Category Archives: Les Guis

Tuesday 13th March 2012 – A FEW MORE …

… records tumbled today.

We had the glorious weather again, so much so that the water that is heated by the surplus energy from the solar panels, the “dump load”, was heated to such an extent that it went off the end of the temperature gauge – ie over 70°C.

That’s the first time this year.

The water in the solar-heated tank (a black plastic box with a glass lid) reached 26.5°C and that’s the highest so far (but still a far cry from the 45°C of midsummer) and if it hadn’t have been so windy, I would have put some of the water out of the dump load into the solar-heated tank to bring the temperature up to about 38°C and I would have had the first solar shower of the year.

But it was far too windy – I would have died of exposure I reckon, and the fact that showering outside in the all-together is the way that it’s done around here, it would have been indecent exposure too.

Talking of the wind, it’s died down now, after the last few days, but once again I had more wind energy created today than the cumulative amount of wind since I installed the power meters 2 weeks or so ago.

Mind you, I don’t think that we will have that again tomorrow.

But here’s an interesting and little-known fact, one that I can now prove. And that is that you can often have more power from a low-powered wind turbine than you can from a high-powered one.

Confused?

Well, let me explain.

Most electric motors, and wind turbines are no exception, have magnets in them and these operate the coils of the motor. Of course, the bigger and more powerful the motor, the bigger and more resistant are the magnets. And so you need more force to overcome the resistance in the magnets.

When you have a low-powered wind it will overcome the resistance in the magnets in a low-powered motor, and make the motor turn. However, there will not be enough force in this low-powered wind to overcome the resistance in a big magnet in a high-powered motor so that this motor won’t turn.

And there I was today, watching the little Rutland 90-watt wind turbine quite happily ticking over and giving me 10 – or 15 watts for much of the day while the big 400-watt wind turbine was doing nothing at all.

And then, all of a sudden there would be a stronger gust of wind and the big Air 403 wind turbine would start to turn, and once it had built up steam it would be there with 50 watts, or 80 watts, or even 113 watts on one occasion, while the smaller wind turbine was giving out 30 or 40 watts.

But be that as it may, the smaller wind turbine chucked out in total three times as much energy as the larger one over the 24-hour period under review. And it’s done that consistently over the last few years.

There are lessons to be learnt here of course – namely a collection of low-powered turbines will do more good than one big one over a continuous period, especially in a place like this.

Monday 12th March 2012 – WHAT AN EXCITING DAY!

The first exciting thing that happened was me lying wide awake in bed for ages thinking that I may as well get up – and finding when I did so that it was all of 07:45 – a good half-hour before the alarm goes off.

And not only that – with having had the fire on up here last night to cook a pizza, it was 16.6°C in here too, and it actually felt warm as well.

So having had breakfast and another load of coffee I did a pile of stuff on the computer. And then it was off outside to survey the house and barn – something that, quite surprisingly, I have never done.

It was not only glorious sunshine but a really strong wind and once more the wind energy today exceeded the cumulative total since I installed the power meter. And all of that was totally exciting as well.

Knocking off at 18:30 I discovered that the water in the dump load was heated to over 68.5°C and that’s a record this year. I had a gorgeous hot wash and shave with the water at that temperature and that made me feel so much better

At the Anglo-French group tonight we had two new attendees, Isobel from the Comcom at Marcillat en Combraille and her friend. We all had a really good night down there in St Gervais d’Auvergne.

And on the way home, the stars are the brightest that I have seen for a while. There are thousands of them out there, and Jupiter and Venus are wonderful. I can’t see Uranus from here though.

Back here, the water in the dump load was still 61°C and so I rounded the evening off by doing the washing-up with it, saving the gas supply for tonight.

So you can see what I mean about “exciting”, can’t you.

But in really depressing news, it’s three years tonight that Liz left us all. Time travels so fast these days but it can’t dim the lights.

-2

Sunday 11th March 2012 – CONTINUING ON …

… with the saga of weird football matches, I went to Terjat this afternoon to watch AS Terjat play a team from Montlucon – Bien Assis I think – seeing as how there was no Pionsat team in action this afternoon.

The trainer for Terjat, with whom I struck up some kind of conversation last time I was there and which carried on this afternoon, told me that in the league tables Turgid were well ahead of their opponents, and that they needed to win (which everyone was expecting) to keep up some kind of reasonable pretensions for promotion.

He was right about the “well ahead of their opponents” bit, because a more one-sided game you would not wish to see.

