Category Archives: Les Guis

Tuesday 14th January 2014 – THERE”S ONLY ONE THING WORSE …

… than not being able to swallow, and that’s not being able to swallow when you have a streaming head-cold. Hence it was long after 02:30 when I dropped off to sleep and I awoke at about 04:00. Yes, a bad night indeed.

Lying there listening to the rain didn’t improve my humour much either. A bad day was threatening.

And a bad day it was too. 90 minutes to eat breakfast, 90 minuts to eat lunch and 90 minutes to eat my tea. I have been most uncomfortable today without a doubt and I wish that I were dead.

However, look on the bright side, Eric. Every last piece of rubble and dust is not out of the downstairs room and I’ve filled two black bin bags full of yet more rubbish. Most of the product that I need to work on the place is now down there and I’m reorganising the room yet again, putting the table that I’ll be using as a workbench under the window where it will be light.

I’ve had another bit of good luck too. You’ve no idea how much I’ve found that I thought was irretreivable (running a powerful magnet through the dust and rubble works wonders) but I’ve also found my sunglasses!

Bought in South Carolina in 2005 because the ones that I took with me to the USA were no good at all in that weather, I wore them almost constantly. They were superb, best that I’ve ever owned. So when I lost them in 2008 I was distraught. But here they are, sitting on an old newspaper that had slid into a box of rubble that I had brought down from my old apartment in Brussels.

It just goes to show …

Anyway, tomorrow (if I don’t have any interruptions) downstairs will be finished and I will be able to move the workshop down and out of the bedroom to give me yet more space.

And it’s below freezing tonight outside – first time for weeks.

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Monday 13th January 2014 – I’M A LITTLE BETTER TODAY

To such an extent that I even managed to eat my pizza tonight.

Took me ages,but it went down. And was much nicer than that Pumpkin soup that I found for lunchtime.

So this morning I awoke to the sound of torrential rain – first time for a while that was, and then after breakfast I carried on with the ground floor.

I was right about one thing – that the room won’t ever be as tidy as it was when I took that photo the other day, because I’m now at the “moving stuff around” stage. I’ve even attacked a large bin full of rubbish that dates from 1999. And the beauty of sifting through it all with a magnet is that I’m finding tons of stuff that I lost uears ago and gave up hope of ever finding again.

I nowhave three sacks full of cement, brick and rock dust. And I bet that you are wondering why I have saves it, and the answer is that I need stuff like that for levelling off a surface so that I can fit tiles, and why pay good money for sand when I have this?

I’ve brought in from the lean-to all of the stuff that I need for the house such as the pine planks and work tops. And now there is a meter and a half of wall in the lean-to that is bare, exactly where I want to put the shelves for the gardening stuff

17:55 when I put on the light downstairs. Up til then I was working in the natural light. The nights are already getting shorter. We’ve added over 25 minutes to the evening since the Winter Solstice.

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Sunday 12th January 2014 – I’m a bit icky-poohs

All of the dust that I’ve been swallowing this last few days has got onto my lungs and making me cough like a smoker. And now my tongue has swollen up and it’s rubbing against a broken tooth, so I’m in agony right now, there’s a blister on my tongue and I can’t swallow. Consequently I’ve not eaten very much at all today.

Apart from that, it was 10:30 when I woke up this morning to the most glorious day I’ve seen since I was in Greece. If I had somewhere outside that wasn’t covered in rubble or junk I would have sat outside and had my breakfast there.

Today I read some more of my book, John Bourke’s On the Border with Crook

It’s a fascinating book and written in a style in which I would dearly love to write –
“X and Y were determined that thay would farm down in the bottom of the river valley. The Apaches were equally determined that they would not. Consequently X and Y were never lonely down in their little river valley”.

But what is interesting is Bourke’s account of his first visit to Tuscon. In 1848 when Mexico lost this area to the USA they withdrew all of their priests from the area. The Pope made an appeal throughout Europe for priests to go out there and one of the priests who volunteered was a certain Jean-Baptiste Salpointe. Salpointe was born in the “lieu-dit Salpointe”, which is just a few kilometres from here at St Hilaire près Pionsat.

Some people around here are researching Salpointe and his activities in the New World and here in Bourke’s book, written in 1891, is a mass of information about the time Bourke met Salpointe in a restaurant in Tuscon.

As I keep on saying, the world is a terribly small place.

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Saturday 11th January 2014 – I was right …

… about the downstairs room lookng like it did for very long. Four hours down there this morning and it’s all disorganised again.

