Friday 17th April 2015 – SO …

… after the vicissitudes of yesterday, it was “keep calm and carry on” today.

But it nearly wasn’t. I shouldn’t have had that coffee when I knocked off yesterday evening because at 02:45 this morning I was still up and about. Serve me right.

And having slept on it, I’ve decided that the next worktop that I fit, I’ll cut it, fit it into position and then build the cupboard around it BEFORE I cut out the insert for the sink. That way, it might just withstand the whole process.

After breakfast, I made a start on the new stud wall. I’m building it downstairs and then I’ll take the bits into the shower room and assemble it. It’s had a couple of design improvements too, there are also the brackets fitted for a couple of shelves, and even though I say it myself, it’s much better-built than its predecessor – the joints are tighter for a start – but so it should be, seeing how I’ve taken more time over it.

By the time knocking off came round, it had all been built, shaped and had a trial fitting. Now, all it needs is for some wood treatment to be applied because the wood has been stored in the same place where the other two bits (that I mentioned yesterday) had been stored.

At the shops, I didn’t meet anyone that I knew, but I had to go and pick up a parcel that was awaiting me – more of this anon. I spent the grand total of €19 in the shops at St Eloy this evening even with a couple of little extras – it’s definitely cheaper here than at the Intermarche in Pionsat.

So now I’m off to bed for an early night. I need one after yesterday.

Thursday 16th April 2015 – WE HAVE HAD A CALAMITY.

Yes, and you have no idea just how miserable and fed up I am.

Mind you, at about 11:00 things were going pretty well, as you can see.

Here is the worktop in the bathroom. It’s been cut to size and shaped to fit. And now I’ve put it into position just to make sure that it’s fine.

It is in fact milimetre-perfect, except that it’s going under the rails, not over them. But that’s not a problem

Next plan is to cut out the inset for the sink.

It’s not as complicated as you might think. First, you draw around the perimeter of the sink, to give you a maximum area. Then using a straight edge and a pencil, you draw straight lines from the perimeter – these correspond with the outline of the inset that you need so that you can drop the sink into the hole that you’ll be cutting.

Then you remove the sink, and continue the lines into the inside of the perimeter and they will all join up and you’ll have an internal perimeter. If you enlarge the photo, you’ll see exactly what I mean.

And then you cut away the internal perimeter. Drilling out the corners with a 10mm drill, you can use a jigsaw then to cut out along the lines.

And here we have the sink, inset into the worktop, and the worktop screwed in place.

Well, in fact the sink is just set into the hole. What you need to do of course is to smear mastic everywhere and then drop the sink in, and that will make a permanent fixture.

So it’s looking good, isn’t it?

Well, actually, no it isn’t.

If you look at my thunb, you’ll see that the worktop has collapsed – and collapsed under its own weight too (I put the sink in afterwards for a demonstation).

That’s right – more rubbish from Brico Depot. Cheap, nasty worktops that aren’t fit to be used as firelighters. This went into the bin. And there will be another pile of Brico Depot stuff following it too.

I’ve been complaining for ages about the quality of Brico Depot stuff being worse and worse, and it’s hit rock bottom today. I’ve wasted 5 hours on this piece of Brico Depot garbage

Anyway, I went and had a coffee and called it a morning. I also had a listen to Neil Young singing about Brico Depot products

And if that’s not bad enough, then this afternoon I made a start on another job that I had intended to do now that I’ve dismantled the shower room. And that was to rebuild one of the stud walls, only with the shelf rails in the correct place.

I sorted out he two demi-chevrons left over from when I bought a pile of stuff years ago to repair the downhill lean-to that had collapsed, and then marked them off and started to cut the lets.

That was when I noticed that both the demi-chevrons had somehow acquired a dose of dry-rot. Consequently, they’ve followed the shower room worktop into the pile of firewood.

Believe me – I’m totally p155ed off by all of this. On Monday, after the radio, I’m going to go and have a look at the real worktops in IKEA and I don’t care how much I have to pay. I’m totally fed up with this Brico Depot rubbish.

The good news is that we had a storm tonight and 8mm of rain fell in 90 minutes. That’s filled the water butts back up and no mistake. If the good weather comes back, I can carry on with the washing.