However from the first attack of the game one of the Bien Assis forwards had a weak shot on goal, well covered by the keeper and which would have been comfortably saved had the ball not taken a wicked deflection off the needlessly-outstretched foot of a Turgid defender and rolled into the far corner of the net.

For the remaining 89 minutes AS Terjat were camped in the opposition half with their keeper being merely an interested spectator.

And the final score?

Yes, you guessed it. 1-0 for Bien Assis.

As an aside, the Turgid keeper had one of the most powerful kicks I have ever seen and his clearances upfield were outpacing his attackers every time. And one of the Turgid central defenders was the best header of the ball that I have ever seen at this level of football.

In fact this game was quite a decent match for aerial prowess. I’ve not seen another match quite like this one for that kind of thing.

But the referee came out onto the field of play having left his cards in the dressing room.

At least that’s the only reason I can think of as to how we managed to reach the end of 90 minutes of this match without a single card being shown, despite the kind of goings-on that we had during the game.

“Hard-fought” is probably quite an apt description.

In other news, I had something of a lie-in today. In fact, 11:29 was when I crawled out of my stinking pit. About time I had a good lie-in.

We are also having a record day for wind power. I’ve had the power meter connected up for about 10 days or so, and we’ve had more wind today than the cumulative figure over the other 9 days.

It really is quite impressive.

-2

Saturday 10th March 2012 – BRAIN OF A DUCK, YOU KNOW!

Yes, Brain of Britain drove all of the way to Commentry to do his shopping this afternoon, only to find when he arrived there that he had forgotten his money, his wallet and his bank cards.

And so all the way back to here to fetch them and then go all the way back again.

That meant that I didn’t have time to do much shopping and so I just did the bare essentials – and then only some because I forgot quite a lot, I reckon.

And after that, a nip to the swimming baths at Neris-les-Bains.

It was freezing in there this afternoon and I wasn’t sorry to come out after an hour or so.

But I did have an amusing time watching a group of kids in there. All aged between 6 and 8 I reckon and all came in individually with parents, but after a while I noticed that they were all playing together in a corner of the shallow end.

It never ceases to amaze me how unself-conscious kids of that age are, and how quickly they all seem to integrate.

FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s 3rd XI were playing Sauret this evening at football down at the bottom of Division 4 of the Puy de Dome District league in Pionsat.

For once they had a full side out with a couple of new players as well as a few decent players who have featured for the second XI. And so they spent most of the match peppering the Sauret goal whereas the opposition just contented themselves with a few breakaways.

And such is the perversity of modern football that Sauret won the encounter by 2-1.

This was another match that Pionsat threw away. They really do need to win encounters like this if they want to crawl away from the basement.

-2

Friday 9th March 2012 – WHAT A GLORIOUS DAY TODAY!

Apart from the wind, which had the wind turbines going round for most of the day, we had beautiful blue skies with not even a trace of cloud anywhere.

I’m not sure how much solar energy I received but there was about 55 amps in the barn, with all of the batteries fully-charged – and here in the house when I looked at about 17:00 we had had 250 amp-hours with some more after that.

That’s a total of something in the region of about 4 KwH and that can’t be much short of a record.

The water temperature in the dump load had reached 63°C as well by 15:30 and so with all of that kind of thing today, there was only one thing to be done. And that was to unearth the little table-top washing machine and do a load of washing – with proper washing powder this time, not those nuts. Nuts to them!

I’m not quite completely up-to-date with it, but there’s not much left to be done.

And if I go to the swimming baths tomorrow (if the good weather keeps up) I’ll treat myself to the luxury of clean bedding tomorrow night.

While the washing was doing, I did some tidying up on the ground floor in here. I did a lot too, as you might expect in 90 minutes, but you can’t see any improvement. There’s that much that needs to be sorted out there. 90 minutes isn’t even chipping away at the edges.

This morning though, after computing, I went back outside and did an hour or so on the wasteland that I started to clear yesterday when I should have been doing the vegetable beds.

That’s much easier to clear than the downstairs of the house and the results are so much more tangible as well. I’ve actually made it to the stone wall at the boundary of my property and that’s astonishing.

The downside of this is that the heap to burn is far too high for safety where it is, and I shall either have to move it elsewhere or else burn it in stages – probably the latter.

-1

Thursday 8th March 2012 – I HAD ANOTHER …

… one of those nights last night – still awake at 04:30 and up again before the alarm went off at 08:00. And so I’m pretty whacked right now.

