10/6-8/09 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at 12:50 and was greeted by Bert all by himself. Ernie must have had something else to do. When I went up to the cabin, I discovered that the bait in the crawlspace trap was gone but the trap was still set. I'll have to replace that trap with a more sensitive one. Upstairs I found one mouse in a trap and the other trap still set. I went right to work looking for another mouse hole. I found a pipe through the foundation at Grid A2 that looked like it wasn't screened on the outside. There is a big pile of boards on the outside which makes it hard to get to the end of the pipe to check it out. I suspected that when I moved the boards away from the vent screen last week, I probably knocked the screen off the pipe. So I screened the pipe on the inside and I screened a second pipe that has an electrical wire running through it. I put a peanut inside each pipe that I can see through the screen. If either peanut disappears, it will prove that the pipe was a possible entry way for the mouse. This is worse than a game of cat and mouse; I never really know what is going on.

Next, I unloaded a lot of yard waste and piled it on the compost pile. I also trimmed a lot of low branches from the trees around the compost pile. That makes it a lot easier to walk around in there and it opens up a lot of potential tent sites for the scouts as well.

It was too windy to work safely in the woods, so I decided against any digging on the water line. Instead I went to work on the porch bench. First I scribed the bench stump for the notch to hold the bench log. Then I rigged up ropes, a chain, and a come-along and used them to lift the bench log. Then I clamped the bench stump to the porch deck and used a chainsaw to fashion the notch in the stump. I put the stump back and lowered the log onto it and it fit a lot better. The notch needs to be trued up a little, but the bench is now functional. I like it and I like sitting on it and relaxing.

Before I went in for the night, I set a better, more sensitive, mouse trap in the crawlspace and tethered it to a 2x6.

On Wednesday it was perfectly calm and cool. Just right for working in the woods. There were no signs of mice in the cabin so I took my Razorback shovel and a loppers into the woods and dug some more of the water line trench. It was slow going because it went between some big trees and a big old cedar stump. There were also a lot of rocks in the way. In addition to the Razorback, I used my loppers, which of course I have named "Cindy", and a bow saw to cut through the really big roots.

After lunch and a nap, I took two buckets of water to the sequoia trees and watered Ellen, Bill, and Andrew. Those are the ones having the hardest time of it. The rest of them seemed to be thriving.

I went back and dug some more on the water line. Three gray jays found me there. They made regular trips to get peanuts from me and take them to wherever they take them.

When it got too dark to dig, I went to work on the big wooden slab that I plan to make a "Camp Serendipity" sign out of. I squared it up using a Skilsaw and did some scraping to clean it up a little. I'll leave the chainsaw cut marks to give it a rustic look. Then I took the bench stump back out from the bench and scraped it to get it ready for stain. Then I stained both the bench stump and the sign board.

On Thursday morning, I used Rasputin to shape the inside of the notch in the bench stump so that it fit better. When I was satisfied, I stained the stump and the sign board with another coat. Then I put the bench back together, hopefully for the last time, took down the lifting rigging, and cleaned up the porch. I had made a lot of sawdust and chip mess which I swept off. Bert and Ernie came around for dog biscuits about the time I finished.

I still had about an hour left so I went back into the woods with a big steel bar and used it to dislodge and remove a pretty big rock that was keeping me from getting the trench deep enough in one spot. When the rock was out, I quit for the week. I left for home at 1:30.