And I was on my travels last night – around the pubs in the East End of London. and I had to go and change my clothes and disguise myself, and the best place to do this is in the toilet of course. So there I was in the ladies’, of all places, in a cubicle with a woman banging on the door. But I was too busy checking through the stuff in there to make sure that some stuff that I had left a previous time was still there. And when I came out, the woman had gone and the toilet was empty. From here I went on the Holmes Chapel and Shearings depot, wandering around carrying a huge pile of plates. People were telling me that there was a load of new faces for the new season that was starting, but of course that was nothing new as coach-tour driving is something of an itinerant job. Still, there I was, wandering around all of the rooms, and it suddenly occurred to me – why don’t I put the plates down? Why do I need to carry them about?

Wednesday 15th April 2015 – I HAD AN UNEXPECTED …

… visitor at the front door this morning.

I’ve no idea what Bugs was doing there but he looked as if he was at home there all the same. Anyway he soon cleared off when I came to the front door and I was lucky to be able to squeeze off a slightly out-of-focus shpt as he scurried back up the drive.

So having been at one with the local wildlife, I carried on with work today.

First thing was to deal with the issue of the solar water heater. The temperature was 59°C in there this morning and at an average of 8°C per hour in the kind of weather that we have been having just now, then once the batteries are fully-charged, the water will boil up before the sun goes down tonight.

So what I did, and for the first time ever, was to drain 20 litres of water off it. Two buckets full, and I simply left it in the buckets to cool down. When the water started to heat up this afternoon, I simply tipped the buckets of lukewarm water into it. As a result, the water didn’t rise past 65°C, and that was fine.

Another thing that helped keep the water temperature down was to run the coffee machine for the first time this year.

850 watts at half an hour produced a nice pot of coffee as well as swallowing up some of the surplus energy, and I’ll have to do this more often. In any case, it saves on the gas here.

As for the work, I carried on in the shower room today.

First thing, I fitted the second batten for the shelf that will form the top of the composting toilet. You can see it here, at right angles to the shelf that I fitted yesterday.

There’s a third shelf too, but that’s in the false wall that I’ve temporarily dismantled while I’m working. The fourth shelf will be the top of the front panel, but you’ll see this in due course as the work progresses.

I’ve also finished the rest of the battens in the bathroom (for now at least).

You’ll see on the left just underneath the window the batten which will support the worktop into which I’ll be fitting the sink. This is something that I’ll be tackling sooner than you might think.

As for the battens, I’ve finally found my mitre gauge and with setting it up to 13mm (the battens are 26mm) I can mark off the mitres with some kind of accuracy. And even with my slightly-bent mitre saw with a couple of teeth missing, and my 100 year-old wood chisel, the level of accuracy that I’ve been managing has certainly astounded me.

So I’m having a well-earned rest and I might even have an early night too.

-1

Tuesday 14th April 2015 – THIS MAKES DEPRESSING VIEWING;

Yes, if you look very carefully at the back wall of the shower room, you’ll see that the plasterboard has been taken down.

And that’s not all either, for half of the plasterboard on the side wall has gone too. And when all of that is sorted out, half on the other side wall will be coming off.

You may remember that I did the plasterboarding in a hurry in 2013 in between trips to belgium, and I really wish that I hadn’t, because firstly, it’s a total mess, and secondy, the studding is all wrong.

I have to fit a variety of shelves in here, and it would have been ohh so easy to have fitted them and then done the plasterboarding around it like I did with the stairs, but that’s far too simple an idea. When I was looking this morning at how to fit the shelving in, and not seeing a satisfactory solution, I thought “sod this for a game of soldiers”. It was quicker to take off the plasterboard and start again.

I don’t know how I’m going to find the space to cut it down to the new shape, by the way, but I’ll worry about that in due course.

This is what I should have done before I fitted the plasterboarding.

Here’s the shelf mounting for the top of the composting toilet and it took me about an hour and a half to make it, including searching for the wood and changing a few light bulbs in the barn. However, it took about 5 hours altogether given all of the messing about. And that’s sad news. You can see what I mean about having done it first rather than last.

There needs to ne another shelf bracket fitted to the adjacent wall and I’ll finish that tomorrow – I’m well on my way to doing that already.

In other news, the blossom has finally arrived on the trees. 3 weeks later than usual, but it’s here nevertheless. And it does look pretty too – well worth the wait.

And you can see how nice the weather was – another beautiful blue sky all day long.

