Wednesday 20th August 2014 – PHEW!

Yes, I’m exhausted. And I’ve only been tidying up the wiring outside underneath the fascia board.

That was meant to be a five-minute task but I’m already on the 3rd day and it’s far from finished. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong.

I started off by disconnecting the wind turbine on the fence – the one that I’ve been using as a test bed. I wanted the timer off it. I then connected two wires to it, and that was where the easy bit ended.

When I dud the roof, I ran some 6mm wire down some conduit from outside under the eaves with theaim of wiring up the wind turbine – the one on the roof – to it, but it never gave any charge and so I ran an outside wire up to the turbine. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I had another go at wiring up this 6mm wire to see where the fault was.

This is where I discovered that the charge controller is built for a maximum of 4mm wire. After hours of fiddling around I had to splice some 2.5mm wire into the 6mm wire to make the good connection. When I wired it all up to the batteries and installed a fuse, I had a bright blue flash right across the living room.

Hmmm. A dead short. THat’s why the wire’s not working.

Back on the scaffolding, I cut down the wire so that there was no excess outside, and then attached a couple of new lengths to the older lengths in order to pull them through. Anyway, that promptly stuck and it took about an hour to pull it all back out.

Next, I tried a cable puller and that became irrevocably stuck and nothing that I could do would shift it. After much binding in the marsh, there was nothing for it but to unpack the corner of the attic where all of the wiring comes through (it’s not sealed off yet) and unstick it from the inside under the eaves. And that took hours and now the attic is on an even worse mess

But I didn’t ‘arf have a surprise when I opened it all. I don’t mean the cable puller – that came out in seconds, but there was a huge pile of wire inside there.

It seems that the wire from the outside is just coiled up behind the plasterboard and isn’t going into the conduit to go downstairs. Furthermore, the two wires that are coming up from downstairs is also coiled up behind the plasterboard and hasn’t been pssed through the conduit to the outside.

I’ve no idea what I must have been thinking when I was doing this wiring back in 2009, but at least it explains why the wind turbine wire wasn’t doing anything back in those days.

It also explains the blue flash downstairs too – that’s because the wires coming upstairs had been taped together so that they wouldn’t separate, and the copper in one wire is touching the copper in the other.

The wire that came through from the outside, I pulled it out, and the one that came from downstairs, I pushed that outside for the wind turbine and at last I’ll have a circuit.

If I had stopped there, it wouldn’t have been quite so bad, but seeing as I’m putting another bank of solar panels on the wall outside and they need a pair of wires, and I had the xall dismantled and a onduit passing through to the outside, I decided to pass the wires through the conduit and inside the house so that they aren’t visible fr – om the outside.

So with 4 strands of 6mm cable trying to fit through a 16mm conduit, it called for some delicate manoeuvre and I’ve never had cable so firmly wedged in conduit before. It was inch-by-inch, on and off the scaffolding to feed it into place and then into the attic to pull it through from outside. And when you need 7.5 metres of cable coming through, you can see how many times I was on and off the scaffolding.

Anyway, I now have 7.5 metres of wire coiled up inside and the next intention was to thread it down the conduit – a 32mm pipe with all kinds of stuff coming up in it. I’ve started to thread the cable puller up from the bottom, but that’s stuck in the conduit for the moment.

So that’s where I’m at at 19:30 in the evening with my little 5-minute job. I’ll be in bed in a moment with no tea because I don’t feel like making any. I’ll have another go at it tomorrow.

Tuesday 19th August 2014 – WELL I’LL BE …

Yes, absolutely!

Just about to go to fetch some cable trunking out of Caliburn this afternoon when a big red Honda motorcycle pulled up just outside here. A lady descended from the rear and smiled at me, which was a surprise – not something that happens every day – and then the driver came over, shook me warmly by the hand (which was also a surprise – regular readers of this rubbish will remember that most people who come here usually shake me warmly by the throat) and said “Jean-Marc”.

Well I am actually Eric, as most of you realise, but it turns out that the motorcycle rider was called Jean-Marc.

