8/23-25/16 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at 12:47, moved in, hoisted the flag, had my lunch and my usual nap. When I got up, I turned on the valve to water Brian and Paul and then went into the woods and checked on all the giant sequoia trees. They all seemed to be OK but I wish they grew faster.

While I was in the woods, I scouted for big, bent vine maples that might make a good handrail for the inside of the front staircase. The pole I had had stored away for that purpose just wasn't long enough or curved enough.

I found one that I thought would work and cut it down. I dragged it back to the cabin and tried it for fit. It looked like it might work.

On Wednesday the weather was hot so I watered Brian and Paul again. I decided to fertilize the sequoia trees and I happened to have some Miracle Grow in the cabin. I read the directions and gave each tree, except for Dave, a gallon of fertilizer solution. Dave is thriving so well I decided to save the fertilizer for the others. I also gave Andrew, Earl, and Ellen an extra bucket of water because they looked like they could use it.

Back at the cabin, the front staircase was in direct sunshine. Since I plan to work on the railings for that staircase I decided to hang a tarp down from the cabin eaves in order to shade the staircase. I used a 16 foot 2x4 to hold up one corner of the tarp against the corner of the roof at Grid G3 and a 10 foot 2x4 to hold the other corner of the tarp up against the eaves at Grid G2.

Next I wrestled with the vine maple that I had harvested, and found out that to make it fit right it needed to be about a foot longer. I was disappointed and after mulling it over, decided to try to find a better one.

After lunch, I went back into the woods and after a fairly lengthy search I found another big vine maple that looked good. This time I didn't want to cut it short so I got my WWII entrenching tool and dug around a couple feet of the root which I cut through with the sawzall. I cut the branches off and dragged the long trunk back to the cabin. The butt is about 4 inches in diameter and the trunk is about 25 feet long.

After propping it up on the staircase on some concrete blocks, it looked like it would work for a rail. It might serve both as a guard rail and as a hand rail on the inside of the staircase. I'll have to check the rules and see. The butt end of it has a very sharp bend so that it can bend around to provide head room under the Grid F.5 porch beam and then tie into the Grid F3 column at the end. The idea is to allow pedestrian passage between the Grid F3 and F.5,3 columns.

After taking a nap, I dragged the vine maple up onto the porch deck and used a drawknife to peel off all the bark. It came off very nicely.

On Thursday morning I swept up all the bark chips from peeling the vine maple and set them out in a box under the eaves. When they dry out they will make good fire starter for next winter.

While I was sweeping the steps, I noticed that the rodents had chewed through the bottom of a 50 lb. bag of Bentonite that I had stored there. Storing it that way was a bad idea. The paper bag was inside a plastic garbage bag and the rodents had chewed through both. The Bentonite was spilling out onto the step below.

It was a hard, messy job to clean it up but I got it done. I used a steel 5-gallon bucket to hold the Bentonite and I threw away the remnants of the bags it was in.

Next I went down to the creek and re-established the siphon to irrigate the rhubarb. This time I left the valve open all the way and I positioned it so that it ran out a foot or two downhill from the rhubarb plants. The water coming out forms a small creek about 8 feet long that joins the big creek.

With that done, I returned to the cabin and vacuumed the floors upstairs and down. I plan to have guests stay overnight in a couple weeks so I want the place to be tidy. I left for home at 1:15.