199.3 amp-hours of surplus solar energy (and wind energy too because we’ve had a nice windy day) went into the dump load – the home-made 12 volt immersion heater. The water temperature in the dump load was off the scale (over 70°C) by 15:00 and when I went to fetch hot water to do the washing up at 22:00, it was still not back on the scale again.

I’ve finally fixed the data logger too – the new one that I bought a few months ago. And this is what I call accuracy. I checked it tonight with a 1-watt bulb and it showed a discharge of … errrr …. 1 watt. I rigged up a few other low-powered items and the discharge was 9 watts. Switching everything off again went straight to 0.

I’m well impressed with this.

I was back in Crewe on my travels, with some people who figure more in my nocturnal adventures that they do in real life which is just as well as they aren’t people whose company I would appreciate for real.

We were in one house – a Victorian semi with waste land at the side that was a zone of special scientific interest – a marshy wetland. A car driven by a woman went past, did a U-turn across the marsh, went across the drive behind my car, and out across the lawn and back onto the Highway. This had caused a huge pile of light-grey gravel to be pushed into the marsh and had totally dried it up.

Then, I had to take one of these people to see his father, and he gave me directions. When we came to what he reckoned was the house number, it was an empty plot of land in Delamere Street where the little old school used to be. Now it’s been 23 years since I last lived in Crewe, and yet I could tell the difference between Delamere Street and Flag Lane, even when I’m deep in the arms of Morpheus.

-3

Monday 13th April 2015 – I SMELL ALL WHEATY TODAY

And the reason for this is that I’ve had another shower.

I started off today by dismantling the solar water heater and giving it a really good clean out. The solar water heater by the way is a black plastic box with an old caravan window over the top, and the back is insulated with some of this space blanket insulation. It’s stuck on the roof of the outside shower cubicle where it catches the sun quite nicely. The water then descends by gravity through a tap and then to a shower head.

It needed a really good clean too as it’s not been used in a while and there were all kinds of dead leaves inside the tank busily decomposing, and the window needed a really good clean too.

Next job was to fix the guttering on the uphill lean-to. The guttering has become detached because it’s too low and the door into the upstairs but where I keep all of the paint keeps knocking it.

But this wasn’t as easy as it might sound as I needed the folding ladder, and that’s all overgrown with brambles that have grown over the wall from Lieneke’s field and which one of the days we’ll have an accident with 5 litres of diesel.

I had to cut the ladder out of the brambles and that led to a general clearing of the patch of ground in front of the woodshed. Now I need a place where I can have a garden fire to dispose of all of the dead brambles.

So once I’d freed the ladder, I could dismantle the guttering, reposition the brackets and then refix the guttering. Now, not only does it slope all of the right way, but it clears the door too.

I’ve run a mains cable through from the house into the downhill lean-to, via the hole that I drilled through the wall ages ago. And with the electricity now in there, at lunchtime I did another load of washing. That’s come up nicely but there’s still a pile to do. It might not be done this week though as the water level in the water butts is quite low. 5mm of rain would do quite nicely right now to fill the water back up again.

I found 3 centimes in the bottom of the washing machine too. I hope that I’m not going to be done for money laundering.

After sitting outside eating lunch (it was really beautiful today again) and supervising the washing, I went and attacked the shower room and that’s almost empty now. Tomorrow I can start on fitting the shelves in there and the composting toilet.

Finally, the water in the solar heater was at 33.5°C. 5 litres of water at 61°C out of the 12-volt immersion heater soon sorted that out, and I had a really nice outdoor shower, followed by a shave and a change of clothes.

2 showers in 2 consecutive days? Whatever next? I’ll be washing myself away at this rate.

And I was on my travels during the night, working on behalf of the occupying forces during the day but directing resistance activities during the night. Nerina was here in this journey and we were somewhere in the UK in one of these areas with small Victorian detached houses with big gardens. The road to where we lived was a tortuous route though this built-up area but all of a sudden someone had put a direct road through the houses that curved around to where we were.

-2

Sunday 12th April 2015 – I SMELL ALL COCONUTTY AGAIN.

A gorgeous day again, clear blue sky, tons of solar energy and temperature of 46°C in the verandah. Obviously, a nice warm shower is called for, even if it does consist of a bucket of hot water out of the home-made immersion heater and a jug to pour it on.