At least I’ve been finding new stuff, much of which I had forgotten about, and I’ve also binned quite a few items including the European carpet squares mountain that I accumulated. I was going to use those to cover the floor but now as you know, I’m going to be fitting a false suspended wooden floor down there so there’s no need to keep them.

I’ve moved the fridge and the water heater to under the stairs and the insulation that was there is now stacked up against the wall behind the table which is now parallel to the stairs with enough of a gap between to walk down.

Then apart from that, everything else is messed around and needs to be sorted out, and there’s still piles of stuff to
go.

This afternoon I nipped down to Pionsat and the intermarche to pick up a few things that I had forgotten. And while I was checking the BIO shelves I noticed that their products were cheaper than Carrefour in St Eloy. Shame there’s no LIDL in Pionsat otherwise I’d shop there.

After lunch I finished off the outstanding radio programme for Radio Anglais and that’s up to date now. But there’s some good stuff in a little magazine that I’ve been sent so I’m okay for the next few weeks after.

Tonight I had a fire going – the first since Sunday – because it was a little chilly and I wanted to cook tea. Now I’m sitting in my shirt sleeves with the windows open. Not a very clever idea gicen the heat that my stove gives out.

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Friday 10th January 2014 – MAKE THE MOST …

downstairs groound floor living room les guis virlet puy de dome france… of this photo for you may never see the like of it again.

I spent the morning cleaning out an area of the floor and I’ve put two old pallets against the old chimney and stacked the bags of cement and plaster on there to keep them off the ground. So now I can start to move things around.

But right in the centre where you can see the steps, the big black mortar-mixing bucket and the empty space, that was where there was a huge mound of rubble, stones, old insulation, all kinds of rubbish and it’s that which I’ve been emptying this week.

There’s still a huge pile of junk to be moved and I was planning on moving it this afternoo except that I had a little interruption. Terry rang to ask me if I was still interested in going to Montlucon. Do bears have picnics in the woods?

We stopped off at the LIDL by the river where they had a couple more of those LED light bulbs and then we went to Brico Depot. Terry bought his huge rainwater-harvesting tank and I took advantage of the 3m40 length of the inside of his van to buy another 20 shuttering planks. Like I’ve said before, they make excellent shelves and I’m in shelf-making mode right now.

A few other bits and pieces too, but the highlight definitely has to be some more 12-volt LED bulbs. 4-watt this time – even brighter, and €5:99 this time – not for one but for two. so I bought 5 packets of those and they will light up the barn a treat, I reckon. All I need to do is to invent a light to house them, and I have a cunning plan …

So by the time I was back home and had a coffee, it wasn’t worth starting work again for the last half-hour or so. But I had half a day off on Thursday morning and half a day off Friday afternoon so what I reckon is that tomorrow I should put in a few hours work in the living room again and crack on there.

There’s a reason for that. The long-range weather forecast reckons that by the end of next week this Indian Summer will be over and we’ll be in the depths of winter again. If I have an empty room on the ground floor I can move my workroom down from the bedroom. And when that’s empty I can crack on in there. That will keep me out of mischief in the cold weather and if I can break the back of that and finish the wardrobes in there I’ll have space to put my clothes and spare bedding.

And then I can dismantle the two wardrobes in here, and won’t that give me much more space?

I won’t know myself at this rate, will I?

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Thursday 9th January 2014 – WOW!

And for several good reasons too.

Firstly, I was up early this morning and I was at LIDL in St Eloy just minutes after the place opened. Not quick enough for the recessed LED lights and fittings that I was hoping to fit in the living room, which is a shame, and there were only 6xGU5.3 12-volt LED light clusters left.

Needless to say, I cleared those right out and when I returned home I had a good look at them.

The 12-volt LED bulbs that I have here are 1.2-watt bulbs which is sufficient for what I want to do. But these new ones are 3-watt. I fitted two, one over the desk and one over the kitchen table nd, well, WOW! It’s like Blackpool illuminations here. I’m well-impressed with these!

I stopped off at Cécile’s to chack her mailbox but it was still empty. And so I had to go off to St Gervais to talk to the Postie. Of course, with no letter of authority, no receipt or anything there wasn’t much that I could do, but I did it all the same.

I started to work on the downstairs lighting too. For years the lights in the verandah have been confusing me – the 2-gang light switches have constantly failed to do what they are supposed to do. I was there for an hour trying all kinds of permutaions and still nothing was working, but a closer inspection of one of the switches – the feed switch – showed that the brass housing seemed to be cracked. I fitted a new switch to see if that made any difference and, sure enough, not only did we have light but proper 2-gang controlled light switching too just as we are supposed to.