Today started with a major tidying up as planned due to my expecting a visitor. And while I was making good progress the aforementioned visitor rang up to cancel.

Ahh well. back to the computer for an hour or two.

Once the computer session had taken place I went outside and finished weeding last year’s potato beds.

There were about 20 potatoes that I salvaged but some of them had started to sprout. So what I did with those was to put them in the raised bed that I had laid down the previous day. We’ll see what happens with that lot.

But there is already a potato plant fully established in one of those beds. There’s no sense in moving that and so we’ll leave that in position to confuse the beans and peas that will be going into that bed.

After that, things became confusing. I have garlic growing in the next row of beds and so I started to clear out the row after that. In that row I discovered some carrots that I must have missed and so I started to clear out the following row of beds so that I can move the carrots.

But in there are some leeks, so I found out, and they need to be moved another rown higher …

Anyway, you get the picture. I’m going to start at the top and move downhill instead.

But then I was sidetracked by a row of nettles that was growing in front of the old Mercedes 240D that is festering in the field, and so I started tugging at that. This turned into something of a major session of weeding higher up the garden and by the time that I had finished (19:15 – isn’t that something of a record?) for the evening, I was well on my way to clearing a rather large part of the wilderness that will eventually be the lawn, whenever that might be.

I’ve worked really hard today. No wonder I’m knackered.

-1

Wednesday 7th March 2012 – I’VE BEEN CRACKING …

… on in the garden today.

I’ve finally dug out where the new bed is to go, so that’s all prepared.

But in a slight change of plan I decided that the old raised bed was too badly knocked about and damaged to be reused and seeing as I have plenty of wood, I threw my bonnet over the windmill and knocked myself up another.

It’s slightly larger than the other and it fits so much better into the scheme of things as you can see.

I then had a pleasant hour or so weeding some of the pathways.

Now that I’ve found the stuff that I was going to use as a weed blanket (as I knew that I would as soon as I no longer needed it) I’m going to lay it on the pathways, cover it in the sand and mud mortar that I raked out of the house wall, and then top it off with the broken slates from the house roof.

For the rest of the afternoon I did some weeding of the raised beds – starting with the two that had the main crop potatoes. Unfortunately the bad weather has done for most of those and there aren’t very many worth salvaging.

But never mind. I did notice that the garlic is looking quite healthy though and it won’t be much longer before I can pull that up.

This morning though I spent my computer hours working on some of the footy pages. I’ve been letting them slip just now so I need to get myself up to date.

I won’t be doing that tomorrow though – I’m expecting visitors so I need to tidy up a little.

-1

Tuesday 6th March 2012 – I’VE FINISHED …

… the compost bin as you can see.

Well, when I say “finished”, I don’t really mean “finished”, because as you can see, it’s a modular structure. I have aboout 10 of these square modules and I can stack them one on top of another, increasing the height as I build up the heap and decreasing the height as the contents compost down.

As you will note, there are air gaps to aerate the heap. This helps the composting process.

The base of the heap is an old air bed that has given up the ghost. I did have some special stuff to use but like anything else around here I can’t find anything when I really want it. The air bed will have to do.

The purpose of that is to suppress whatever weeds might want to push their way up through the heap.

There are currently two other active compost bins. One has rotted down nicely and when I empty it (by adding the contents to the raised beds) I can take it apart and use the modules to build up the bin here.

They will fit of course because the modules are all the same size – namely 875mm long.

“And why 875mm long?” I hear you ask.

That’s because they were made from a job lot of 3500mm planks that were cut into fours.

The other bin won’t be emptied for another year. That bin was only started a year ago and so it still needs time to settle down. The routine is that you spend a year filling a bin, and then leave it to stand for a year.

The contents of that particular bin will go into the raised beds next winter and then I can move it to behind the one there – where the spade is standing up.

Once that was organised I started to dig over the ground to the right of it – where the garden fork is lying down.

I have a raised bed from the first attempt at gardening, one of 3500mm x 1000mm, left over from those days and the plan is to run it across there, behind the last row of raised beds, and plant the soft fruit bushes in it. This year though, I’ll use it for the new potatoes.

Preparing that patch is not easy. It’s part of the primeval forest and there is a ton of ground alder in it as well as huge masses of thick tree roots. All of these have to come out and it’s taking ages. It won’t be finished for a bit.

In other news, regular readers of this rubbish will recall me talking … "on numerous occasions" – ed … about Yakima Canutt.