You may remember that several weeks ago on the way back from Munich, I called off at a village called Chasselas, near Macon, a village where I had stayed with a French family in my mid-teens. And now Jean-Marc, the son of the family, had come over to repay the compliment.

Yes, it’s totally astonishing. It’s 44 years since we have seen each other. And it was totally unexpected and I wasn’t in the least prepared, with stuff all over the place here. Good job that it was sunny so that we could sit outside. If it were raining, it would have been very embarrassing.

And sunny too – that’s about three days now that we’ve had some sun and I’ve had hot water. Too late to do much about it now – Jean-Marc was telling me that the grape-harvest in Macon will be a total disaster this year.

But this place is even more of a mess than usual. There’s stuff all over the place while I’m working out what to pack to take with me. And I also forgot to charge up the video camera so I had to do that as well.

I’ve also been trying to download off an old dictaphone some soundbytes – one of a Canadian diesel locomotive and and the other about a peal of bells from a Canadian church. But for some unknown reason, the lead that I have to connect the dictaphone to the computer isn’t picking up the sound. I’ll have to look further into this.

After Jean-Marc and his girlfirend left, I still had time to go up onto the scaffolding and throw piles of stuff off the top. That seems to be the usual practice these days and I was up and down the ladder for most of the evening.

But now, I have outside lights underneath the eaves to light up where I usually fall over everything when I’m out after dark. And they work too, much to my (and everyone else’s surprise). And all of the cables are in trunking made from 32mm water pipe and it all looks quite tidy, which doesn’t ‘arf make a change around here.

And no gardening today as I promised?

No, because Rosemary telephoned me to say that she might be round on Thursday. We can pull up the onions and everything else then.

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Monday 18th August 2014 – I’VE BEEN DIGGING UP …

… the shallots today. And there was quite an amount of those too – easily the best crop of shallots that I’ve ever had. I’ve washed them and they are draining off overnight, and tomorrow I’ll have to hang them up to dry off.

But I really am impressed with the crop. It’s superb.

I’ve also dug over the three potato beds again. Loads more spud too – it’s amazing how many were left behind yesterday but that’s something that always happens with potatoes. No matter how many times you dig over the beds, there’s always some potatoes left behind to grow again.

The beds have now been hoed and raked over and are now covered with black plastic to keep the weeds off. I can therefore forget about them for several months until the winter.

This morning though I booked my train and hotel. I’m leaving Riom on the usual 17:06 to Lyon Part Dieu and then the TGV – but this time as far as Lille. I’m having to stay two nights in a hotel before my flight leaves and two nights in a hotel in Lille is about the same price as one night in a hotel at the airport.

And not only that, there’s no food or anything at the airport except to be held to ransom in the hotel’s restaurant (and they can’t cook anything for me anyway) whereas in Lille there’s much more going on and much more choice.

Everything is now charged up as well – the North American phone, the North American SatNav, the spare batteries for the dictaphone, all that kind of thing.

Tomorrow, I’ll have to start packing. I mustn’t forget the car charger for the laptop and a few other bits and pieces but I’m certain that I’ll forget something before I leave. Most people make a list and then pack according to the list. I simply pack, and then make a list of whatever I have forgotten.

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Sunday 17th August 2014 – OHHH LOOK AT THAT!

Yes, look at that indeed.

Roselary came around this afternoon and so we decided to pull up the new potatoes. In fact we ended up pulling up all of them as the lates seemed to be ready too, and this is what we ended up with after about 4 hours of uprooting.

There’s about 20 litres of potatoes there and and that’s a lot of potatoes, much more than I was expecting and much more than I usually have. Clearly the wet summer is having something to do with this.

Rosemary stayed chatting until almost 20:00 and that made a pleasant evening, even if it was a little cool.

But not as cool as yesterday evening – the temperature dropped to an astonishing (for mid-August) low of 9.1°C, and if you think that this is bad, then Friday night’s temperature was an even lower 8.2°C. For mid-August, these figures are unbelievable. I haven’t seen anything quite like this.

This morning I finally finished this mega-backup. It’s all on a big external drive, a portable hard drive and (minus the photos) on a 64GB memory stick. That should keep me going if anything happens.