I then turned my attention to the light in the ground floor. Fitting it and wiring it all up was no problem but I needed a neutral connection. It was then that I found that I’d done all of the wires in twin-and-earth so there wasn’t a simple neutral cable. I need to cut into a twin-and-earth and strip out all of the insulation.

But then I had another look at it all. For a start, I’ve wired the lights up with blue and brown cable – the same that I’m using for mains wire and I almost ended up cutting into a 230 volt cable. I’d made up my mind long ago that 12-volt would be red and black so this wiring is evidently older, before I sorted myself out.

And it’s rubbish too. When I started doing this, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and sorked it out by trial and error. It’s been a trial and there are dozens of errors, so I’ve decided that, seeing as how I’ll be starting work down here sometime soon, the wiring will be the first thing to be changed so there isn’t really any point in trying to do anything with it. Consequently I’ve abandoned that plan.

The next WOW! relates to my pile of rubble. In fact, it’s all gone and the floor is free. That’s not to say that there’s no rubble there of course. The big pile went by the end of the afternoon but there are still some bits and pieces.

So tomorrow I’ll be attacking the stuff that’s in there, reorganising all of it and making a work room there. That will mean that the bedroom will be free of clutter so that I can carry on in there.

And that really WILL be a big WOW!

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8th January 2014 – 18:07 …

… was when I finished outside this evening. It was quite dark – to dark to really see but there was just about enough light to see the weeds that I was pulling up.

Talking of light, I didn’t get around to fitting a light in the ground floor living area. However I did manage tp dispose of most of the rubble. It won’t take ling to finish it off.

I have a new tactic now. I have a plastic box with holes in it – like a giant sieve. I’m shovelling the rubble into that and letting the dust and small stones fall through into a large bucket. Then, I’m passing a magnet through whatever is left in the plastic box and when I’ve fished out all of the metal objects I tip that into some buckets and when the buckets are full I empty them onto the rubble heap.

I’ve taken tons of stuff out now and it’s looking completely different in there now; And no only that, I’ve filled about a dozen rubbish sacks and there’s still plenty to go.

I might not be doing it tomorrow though. Terry rand up and apparently he might be going to Brico Depot. I said that if he did, I’d cadge a lift. Fetch some more shelving as well as some other stuff.

Not only that, it’s a lighting sale at LIDL tomorrow and they have 12-volt LED light bulbs. I mustn’t miss that at any price, and Cécile wants me to check her mail box again.

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Tuesday 7th January 2014 – I CAME IN …

… this evening when it was too dark to see what I was doing outside. And a quick glance at the clock showed me that it was 17:58 – almost knocking-off time. The days are certainly lengthening.

And not only that, we had 16.1°C outside this afternoon and I was half-inclined to take my jumper off. This weather certainly is crazy.

I had a bad night last night. I couldn’t get to sleep until long after 02.00 and when the alarm went off at 07:30 I felt like nothing on earth.

I lost count of how many buckets full of stones and rubble I moved from the living room, and it’s taking longer than it should . I’m having to fill them by hand rather than with a shovel because, if you remember, a couple of years ago I dropping my box of tamper-proof fitting dismantling tools all the way down from the attic, and I only ever recovered half of them. The rest are on the floor somewhere all nicely mixed in with the rubble and stones, and I need to recover as many as I can.

In any event, the mound of rubble down the garden is looking quite impressive, and as for the heap of stones, that is even more so. I can’t believe that I thought that I was going to run out of those when I was fixing the lean-to.

I called a halt in there at about 17:15 because without a light (which I may fix tomorrow if I think on) I couldn’t see what I was doing inside. I spent the last part of the day in the garden raking out the loose weeds in a couple of the raised beds. I have to start on the garden some time soon.

No fire up here again this evening. 16.3°C. This weather is totally bizarre.

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Monday 6th January 2014 – GOD IT WAS HARD THIS MORNING …

… to get out of bed. Even though I had had an early night and was wide awake when the alarm went off, it was still a struggle.

And the first thing that I noticed was that in my haste I had forgotten to do the washing up last night, and there is very little that I hate more than waking up to a pile of dirty washing-up.

First job this morning was to empty the composting toilet. Such lovely jobs that I have to do here of course. And after that I had to sort out some wood. I’m running low on kindling but there’s a big bin of it that was thoroughly soaked in a downpour. I had to drain that out and, seeing as it was (for a change) a fine day, I laid it all out to dry.

To get there though I had to attack my pile of old windows – some that I had picked up from the dechetterie for the glass, the fittings and, of course, the wood to burn. So while I was there, I dismantled a few of those.

This then led to the woodshed. I hadn’t quite finished it off as there was a curtain, made from a tarpaulin, to hang across the front. While I was busy adding wood to the woodshed I took 20 minutes to sort that out, and now that’s finished.

