7/31-8/2/07 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at 2:15 and was happy to discover no mice in the traps and the peanuts were all still there. A flock of gray jays greeted me right away. After moving in, I made eleven spikes from 3/8" rebar using the rebar cutter Dr. Dick gave me. Then I drove the spikes in to finish fastening the deck planks down. I felt proud and happy with my sturdy deck.

The next thing was to start on making the footings for the stair stringers. I found two pieces of plywood and used the saber saw to cut holes in the middle to match up with the plates on the CB66s. The plan is to have the CB66s slanting at the same angle as the stair stringers. So the forms will have to be built to hold the CB66s in that position while the concrete is placed.

After I went in for the evening, I heard someone down on the road and I went down to investigate. Here were two guys up on the rock outcropping talking about how they were going to pull the rocks down. I confronted them and told them that the rocks were private property and that they did not have permission to remove them. They said they "didn't know" and that they would leave. They were driving a small black car with a Washington license plate that ended in WLW. The first three numbers were something like 727. At least I know it had at least one 7 in it.

On Wednesday, I was happy again to find no mice or any trace of them. I made a bunch of measurements of the as-built deck and where I wanted the staircase to land. Then I went into the trailer and made drawings and calculations. Then back up to make more measurements, then back to more calculations and drawings until I arrived at the staircase design.

While I was working on the staircase design, I heard a mower working on the road so I went down to swing my gate out of the way for them. While I was doing that, two runners ran by on the road and waved. Then a third woman came running by and she stopped to talk to me. She told me her name was Maisie Duma and that she was interested in looking at my project. I invited her in.

She told me that the two runners were her son Patrick and his wife Rona. They were visiting Nick and Melissa next door. Melissa is Mary Jackson's daughter and Nick is a good friend of Patrick's. Maisie told me that she grew up in New Jersey in a family that went back to colonial times. They told her stories of how the families had to protect themselves from Indians. One thing they did, which my cabin reminded her of, was to build their houses directly over a spring so that they would have a source of water without having to go outside. I told her my spring was not in my house, but up the hill farther so that I had gravity feed for my water supply. Since I don't have Indians threatening, I think mine is the better arrangement.

When I finished the design of the staircase, and had drawn it to scale, I proceeded to build the forms for the first footing. I used the same old cedar fence boards, cut and ripped the pieces with Jack the Rip Saw, and screwed the form together. When the form was ready, I took some pictures of it. The gray jays and chipmunks were around for their peanuts the whole time.

Right after breakfast on Thursday morning, I went to Plain and bought 12 more 60 lb. sacks of concrete mix. I had calculated the volume of the form and figured that I needed 12 sacks to do the job. I already had 12 sacks but I didn't want to cut it that close. With 24 sacks on hand I was sure to have enough for the job.

I drove the pickup up to the upper roadway and unloaded the 12 sacks. While the pickup was up there, I loaded a mattress that I had been storing for Chuck and Kalimba. They wanted it back so I'll take it home with me. I backed the pickup back down with no problem.

A county road crew was working down at the road so I went down to talk to them. They are going to replace the culvert. I talked to them about people taking rocks from the outcropping and they recommended that I post it with Private Property and No Trespassing signs. They also said that they would try to push the huge boulder back away from the road and back onto my property if they could.

Next, I set up the mixer and wheelbarrowed 12 sacks of concrete mix over to a stack next to the mixer. I strung the hose and the electric cord over, and I got my riser out thinking that it would be easier to dump sacks of concrete into the mixer if I was standing up higher. I also got out the camera and tripod, the wheelbarrow, the trowels, shovel, hoe and other tools I needed. Then I started mixing and placing concrete.

The riser definitely made loading the mixer a lot easier. And, by making a ramp up the back steps, I was able to dump directly from the wheelbarrow into half of the form. I had to shovel the concrete from the wheelbarrow into the other half of the form. The job went pretty smoothly. The hardest part was vibrating the concrete with a hoe. I mixed it pretty stiff so it took a lot of energy to get the concrete wiggling as a mass and to get it settled up against the form walls. We'll see how good a job I did when the forms are stripped. I took a few pictures of the progress as I went.

It took exactly the 12 sacks of concrete to do the job. The gray jays and chipmunks came around while I was cleaning up the tools and after the noise level was back down to normal. I left for home at 3:10 feeling pretty good about what I had accomplished.