Now I’m nice and clean, with nice clean clothes and I’m even going to have new clean bedding tonight. Ohhh luxury!

What I might even do tomorrow, if the weather keeps up, is to do another load of washing. And then maybe even a third sometime this week too. If I can clear all of the backlog I shall really be in my element.

Apart from that, I’ve not done much today. I should have gone to Montfermy to see Pionsat’s 2nd XI play but after they let me down last week and I drove all that way and back for nothing, I wasn’t feeling like having another long wasted journey.

Not only that, today’s football match in the Welsh Premier League between my team, Bangor City, and Connah’s Quay Nomads was being streamed live on the internet. So I wasn’t going to miss out on my weekend’s helping of footy.

Mind you, I don’t know why I bothered. Today was the first time that I’ve seen 90 minutes of a Bangor City match this season, and it’s clear to see why they are struggling near the foot of the table. They were totally disinterested, lacking motivation, and playing as if they were out for a Sunday afternoon stroll. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen two such ineffective forwards in my life. They seemed to be totally out of the game and didn’t put the Connah’s Quay defence under any pressure at all.

On the other hand, Connah’s Quay have recently signed veteran old warhorse Cortez Belle and they played him up front today. He was an absolute nightmare for the Bangor defence. He was up there all of the time, putting the defence under continual pressure, and that was what made the difference.

But if Bangor City do survive this season, then next season is going to see some very thin pickings indeed if the team can’t find any better motivation than this. You don’t need to be particularly skilful to sow all kinds of seeds of panic in an opposition defence as long as you have the right kind of drive, determination and aggression, as Cortez Belle proved today. Bangor City needs to find that, and find it pretty quickly too.

-2

Saturday 11th April 2015 – WHAT, ME?

Working on a Saturday?

Perish the thought!

Meanwhile, here’s a composting bin.

Having unexpectedly lost a good few hours of work time yesterday and with the composting bin to finish, I nipped outside after (a rather late) breakfast and carried on.

I cleared away a previous attempt at a composting bin, put as much of the compost as would fit into the existing bin, and put this one up on the same spot as the one that I had just dismantled and put the rest of the compost in. That will act as a starter.

The top off the dismantled bin, I salvaged that and cut it down to fit the new one, rescrewing and strengthening it where necessary. I was also able to salvage the hinges that I had bought and used for the infamously-unsuccessful trapdoor in the landing floor, and now I have a folding lid on the compost bin. That was a design failing on the original one, having just a lift-on, lift-off lid.

When I get around to it and I can find some cheap forsythia, I’ll put a little hedge around it. I’m not sure when that might be, though.

What is ironic about all of this though is that yesterday, the day after I had built the framework for the composting bin, the postie came round with a leaflet, telling us that VALTOM, the organisation that deals with waste disposal, has a special offer on compost bins this Spring.

Two other jobs that I had intended to do yesterday – fixing the guttering on the lean-to and cleaning out the tank for the solar shower – well, they will have to wait for Monday regardless. There are limits to what I’m prepared to do on an “office” day.
This afternoon, I’ve been researching for my website. I needed quite a few bits and pieces off the internet, so I decided to attack that.

And really, that’s about it today. Doing my shopping on Friday evening is a good plan, that’s for sure.

-1

Friday 10th April 2015 – I HAD AN UNEXPECTED …

… day off work today.

But that was partly because I had an expected visitor, in that Liz came round to inspect the premises at lunchtime. Consequently I had to spend the morning tidying up. It certainly made quite a difference, and you can actually see the top of the table now, as well as the coffee table.

A job well-done.

Liz thought so too – she was quite impressed with what I’ve done so far (and so am I of course) and then we had a coffee and a long chat.

After she had gone, I installed the new Livebox and, as I expected, it didn’t go anything like according to plan (mainly due to the fact that the screenshots in the destruction manual were nothing like what I had on my screen). This meant a phone call to Orange, and that was the end of the early afternoon.

Still, the thing is working now, and it does seem to be faster, which is good news. maybe they weren’t wrong about upgrading the phone lines.

All of this meant that I had a very late lunch – more of an early tea really – and it wasn’t worth starting work after that. I had a play on the internet instead.