He was a stunt man from the late 1920s who was picked up by a very young John Wayne and co-starred with him in many of his earliest films of the 1930s. When acting became much more sophisticated, Canutt was one of the thousands of actors who were clearly not up to it and disappeared from the silver screen.

Wayne didn’t abandon him, however, and on the later (as in 1934/35/36) batch of Wayne’s B-feature movies, the second-unit director is none other than one Yakima Canutt.

So what’s the interest in him tonight? Well, this evening I was relaxing with a DVD, Breakheart Pass, starring Charles Bronson.

Based on a story by Alastair Maclean, it’s easily one of the best of the “non-western westerns”, even if the directing is totally awful and we have to put up with Bronson’s appalling floozie Jill Ireland, without whom he won’t go anywhere even if she can’t act to save her life and who hasn’t recovered from co-starring as the outrageous Kenneth Williams’ grilfriend in Carry On Nurse [DVD].

But anyway, before I bore you all to death with my own polemic, I happened to notice the credits of Breakheart Pass as the rolled by. And who was the second-unit director and stunt co-ordinator? Yes, none other than one Yakima Canutt. He kept on going until he was 90.

And the snow that I mentioned yesterday? Well, you can see all about that in the photo above.

Not a flake.

-2

Monday 5th March 2012 – I WAS RIGHT …

… yesterday about the snow.

At about 15:30 this afternoon the heavens opened and for a couple of minutes we had a snowstorm.

Not totally unexpected either, because between about 14:00 and 15:00 the temperature dropped from 8.3°C to 4.1°C – quite a dramatic fall in temperature in such a short space of time – and it carried on dropping too.

Having spent much of the morning doing computer things, I went out to move these tree stumps that are in the way of where I want to put the compost bins. But rather than spending all of the time moving the stumps, I spent much of that time taking the handle out of an old abandoned spade to put in the garden fork.

That’s another tool handle broken – I’ve lost count of how many just recently. I’ve no idea what’s causing them all to pack in.

However, when I was at Bricomarche the other day I noticed a pile of tool handles. I shall have to go and mortgage my life away.

“But why did it take so long to change a tool handle?” I hear you say.

Probably because the handle in the spade was well stuck in and in the end it was a job for the angle grinder to cut away the neck of the spade. As for the fork, that involved drilling out the broken bit of handle and that wasn’t as easy as it might have been either.

But now the big tree stump is out, and so are a couple of smaller ones. I didn’t have time to remove the rest so that’s a job for tomorrow, always assuming that I can see them through the snow that is forecast to fall tonight

Another thing I did was to plant the lettuce. Did I mention that I bought a dozen baby lettuce plants on Saturday? A dozen cost €2:95 and the price for 6 – also €2:95. So seeing as a dozen lettuce all ready at the same time would overwhelm me, I planted 6 and gave 6 to Liz at the Anglo-French group this evening.

What I will be doing is buying a few small lettuce plants every few weeks and running them throughout the year.

A big mistake that I made last year was that I left the final lettuce out in the open and the frost got to them even though they were stiull going. I’ve therefore planted this lot of lettuce in the cloche with the strawberry plants and put the glass (really two old caravan windows) over them to keep the bad weather out.

And the lettuce from September onwards will also go into the cloche to see how long they will keep in there under cover

I also bought a few packs of seeds from ALDI and LIDL – €0.29 and €0.49 a packet depending on size. Not many varieties but enough to keep me going. I imagine that temperatures of -16°C have done for the seeds in store from last year.

I also need to think about seed potatoes, onion sets, garlic and shallots. It’s getting to be about that time.

All in all, things are starting to become busy around here. I need to put my skates on.

-1

Sunday 4th March 2012 – IT WAS SUNDAY TODAY …

… and despite me having another one of these “04:30 in the morning” sessions, it was 10:25 when I was up and about.

Just as well, though, because I had to have an early start.

FC Pionsat Sy Hilaire’s 1st XI was playing Clermont Fontaine du Bac’s 2nd XI today and that necessitated a drive almost to Aubière – and the kick-off was at 13:00. That meant an 11:30 start from here.

Finding the stadium was easy. Finding the entrance was something else. Eventually, after many trials and tribulations, I stumbled upon it – in the … errr …”rue du Fontaine du Bac”.

D’ohhhh!!!!

The opponents were a good strong attacking side, and Pionsat’s team was … errr … somewhat makeshift, especially in defence. Not one of the four established full-backs was out there today.