I’ve also prepared an old portable hard drive and another 64GB memory stick.They have the old films that I downloaded from archive.org and also the old-time radio programmes that I like to listen to. There are directories for the photos, the dictaphone notes and the text that I’ll be typing.

One thing that I’ll try is a 64GB SD card too. The trouble with portable hard drives is that they eat into the power supply of the laptop and, of course, with moving parts they will use a good part of the power. Solid-state is therefore the answer, hence a memory stick, and I reckon that an SD card might be even better in this respect.

We shall see.

So tomorrow, I’ll go back in the garden, churn over the beds agaon to see if we missed anoy more spudes, then hoe and rake tham and finally cover them up with black plastic to keep out the weeds.

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Saturday 16th August 2014 – I’M ON ABOUT …

… this parking again, aren’t I? It must be that time of the year again.

I just can’t believe just how selfish some people are. The Intermarché at Commentry is a busy place and there’s always pressure on the parking here – and even more when someone such as this takes up two places in an old nail like that. It’s bad enough when someone in a brand new car does it – it’s even more sad when it’s something like this.

So yes, I was in Commentry doing the shopping this late afternoon. And it was a quiet time there, apart from the stuff that I bought in Bricomarché, such as more trunking and also the cement rendering for the outside of the house.

Prior to that, I spent the morning finishing off the backups that I had been doing and sorting out the stuff for taking with me in 10 days time. I need to sort all of this out as quickly as possible.

After lunch I went over to St Maurice to pay the deposit for the stuff that I had bought the other day, and as usual I forgot to take any photos, so you’ll have to wait for a good while to see what it is.

And then, to the baths at Neris for my weekly swim. There were about half a dozen of us in there and that’s hardly surprising seeing as it was not that warm and the sides of the pool were open. But it did fill up a little later, and there were quite a few kids having a whale (well, we are talking about water) of a time. One girl was just 5 years old but was really at home in the water, leaping into the 2-metre depths and then doggy-paddling to the side to start all over again. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a kid having so much fun, and I had a good chat with the girl’s grandma.

So then off to Commentry for the shops.

And the parking.

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Friday 15th August 2014 – YEEUUCCHHH

Yes, it had been another one of those evenings last night. Late last night it started to pour down in spades and at about 06:00 it was so loud that it woke me up. It was unbelievable. Every day I seem to be saying that I’ve never seen anything like it, and every day I’m right because it’s just getting worse and worse.
,
It poured down for most of the morning and I did the usual work on the web site. I ended up building a shop as well – I’m slowly changing all of the links on my Canada pages from Amazon.co.uk to Amazon.ca and there’s a shop facility on there.

I need to maximise the income potential on my web pages.

After lunch, I waited until the rain subsided and then went up on the scaffolding to carry on working on the electrics. And I would make much more progress if I could find all of the stuff that I needed without having to spend hours hunting it down, and I knew where all of my tools were. It seems that this tidying up that I did throughout the winter isn’t working out as planned.

I didn’t do much while I as up there either. Despite having planned it all the other day, I’ve changed it a couple of times already this afternoon while I was up there, and it will be changed again before I’ve finished.

Not only that, I was suffering from a bad attack of dropsy. I was dropping everything while I was up on the scaffolding and I had to keep on going down to fetch it – I’ve forgotten how many times I was up and down the ladder. In the end, all that remained to fall off the scaffolding was me and so I called it a day. It’s not the place to be, the scaffolding, when you are having concentration issues.

It was however 19:50 when I knocked off – it shows you haw engrossed I was in what I was doing. And it’s a good job I stopped when I did as about 15 minutes later the heavens opened again.

So let’s see how I can get on on Monday.

– in that I was

Thursday 14th August 2014 – I’VE BEEN SPENDING …

… my money again today.

I went out this morning to go to visit someone who was finishing off the work on his house as there were some bits and pieces up for sale. One of the items on sale was a solid, proper Indespension Plant Trailer – 4-wheeled close-coupled low-loader with built-in ramps, 3 metres long and built to carry a tank. It has low loader sides but they can be raised by boards so that the trailer can carry sand and gravel too and it isn’t half an impressive beast, especially when you consider that it will carry all of my scaffolding too as well as the Kubota tractor and whatever else is lying around here.