Next job was to start moving the stones. And some of them were flaming heavy too – I’ve no idea how I got them into there in the first place. Most of them I could lift out but a few I had to roll.

This afternoon when the big stones were out of the way I started to tidy up some of the rubbish. And there was a pile of that too, but once that was out of the way I could look at the rest of the rubble.

To move that, I needed to clear the space where I had been tipping the rubble before. A year or two’s worth of weeds, nettles and brambles needed cutting down and removing so that took a while, and before I knew it, we were in the dark.

Still, with all of the donkey work having been done, the rest should be straightforward tomorrow.

No fire up here tonight and it’s 16.8°C up here. This weather is astonishing. I even ended up cooking downstairs tonight – far too warm here for a fire.

But guess who put a tin of lentils instead of a tin of kidney beans into his aubergine and kidney bean casserole?

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Sunday 5th January 2014 – IT’S MY LAST DAY …

… of seasonal break today. And how did I celebrate it? I started by staying in bed until 10:30 am. Mind you, with all of the rain, I didn’t really want to get up anyway.

And after breakfast? I did nothing at all. Not even any housework. Just carried on working on these web pages that relate to my Canada 2013 voyage.

I watched a film this evening – The Horse Soldiers starring John Wayne.

I can’t believe that it was the film that he followed Rio Bravo because Rio Bravo is a classic yet The Horse Soldiers is an awful film. The plot is rubbish, the script is dreadful and quite a bit of the acting is thoroughly wooden. And how William Holden could put in such a pitiful performance when you consider what has to be a masterpiece of a role in The Wild Bunch. That will be one of life’s most important mysteries.

As for tonight’s gridiron, The Chargers stuffed the Bengals and the Packers can’t get going against the 49ers. I’d normally stay up to watch the rest of that but I’m going to bed. I’m back to work tomorro.

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Saturday 4th January 2014 – I FINALLY MADE IT …

… off the premises today, but I didn’t go far, which is just as well.

I had yet another bad night – not going to sleep until long after 02:00 and being awake long before dawn. And when I finally bit the bullet and hauled myself up, it wasn’t even 09:00.

Just as well, as I needed to make an early start.

I had to go to Cécile’s this morning. She’s awaiting an urgent letter which requires someone -such as Yours Truly – to make a dash to St Gervais prior to 11:30. And while I was there at 10:45 with plenty of time to spare, Cécile’s mailbox rather resembled Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, so that was that.

I nipped into St Eloy for the shops and the only excitement there was that LIDL was having a sale of tapes. Not the audio variety but the sticky variety and I never have enough aluminium tape or masking tape, so I stocked up. And with all this extra expense, well, my shopping came to a massive €25:00. It’s good to be here and not in Brussels.

This afternoon I did some more work on the website – only a bit because the lack of sleep caught up with me and I crashed out for 90 minutes.

Later on I watched what is my favourite French film, La Folie Des Grandeurs starring my hero Louis de Funès. A magnificent comic actor and this film sums up everything that there is to say about him.

Tomorrow it’s my final day of rest and I need to make the most of it because I’m back at work on Monday. I’ve been making a little list of things to do and believe me, there’s enough to keep me going for a couple of years.

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Friday 3rd January 2014 – I DIDN’T GO OUT TODAY …

… either. And once again, wide awake while it was still dark and that wasn’t enough foor me to leave the comfort and safety of my own bed. In fact, we had to wait until … errr … 10:30 before I rejoined the land of the living.

Breakfast started the day as I meant to go on – I dropped my coffee all over the downstairs floor and that was that.

I’ve spent all of the day working on the web pages for my voyage to Canada. There’s tons of stuff of course and it isn’t going to write itself. When I start on summer hours, I work on the website from 10:00 to 12:00 and work outside until 19:00, but we are a long way from there right now.

Cécile rang up for a long chat at lunchtime, and that was really everything that happened today. A quiet day by any standards – I’m building up my strength ready to start work in earnest on Monday.

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Thursday 2nd January 2014 – AS PREDICTED …

… I didn’t do anything today. I had yet another day of rest.

And quite right too.

Mind you, it wasn’t so much of a rest seeing as how I had a very disturbed night with all kinds of weird dreams – I was with my younger sister, and then I was on a motorbike going through the suburbs of Paris although it wasn’t Paris, all kinds of things. No wonder I hardly had a minute’s sleep.

And awake before dawn too. Not very often that that happens, but it’s been happening too often for my liking juqt recently.