And Jerome, who usually tears up opposition defences, was on the bench (the only substitute as well) and Franck resisted all temptation to put him on the field in place of the one or two attacking midfielders who were clearly only there in body this afternoon.

He managed a brief 15-minute cameo when Cedric was forced to hobble off. It was no surprise that Pionsat lost 3-1, and it was something of a disappointment.

On the way back I stopped to fuel up at the Auchan at Clermont-Ferrand – and €1.42 per litre for the diesel. It’s ridiculous the cost of fuel right now, and it’s not going to let up.

It’s also raining – the first time for 8 days – and the wind has shifted direction and is blowing from the north-west. We’ve been promised snow again on Tuesday and by the looks of things it may well be here before that.

-1

Saturday 3rd March 2012 – THE WEATHER …

… wasn’t quite as nice today.

Based upon the scheme of description that I use, we had “scattered clouds” this morning followed by “clouds” this afternoon. That’s rather a change from the “glorious” of the last couple of days.

I was up quite early this morning and had something of a lazy half-day doing nothing in particular.

From there it was off to Commentry, just for a change, to do a round of the shops there. But there was nothing extraordinary at all on offer about the place today and I didn’t buy anything special at all

I did make it to the swimming baths at Neris-les-bBains though, for the first time in ages, and I’m all clean now.

I finally managed to watch a football match tonight – the first time for what feels like several years.

Down in Pionsat, FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s 2nd XI were playing Menetrol so I went along to lend them my support. And despite playing a little better than they have done just recently, they still managed to lose again.

They are now struggling near the foot of the table with relegation starting to stare them in the face and it’s all looking quite ominous.

-3

Friday 2nd March 2012 – WELL, I DIDN’T …

… quite have my early night last night.

I started talking to someone on the internet just after I posted last night’s blog and it was 02:00 when I finally went to bed.

But here’s something that doesn’t happen every day – not only was I awake when the alarm went off, and not only was I breakfasting, but I was actually outside weeding the garden when the alarm clock went off this morning.

Wide awake at 07:30, I was, and I’ve no idea why. I must have wet the bed or something.

But it was a good day to be wide awake so early. By the time that I came in for a coffee – at about 11:50 – it was 24.6°C outside with gorgeous blue skies and everything. It really was marvellous.

Terry came round a little later. He had a job of work to do in the vicinity and so he popped by to sey hello. And I swapped a few 4mm bolts for a few sacks of sawdust – the composting toilet depends on sawdust, and plenty of it, and I was starting to run low, although you might not think so with all of the wood that I have cut up just recently

With it being so nice, I quickly coupled up the solar water heater -cum – shower unit. I was not really wanting to do that as there are a few improvements that I want to do, but it was a shame to miss out on the solar heat and the possibility of a shower some time in the near future.

I could certainly do with a shower anyway, and I’ll be heading to the swimming baths at Neris-les-Bains if it stays nice tomorrow.

With so much solar energy (we had 243 amp-hours today – that’s about 3KwH) the water in the dump load reached 48°C. That was the cue for the first load of washing for the year.

And there was plenty of that to do as well.

And it was nice to sit outside this afternoon with a butty or two, a coffee from the electric coffee machine, and watch the washing machine do the business using water heated by the surplus energy off my system. It really is a sense of acccomplishment for all of this to happen.

But as for the washing itself, most of it is going to have to be done again. I tried to do it using these washing nut things but they turned out to be a dismal failure and haven’t made mush impression at all on the dirty stuff.

I’ll have to buy some “proper” washing powder stuff and do it again.

After all of that, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden again.

I didn’t have the fire going because I had the washing hanging out, but there’s now a huge mountain of weeds and so on ready to be burnt and I might do that tomorrow morning.

The area to where I’m going to move one of the compost bins is now clear. All I need to do is to dig up a few small tree stumps there, and compact some hardcore down to stop the weeds from penetrating from underneath, and then I can put the first of the bins there.

And when the pile of weeds has been burnt, I can start to put the greenhouse there where it ought to be.

It seems to me that everyone is starting to come out of hibernation now.

-2

Thursday 1st March 2012 I’M GOING …

… to have an early night in a couple of minutes. All of this paperwork in the morning is wearing me out

But still, it’s nice to be up early (well, early for me, anyway) and spend the morning with a pot of coffee.

Ohh what luxury!

But once the paperwork period was over, I excelled myself by doing a little tidying up in the bedroom where I’ve been working. I can actually see some floor now, and that’s real progress.