But not only that – it was what was on the trailer that caught my eye. I had a goot poke around at that and although it’s old, it was in good condition, not leaking and not smoking, and the price for the trailer and the load would have been what I would have had to pay for one of the brand new trailers that I had been looking at if I had to go to the UK to pick it up. Consequently, I bit the bullet and that was that.

I’ve got to go back with some money and then I can take a photo of my new toy and you can see what it is that I bought. UNtil then, I’ll leave you all in suspense.

Back here I put the second coat onto the fascia panel and the beams of the roof on the front of the house (at least, as far as I could reach). Then I went to lunch.

While I was eating my butty I was interrupted by a visit from a couple of people from the Mairie. They were newly-elected councillors familiarising themselves with the area, and they had a little moan about one or two things here.

And that was my clue. I explained firstly that the untidy and unkempt land isn’t mine but is actually the commune’s land. And why I can’t move my stuff around any better is that the commune hasn’t maintained the land for years so I can’t move stuff past it. ANd so if the commune wants me to do something, they need to do something first.

Furthermore, I had applied to the commune to buy the land. Readers with long memories will remember that I deposited my application on 8th May … errr … 2009 – over 5 years ago. And the commune has taken no action about my demand.

This led to an animated discussion that went on for an hour or two, and finally they saw my point. They promised that they would bring up the matter of my application at the next meeting of the council.

We shall see.

After they went, I spent a pleasant hour or so sanding down the facade of the house where I’d drilled through for the air vents and then filled it. That’s comparatively smooth now and almost ready to paint, but a sad discovery was that the crepi had dried out and so was no use at all. I need to buy some more now before I can paint the facade.

I then spent a while sorting out all of the electrical fittings and making a bracket to mount the outside light that I want to fit. And by the time I had everything ready, it was time to knock off.

It was a dull day today with just a couple of odd sunny spells – at least until about 22:30 when we had today’s torrential downpour. This summer is really getting on my nerves now.

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Wednesday 13th August 2014 – WHAT A DISASTROUS DAY

Wasn’t it just?

I hadn’t gone to sleep by the time dawn broke, and I remember switching off the alarms before going to sleep – that was at 07:30. But the reason for this was the worst rainstorm yet for the summer. Even with all of the windows closed, it was deafening on the roof and I really haven’t heard anything quite like that which was falling through the night. It really was most uncomfortable and depressing.

It was 11:50 when I awoke – that was the morning gone of course – and after breakfast (at midday!) I carried on with the website – no point in going outside.

By about 15:00 the rain stopped and so I went outside and started work. First job was to put the expanding foam under the eaves of the house. I did as far as I could reach and then had to clean out all of the insertion pipes with acetone so that I can use them again. But this stuff is interesting – “there’s enough expanding foam in the can to fill 85 litres” – yes, and enough propellant in the can to get about half of it out.

Next job was to dismantle to guttering, and the far end didn’t need much help from me to be dismantled, leaving me with the thorny question of how I’m going to refit the far end later, where I can’t actually reach it.

Once the guttering was off, I covered all of the wood that I could reach with a thick layer of LIDL’s famous wood preservative, and that took me up to knocking-off time.

Tomorrow I’ll do the second coat of wood treatment and then make a start on tidying up the wiring. Once that’s done, I’ll refit the guttering. I’ve a feeling that we’ll be going to need it.

Tuesday 12th August 2014 – YET ANOTHER TOW JOB

This time, we used the A frame.

For a change, I was up early and went down to Pionsat to pick up Simon. Then we set off for Riom. I dunno if anyone else has had issues at the Ford garage there but they aren’t half miserable. They weren’t able to fix Simon’s Transit and instead of being embarrassed about it, I found them to be nothing but surly and uncooperative. I struck them off my list of local garages ages ago, and I reckon that Simon has done now.

It took ages for me to work out how to use the A frame – it’s been something like 15 years since I last used it, and of course Simon’s Transit is a big, heavy vehicle – right on the legal limit of 2.5 tonnes on the A frame.

Anyway, eventually we sorted it out and off we set for Montlucon. I would have been much happier with the trailer or even the towing dolly but Simon’s van is far to heavy for both of them and well over the gross weight for Caliburn.

It was quite an interesting drive to Montlucon. It’s all up mountain and down gorge and along canyon, not like anywhere normal, and of course Caliburn only has a small engine so we didn’t get up to anything faster than 70kph, and then not very often at all.

With the weight, going up the steep hill was a struggle but coming downhill was even more exciting, with Simon’s Transit threatening to overrun Caliburn in places.

Not only that, it’s a busy main road and we had to pull over every couple of miles to let everyone past. So it took hours to do the journey.

But anyway, we made it safely (after a fashion) to Montlucon, to find that Barratts, the Ford main agent, was closed for lunch. Luckily, they had left the gate open to the yrd so we could get in there and drop off the van. I had to reverse the whole train right across the carpark so as to put Simon’s van into a parking space, and much to my surprise, it went straight in. That was astonishing, considering that with the A frame pivoting in all directions and no driver in Simon’s van of course, it usually goes off anywhere excpet where you need it to go when you are reversing it all.

Simon bought lunch, for which I was grateful, and then we went back to the garage to negotiate. I know the service manager there and we soon sorted things out, and then we went back to Pionsat.

Simon made a coffee and then I came home and made tea – another aubergine and kidney-bean whatsit.

I’m glad that it all went okay – I was having all kinds of ideas running aeound my head about the million and one ways that this could all go pear-shaped. Still, it’s all in a day’s work, isn’t it?

Monday 11th August 2014 – AS I PROMISED …

… I spent the day carrying on with the back-up. I would love to tell you that it’s finished, but no such luck, and not for the least of the reasons that the photo partition ran out of space.

Not only that, there are two other backups on the external hard drive too, one from a laptop of ages ago and the other is the continually-updated SD card back-up, and my next trick is to merge the two previous backups and then merge them in with the current one.

That won’t be easy as I need to keep the most up-to-date version of any file, and I bet that I’ll get it wrong.

So as far as I got, that took until 02:00 and then I crawled off to bed. But I did have an interruption. At about 16:OO Simon came round. That was “long time no see”. Anyway, it seems that his van broke down a week or so in Riom and was taken to a garage (the same one to which I took Caliburn in 2011) and they have been unable to fix it. The van needs to be taken – as a non-runner – to Montlucon. Could I help?

The van is too heavy for the trailer and also the towing dolly, but I do have something else and if I can find it in the desperate pile of rubbish that is the barn, I’ll go round and help him out tomorrow.

Sunday 10th August 2014 – AS FOR MY MAGNUM OPUS …

… I finished it yesterday. All 37,500 bytes of it. That’s 6,627 words and that makes it the 5th longest article that I’ve written for Radio Anglais in the four years that we’ve been going. And as I said yesterday, I’m now well in front of where I want to be and if I add in a recap about winter driving, what I’ve done this last couple of weeks should see us through to the end of the year and maybe even beyond.

That took me through to the early afternoon, and for the rest of the day I undertook another task that took hours and it’s still not finished yet.

I’m off on my travels in a couple of weeks time and as is my wont, I backed up the entire contents of the hard drive of the laptop, seeing as how I’m taking the laptop with me. Losing the laptop will not be the end of the world, but losing the data will be.

I remember doing it last year and it didn’t take all that long, but this year it’s taken an age so far and it’s still far from finished. In fact, it took me hours to understand why that might be, and it’s really ohh so simple. Each year that I’ve been to North America I’ve either had a new laptop or else there have been a couple of voyages very close together. This year however, it’s been 12 months since I last went and I’ve been up to an enormous amount of stuff in that period.

And then when you consider that last year, the laptop was brand new and there was hardly anything on it – in fact I remember leaving here without several of the important programs that I use regularly being loaded onto the machine and having to download one or two at the airport. I didn’t even have Paintshop Pro installed (and how that upset my routine).

This year of course there’s tons more stuff and it all needs to be downloaded not once but twice (belt and braces) and then sorted.