At 18:00 I went into St Eloy les Mines and did the shopping, bumping into the Laotian girl whom I know (and whose name I have forgotten) and also Desirée, both of whom were doing their shopping. We had a bit of rain too, but nothing to worry about.

Driving past the big car sales place in Montaigut, I noticed that they had a Ford Ranger for sale, just like the one that I own in Canada. So I went over for a wander.

And it’s astonishing. It’s 3 years older than mine, with a much lower spec, yet they want almost twice as much money for it than I paid for mine. Still, the more that I see of them, the more that I like tham and I hope that I’m not going to be disappointed with mine.

And here’s something to record. With the temperature up here in my attic yesterday reaching 23°C and looking like it might be just as hot today, I’ve opened the skylights in the roof.

First time this year, too. It’ll be nice sleeping in here with a little breeze sweeping around the room.

-1

Thursday 9th April 2015 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since you’ve seen this little beast outside and working?

Late 2012 I reckon.

But today, with the outside temperature reaching 29.2°C, a beautiful clear blue sky with aslight breeze, water in the 12-volt home-made immersion heater at 58.5°C that can only mean one thing.

So while the washing was doing, I was sitting outside with my butties, a soft drink and a good book for lunch. And it really was nice too.

Now I know that I have said this before … "and you’ll say it again" – ed …, the mere handful of Euros that I paid for this tabletop washing machine at a brocante all those years ago has been a good investment.

So after an early start, first job was to do something that I don’t like doing, namely to cover a lot of the ground around here in weedkiller. I hate using the stuff and feel that it has no part to play in a rural garden, but I’m overrun with nettles and brambles and have no time to deal with them.

Back up on the scaffolding afterwards to finish off the guttering (except for the glueing together of course) and now we have a downpipe onto the roof of the sownhill lean-to.

Don’t be too worried about the fact that the downpipe isn’t vertical. I had to drill into the quarried stone blocks rather than into the fieldstone, and in any case I want the rain to spread right across the roof rather than drop down on one place.

Final job was to carry on with the new compost bin. Here’s the first of the layers, and in total I’ve made three altogether. That gives me a working height of about 50cms all told, and I can add extra layers as the heap expands.

Tomorrow i’m going to have to dismantle one of the bins from many years ago and site this bin in the place of the dismantled one. It’s too big to go where I wanted it to be;

Each of the sides is only 75cms, and that’s a lot less than the 133cms that I used to make the others. Height rather than width is what is needed with a good compost heap and my others didn’t go high enough to to any real good.

Once I’ve caught up with all of this, I can turn my attention to clearing out the land where I’m going to put the sunken water tank. I had a look around there this morning too and discovered my trenching spade that I have left outside for I don’t know how many years. I’d completely forgotten about that.

-1

Wednesday 8th April 2015 – GUESS WHO HAS BEEN A BUSY BOY THEN?

Yes, I’ve accomplished a lot today. It’s really been keeping me out of mischief.

I was up early too for a change. When the alarm went off, I was eating my breakfast. I must have been keen.

First job was to varnish the floor and the stairs with the third coat of varnish. I gave it a good wallop and it was all over by 10:30. All it needed to do was to dry and set thoroughly – that’s usually about 48 hours. And then I can fit the skirting.

While that was drying, I went outside and had a look around at what jobs that I can be doing. First job was to start on the compost bin. But I didn’t last long on that as I remembered something else quite important to do.

And doesn’t Caliburn look nice with his new clean wheels?

Yes, I needed to change his winter tyres and fit the summer tyres. Of course, I have two sets of wheels so I really just change the wheels. And because they have been outside for 4 months, they were pretty grubby and so I gave them a really good clean and polish.

One or two of them have come up really well too, but I’m thinking that I might give all of the wheels a good clean, scrub and coat of paint over the summer. I’ll add that to the thousand other jobs.

Another job that I wanted to do was to fix the guttering on the house. This involved assembling the ladder now that I’ve recovered both the parts, but on my way up to the scaffolding I noticed that I hadn’t painted part of the fascia board where I couldn’t reach off the scaffolding. This meant that I had to reposition the ladder, and then I could deal with that.

While I was waiting for that to dry, I started to cut the lengths of wood that I needed to start to make the compost bin (which was where I started) but in a search for something or other, I started to tidy up the downhill lean-to. And I made some progress too, much to my surprise.

After lunch, I put the second coat on the fascia board and then started to reassemble the guttering.