I’ve also been tidying up a little in the barn, and outside I’ve fought my way further down the garden and hacked out a load of brambles.

What I’ll be doing tomorrow afternoon if it stays nice (and today was easily the nicest day of the year with over 120 amp-hours on one of the solar banks) will be to have a garden fire and burn a load of dead vegetation, and then move one of the compost bins to its final position.

Won’t that be a cue for a torrential rainstorm?

The hour-meters for the solar banks, those that I installed yesterday, are giving me the results that I expected, but the hour-meter on the overcharge is not quite so good.

It seems that there’s some current seeping through the overcharge controller once the voltage passes 13.4 volts. Not much – a question of a couple of milli-amps or so – but it’s enough to start the hourmeter working.

These things are so sensitive that this one is feeding off the current that is seeping. The old car clock that I was using before couldn’t detect that current, and so tHe figures are going to be a little distorted as from now on

Another thing that I’ve been doing, or at least, trying to do, is to continue to drill this 48mm hole through the wall between the lean-to and the house in order to pass some electrical cables through.

But for some reason, the first 25cms went through without any real effort whatsover but ever since then it’s been making no impression at all, and I’m not halfway yet. Today with an hour or so, I reckon that I made almost one centimetre.

There’s definitely something not quite right about this

Wednesday 29th February 2012 – I’VE GONE …

… onto summer hours!

Yes, already! It’s now light enough to be still working outside at 19:00 and so that’s what I’m doing.

And the computing activities that I need to do, well I’m doing those from 10:00 until 12:00.

So with an early night after my dithering about, I had an early morning as well, just for a change. And on went the coffee pot again because if anything it was even nicer today than yesterday.

So much so, in fact, that I ran the electric heater up here. Not because I needed to, but because it was a shame to waste the energy.

One of the things that I needed to do was to print off about 50 pages of stuff that I need to complete. And I think that I’m having printer issues. The black ink didn’t work at all and in the end I put a new cartridge in.

That worked fine for a few pages and then we were back to the missing lines and dirty heads again. I cleaned the heads, and that worked fine for a while and then we were back in the missing lines and dirty heads.

I don’t know why that is. Printers never seem to last very long with me.

This afternoon I had a pile of fun.

I’ve had a few parcels delivered these last couple of days, and one of them contained the half-a-dozen 12 volt DC hour meters similar to the 230 volt ones that I bought to run with the mains inverters.

The purpose of these 12-volt hour meters is to wire them into the solar panel circuits to see for how long a solar charge is received by the panels (to help in resiting them to an optimum position), to wire into the wind turbine circuits ditto, and also to wire into the overcharge circuits to see for how long surplus energy is created.

And so I spent a happy afternoon wiring in the overcharge timers and the solar timers. I’m not able to do the wind turbine timers as I need diodes to stop the backflow of energy from the batteries and they haven’t come yet.

The wind turbines are connected directly to the batteries with no charge controller so if you wire a timer in there without stopping the current flowing back from the batteries, the timers will be running 24 hours per day, feeding off the batteries.

I also did some tidying up of the panel that I made a couple of months ago – the one with the 600-watt inverter, the electric meter and the electrical sockets, that I’m using in the barn. That looks neater and tidier, and works better than before.

But I forgot to say that when I was in Brussels at Christmas, Marianne was chucking out an old hair drier – something like 400 watts or so. Anyway, I chucked it into Caliburn and brought it back here.

The reason?

Every now and again I use heat shrink insulation on bare wires and while you are supposed to shrink it using a hot-air paint stripper, I don’t have enough power to run a hot-air paint stripper.

I do have enough though to run a 400-watt hair drier and while it’s slower and not quite as effective, it does in fact work well enough.

I’m quite impressed with that.

-2

Tuesday 28th February 2012 – I’VE SPENT …

… most of the day on the computer today.

One or two things have needed doing rather urgently and that was what took up most of the day.

But there was so much bright sunlight that I could sit up here with the luxury of a coffee machine on the boil all day, which I refilled as necessary. The last time that I did that was probably back in 2007 when I was still living in Brussels … "it was just a week or two ago actually" – ed.

But I ended up not having ny tea last night. The fact was that it was far too warm to light the fire up here and what with feeling a little weary this evening I didn’t really feel like going downstairs to cook anything.

It’s hard to summon up the enthusiasm thse days and I don’t know why.

It’s not as if I’ve been working hard, is it?

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality