dumped in my driveway and build a couple dams on the creek. The creek eroded a pretty deep channel behind the trailer and I had dammed it up with branches which helped. The dam silted in and filled the channel, but the branches were starting to give way. I figured the concrete chunks would make a more permanent dam. I wheeled three wheelbarrows full of concrete over to the creek.

In the process of loading up the third one, Mary Jackson, the neighbor in the next property, drove up. It was the first time we had met. She was interested in my project so we went up and had a look at the building. She told me that her family had owned the company that built the St. Louis Arch and the Mackinac Bridge. They have since sold the company.

After she left, I sanded the seven logs that were due for another coat of varnish. The temperature got up to 80 degrees by 3:00. When I quit for the day, I noticed that my telephone was not on my belt where it usually is. I figured it had dropped off somewhere. I figured it was probably down by the creek because there are a lot of low branches there where I was working. I went down there and sure enough, there was my phone floating face down in the creek. It had been there for about four hours.

I took the battery out and shook as much water out of it as I could. Then I tried it to see if it still worked. The lights came on and it would beep sometimes, but I couldn't get dial tone and the intercom didn't work. I figured I'd try again after it had dried out some more.

After dinner, I put the screens back in the windows in the trailer.

On Wednesday, I scraped and gouged the last three logs in the utility room and all the log stubs on the left of the utility room door. I also chamfered all the log ends butting against the door frame. I used a hammer and a 3/4" chisel which seems to be the best way to do it. When I finished, I swept up the chips and vacuumed the walls and floor. I was especially glad to clean up the chips because that will be the last of the chip mess for quite a while. Now that the weather is no longer freezing at night, I will switch from varnishing to chinking. I'll wait and varnish the loft when it starts freezing again in the fall.

On Thursday morning, the phone still didn't work. When I had talked to Ellen about it, she said she thinks it's toast. She is evidently right.

I went to work and scraped the glue bead from the southeast living room window. There was only a couple inches of it to scrape off. Then I mitered the molding for the small bedroom window. This window frame was the first one so far that wasn't square. I adjusted the miter cut to make up for it and the pieces fit real nice. You can see that the frame isn't quite square, but the molding looks good anyway. It's part of the charm. The bottom shim on that window was also sticking out a little so I had to trim away the back of the bottom piece of molding so it would fit snugly. That all took extra time. When I finished with the window, I varnished the entire northwest utility room wall. I left for home at 1:30.