I’ve repositioned it slightly because in the past, it drained down to the roof of the verandah and into the water tanks there. Now, I’m having drop onto the roof of the lean-to at the other side, because it’s there that i’ll be digging the hole for the subterranean water tank.

It took a while to do that because I had to work out the levels and cut a few lengths to size. I did as much as I could (I need to check it in the rain and make sure that it works like it should before I glue it together) but when I went to move the ladder round to the side of the house to fix the downpipe, I noticed that it was already 19:20

Doesn’t time fly quickly when you are enjoying yourelf? That was enough for me and I called it a day. I’d earned my rest.

-1

Tuesday 7th April 2015 – THE WIND FINALLY DROPPED THIS EVENING.

That made quite a change as we’ve had non-stop wind for the last three days or so.

All kinds of records have been broken too with the wind. For example, of all the wind energy created by the big AIR 403 wibd turbine since I reset the meter in December, 40% of it came today. And with the small wind turbine, today has doubled the previous record of wind generated.

It really was impressive but now it’s blown out and we are all quiet.

This morning, I took decisive action and ripped out all of the masking and protection on the stairs and on the landing downstairs. I gave the stairs and landing a thorough clean, sanded all of the imperfections, vacuumed it thoroughly and then gave it all a really good coat of varnish.

That took about an hour and a half in total, and so for the rest of the morning I went outside. First job was to sort out a huge pile of old cardboard that I had put on one side when I tidied the barn out the other day.

With all of that, I went down to the raised beds in the garden where I grow my crops of vegetables. Nothing is going to be done there this year, so I’ve covered over all of the beds with cardboard. I did 6 this morning, and then this afternoon I dismantled the bean frames and did the rest.

I’ve only weeded two of them, the rest can take their chance. BUt it’s not going to be a problem for as soon as it rains and the cardboard becomes waterlogged, it’ll fold down flat onto the soil in the raised beds, suffocate the weeds and then slowly disintegrate into the soil over the period of the coming year.

Immediately after lunch, I put the second coat of varnish on, and I’ll do the third coat first thing in the morning.

For tea tonight I made a mega-mushroom and potato curry. Mushrooms were cheap at the weekend and I had some potatoes left over from winter.

And there was so much surplus energy today that the water in the dump load (the home-made 12-volt immersion heater) went off the scale – ie over 70°C. I had some lovely hot wahing-up water this evening.

-1

Monday 6th April 2015 – I SMELL ALL OF COCONUT RIGHT NOW

Temperature in the verandah, 36°C – temperature in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load for the excess solar energy – 43°C. This can only mean one thing – a nice shower in the corner of the verandah specially set aside for the purpose.

The shower might only be a bucket and a jug to pour the water over me, but it’s a shower all the same and with the rainwater that I use (remember that there is no running water here) and the electricity that the sun generates for me, it’s all my own work.

There is as you know, a shower cubicle outside but it’ll be a couple of weeks before the water in the black plastic container on its roof has water hot enough to shower properly in that.

I knew that it would be like that today though. Last night it was cold, but one of these “warm colds”, with a steady breeze and totally clear sky. Not a cloud in the sky, millions of stars and a huge moon. And today, not a cloud in the sky either. I certainly made up today for the 9 consecutive days of miserable weather that we have just had.

As for the wind, we’ve had a steady wind all day. And to prove a point that I make regularly and which no-one else believes, this is another day in which the small 90-watt wind turbine outperformed the 400-watt wind turbine. In fact, the small wind turbine today produced more that twice as much energy as the larger one has produced since I reset the counter back in December last year – 4 months ago.

The reason for this is simple. They both have electrical generators in them, as you might expect. And in common with all electrical generators, they have magnets in them. And the bigger the generator, the bigger the magnet, so a more powerful wind speed is needed to overcome the resistance and start up the machine. That’s why the smaller wind turbine will start up and generate electricity in a much lower wind speed.

Apart from that, I’ve done nothing else except enjoy the last day of my Easter break. I’m back at work tomorrow.

-5

Sunday 5th April 2015 – I HAD A LOVELY …

… afternoon out today.

My prayers of yesterday were answered and we had the first sunny day for I don’t know how long. And this afternoon I set off all the way across the Département of the Puy-de-Dome for Cisternes-la-Foret, where Pionsat’s 2nd XI were playing.