After breakfast, another couple of DVDs and then I finished the outstanding web pages for Les Guis. We now have pages for 2011, 2012 and 2013 all organised. But I’m going to have to do some more work on them as there is a pile of coding that needs updating. I really have been letting things slide.

Not the music though. I found a couple of old 1GB SD cards and I repaired a 2GB card where the locking tab had broken off, and then uploaded all the music. Now I can have music wherever I go.

I had a pleasant 75-minute chat on the phone to Trixi too. I haven’t spoken to her since we were in Greece together in October and there was a lot to catch up on.

And tea was boiled rice, steamed veg, and curried mushrooms with onion and garlic gravy, all cooked on the wood stove. I’m getting the hang of it now.

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Wednesday 1st January 2014 – HAPPY NEW YEAR!

It didn’t start off as being too happy though. The mango-flavoured artisanal lemonade clearly had an effect on me because I was up and down like a jack-in-the-box through the night.

Of course, you really wanted to know that, didn’t you?

I eventually raised myself from the undead at about 09:30 and had a leisurely, prolonged breakfast drinking coffee, watching DVDs, and listening to the high winds that we are having again.

Later, I caught up with something that I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while.I copied most of my music onto the copmuter ages ago and a few years ago when I bought my SD-card hi-fi I copied it onto SD cards to play it up here. And I bought a car radio with an SD-card socket, so that I could play it in Caliburn too.

I’ve been buying quite a bit of music recently too as you know, but I’ve never updated the SD cards, and so, as I had a pile of 2GB SD cards hanging around here doing not very much at all, I’ve copied as much of my music as possible. I would have done all of the rest too but I’ve run out of 2GB cards. If I can’t find any more anywhere, I’ll have to do the rest on some 1GB cards that I might have somewhere.

I’ve also been working on the website. I’ve let the Lesguis site run down a little so this afternoon I did the 2009 page and the 2010 page.

Maybe, if I don’t feel like working tomorrow, I’ll do the 2011, 2012 and 2013 pages and that will be bang up-to-date.

So Happy New Year again. I wish you all for 2014 exactly the same as you wished everyone else for 2013.

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Tuesday 31st December 2013 – THE MOST ASTONISHING THING …

… happened today- so much so that it’s well-worth recording.

I have never ever talked about, much less photographed, the ground floor of this house. And for good reason too. When I bought the place back in 1998 I quickly dumped in there a pile of rubbish and since then the rubbish has been accumulating. Add to that a huge piles of damaged tiles, a couple of large piles of rubble from demolished walls and excavated floors, several bags of cement and plaster, and whatever else you can think of, then it really is a total disgrace.

On top of that, anything that doesn’t have a home anywhere else has been stuck in there to such an extent that moving around in there can definitely be a hazard to one’s health. I did once hear a story about someone who hoarded old newspapers and was crushed to death when a pile collapsed on top of her. Well, believe me, it’s not too far away from that on the ground floor.

Anyway, having said that, I was untangling a pile of cables from the equipment of the “Tower of Power” so that I can put that upstairs in the lean-to when, you’ve guessed it, I had an avalanche.

So that was that. I spent a delightful four hours this morning in the living room sorting out all kinds of stuff. New stuff into the lean-to, old good stuff ditto, plumbing fittings into the water room etc etc. That was followed by a couple of bags of paper waste into the old damaged water butt which will now be a paper receptacle, and a couple of bags of genuine rubbish into the back of Caliburn.

It doesn’t look like much of an improvement, for there’s 15 years’ worth of rubbish in there and I will need more than four hours to move all of that, but you would be surprised at the difference that it has made and now I can boldly go where no man has gone before since at least 1999. If that’s not progress then nothing is.

Another thing was that I had a bad night’s sleep. I was still wide awake at 03:00 and I was back awake again long before 07:30 when the alarm went off. Either there’s a lot of people talking about me, or else it’s my guilty conscience again.

And while it didn’t rain today, it was overcast and miserable with only the occasional glimpses of sun. We had high winds too – not like the high winds of the other day but high winds nevertheless.

After all of my exertions I knocked off for lunch at about 15:00 – late, I know, but I was on a roll – and then crashed out for a while and when I get my hands on the bank clerk from Pionsat ho woke me up with the telephone, he’ll be looking for a new set of teeth too. I was well away.

Tea was roast potatoes, broccoli, carrots, boiled potatoes, leeks, seitan slices, onion and garlic gravy with sprouts done to perfection, all cooked on the wood stove, followed by vegan Christmas Cake and “artisanal” mango-flavoured lemonade.

What more can any man desire (apart from Kate Bush and Jenny Agutter to share it with me)?

So now I’m off work for the next couple of days. And then, who knows? I might even carry on with the tidying up.

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