10/25-27/16 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I had a lot of errands and things to do before I left so I didn't arrive at Camp Serendipity until 2:30 PM. It had rained a lot recently so everything was wet, but it wasn't raining when I parked and carried my gear up to the cabin. The temperature outside was 50° so as soon as I hoisted the flag, I got a fire going in the wood stove. Then I had a small late lunch and a short nap.

When I got up, it was raining and it rained the rest of the day. I did some more work smoothing the rail using Rasputin and a scraper. My incision site was giving me some pain so I didn't work very hard or very long.

On Wednesday I woke up early so I got up at 5:30 and got a fire going and fixed my breakfast. Dave called while I was eating and we had a nice conversation about what we both had been up to. It started raining while we were talking and again it kept raining all day long.

I tried splitting wood and found that it was no problem for me to split the rounds using the big maul and even the 10-lb. sledge hammer. I just had to go slowly and carefully. I get the most pain if I am not careful walking down stairs or even just downhill, but swinging the maul overhead was no problem.

I did a lot of work smoothing the rail and I finished the job by the end of the day. In addition to Rasputin and the scraper, I used the power planer and the orbital sander with fine grit paper. The planer took the big knot lumps down easier than the rasp, and the sander worked better than the scraper around the knots where the grain of the wood turned up to the surface from two different directions. When the scraper worked against the grain, it tended to pit the wood. The sander didn't do that so it worked better in those areas. All in all, I was pleased with how it came out. Before I went in for the night, I swept up all the chip and sandpaper dust mess on the porch.

On Thursday morning, I slept in and when I finally did get up, I was really sore from the previous day's work. I took it easy and spent the rest of the morning vacuuming the first floor. Then I had my lunch and left for home at 12:45. I'm looking forward to feeling better each week from now on until I'm completely healed.