A gorgeous drive it was too, and the ground is in a really nice setting. But much to my surprise there was just me and two other people in attendance. It seems that Pionsat has once more had difficulty in raising a team (and I’ve no idea why for the 1st XI doesn’t have a game this week) and have forfeited the match.

It’s not the first time that they’ve played this trick on me either and if the truth were to be known, I’m just a little annoyed about having been dragged halfway across Central France for no good purpose. They do have my telephone number, and a little message would not have gone amiss.

Still, as I said, it was a nice drive out.

It also gave me a good excuse to have a really good wash, a shave and some clean clothes (because I’m becoming a little slovenly in things like this just now). But if the weather does keep up like this for the next couple of days, I’ll be back in the shower again. And I can’t say that it’s before time either.

So tomorrow is my last day of rest and then Tuesday it’s back to work. Cleaning, sanding and varnishing the stairs is what I have in mind for that on Tuesday if the weather holds, and I sincerely hope that it does because I want to pull up all of the paper and cardboard that is covering the stairs right now, and have this place looking more like home.

-1

Saturday 4th April 2014 – THAT’S MUCH MORE LIKE IT!

Indeed it is. I turned over this morning to look at the clock and … 09:00. “Badger this for a game of cowboys!” I told myself and curled back up underneath the quilt.

10:30 was when I finally heaved myself out of my stinking pit, and quite tight too. Nothing wrong with a good long lie-in, especially as I’m on a nice Spring break for Easter. No danger of me working on a Bank Holiday weekend!

Having said that however, it’s not all beer and skittles. Saturday isn’t officially a Bank Holiday and so seeing as I do have some work to do tht didn’t involve me leaving the settee, then after breakfast I set to work.

By the time the battery went flat in the laptop (this 5-hour battery life in my little Acer Aspire notebook is really the business) I’d written 5 weeks’ worth of radio programmes and a 1500-word text for the main topic on our Radio Anglais programmes.

Just a little finishing off and then I can start the rock music programmes, and that will be the radio organised. 5 weeks of programmes too – that takes us right up almost to the end of June. I need to forge ahead because I don’t know what the future might hold for me as yet. I briefly mentioned a while ago that there were a couple of things simmering away.

And that’s it. I’ve not set foot outside except to take the stats, and ask me if I care. The weather is miserable – it’s been 8 days since I’ve seen the sun and that’s quite depressing.

If I didn’t have so much to do around here, I’d have upped sticks and cleared off to the sunshine ages ago. Suffering from Cabin Fever in January is nothing new, but in early April it’s unthinkable.

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Friday 3rd April 2014 – I HAD A LOVELY …

… day today. A nice day off for Good Friday and I did almost exactly – NOTHING.

Mind you, I did get off to a bad start. Wide awake and up and about – and it wasn’t even 08:00 either. What a way to start a Bank Holiday.

I’d been on my travels too during the night. I’d been out with Terry towing a trailer that was in fact a tanker with a load of some liquid or other. We’d finished the job and the tank had been removed, well on time but we couldn’t take the trailer back as it needed to be cleaned. I nipped off to fetch Caliburn and ended up walking through this old Medieval town with Liz and Terry. We walked past my youngest siser’s house and there she was, having trouble with an infestation of crabs in her garden pond.

At this stage Liz and Terry transformed themselves into my elder sister and her husband and while they were chatting to my youngest sister, I went into a pub in the town centre, where I bumped into my brother. Even though I was walking through the town drinking from a pint of beer, I grabbed a quick half in this pub. And then dashed out where I bumped into my elder sister and her husband again.

Yes – my family appearing in my nocturnal ramblings. This is a first. I wonder what on earth was going on here.

So spending most of the day on my website where I’m at North-West River. That’s the farthest north in Labrador that it is possible to reach by the highway network and I was there in late September 2014.

I’ve been writing the story of Mina Hubbard, a woman whose husband was lost in the interior of Labrador, due mainly to his own stubbornness and stupidity. She was determined to complete his exploration and succeeded in becoming the first woman of European descent to make it overland to Ungava Bay.

I nipped out to St Eloy this evening to do my shopping. The big shops there don’t close until 19:30 so it means that I do have time to go there on Friday evenings even if I don’t knock off work until 18:00

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EPIC HALL

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