So that was the sum total of my day. I went out of the house twice – to fetch water for morning coffee and to take the stats at night, and I even forgot to cook my pizza for tea.

And I’ll have to carry on tomorrow too because I can’t leave this job half-completed.

Saturday 9th August 2014 – SOMETIMES …

… I have a bit of verbal constipation and I can’t find the inspiration to write very much (usually when it’s most important) when I’m trying to do something. On other days, quite the reverse happens and I can’t somehow manage to stop writing.

This morning was one of the latter days and between 09:15 and 12:30 I churned out a grand total of 4679 words on neighbouhood issues – and there’s still plenty to go at. This is is going to be another one of these mega-opuses I think, and it will put me well in front of where I need to be for when I return from Canada, which is just as well.

Once I’d done that, and had lunch, I braved the rain showers to go a-swimming at Neris-les-Bains. Once again, there weren’t too many people in the pool. And once again, they had opened up the sides of the pool. I’ve no idea why they do that. It’s not as if it’s summer.

It was raining as I left the swimming baths, and the rain increased in volume as I drove to the shops at Commentry. LIDL was having a sale of these elasticated ankle and elbow protectors and so I bought two of the former to deal with the issues of my cement burns, which still aren’t healing.

On the way back home, I was astonished to see this. My house is on top of that mountain and there’s a huge hanging cloud right over the top of it.

This is early evening in early August, remember, and a phenomenon like this is astonishing at this time of year in the evening. And back home, I found the place devastated. Bent branches and fallen leaves, and my verandah has flooded – only the second time ever that that has happened since I’ve been here.

But, as I said, this summer is rapidly turning into a disaster. I’ve never ever known a year like it.

Friday 8th August 2014 – WOW!

What a storm!

It was totally stonishing. About 8mm of rain fell in about 30 minutes round about 22:30. It’s a long time since I’ve seen anything quite like it. I even had to close the roof windows as it was pouring in on me where I was sitting, and that’s not supposed to happen.

Mind you, it had been brewing all day. When the boulangère came by this morning, she mentioned that there might be a storm a little later. And it wasn’t long after that that we had the fist lightning flashes. They kept it up from about 12:00 until about 15:30 so I was pretty reluctant to go up on the scaffolding during that period, otherwise it would have been me frying tonight. That’s the one disadvantage of having metal planks.

When i considered it safe to do so, I went up there. Well, not quite – I had to round up all of the tools and fittings that I needed for the job. And that took several attempts to make sure that i had everything up there that I wanted. I drilled the hole, a 16mm hole, with the Hitachi battery-powered SDS drill and that went into the stone like a knife through butter. It’s a shame that the batteries are becoming tired in it now, because it really is one of the most useful tools that I have around here. I must sort out some new batteries for it.

Fitting my home-made eye wall anchor was straightforward – with a little persuasion from a hammer it went into the hole that I had drilled, but tightening it up was something else. With a little too much force, I reckon, I sheared off the wedge that splits the interior of the anchor. Then of course I couldn’t extract the broken one, and so I had to drill another hole and start again. This time I didn’t use quite so much force when tightening it, so I managed not to break it.

Fitting the turnbuckle was straightforward, but then actually fastening the guy wire was almost impossible as the length of the turnbuckle put it too far away from the scaffolding for me to reach it properly. I was lucky that the wire was quite long, as I was able to put a loop in the far end, pass the wire around the hook on the turnbuckle and then around a pivot (the framework upon which the wind turbine is mounted) and with a rope in the loop that I made, pull it back towards me again.

With it securely tied around the scaffolding, I could perform a major feat of gymnastics, balanced right on the edge of the scaffolding on the toes of one foot, and reach right out to the wire to fasten the wire rope ties (three of them) to hold the wire together.

Then dismantling the temporary fittings that I had made, I could tighten up the turnbuckle. And to my surprise, it pulled the wind turbine perfectly vertical instead of leaning over about 5° to the north.

All of this took me until about 18:20 and so for the remaining 40 minutes I did some (but not much) weeding in the vegetable plots. And as I knocked off, it started to rain. “Perfect timing!” I said to myself. And then we got the lot a few hours later.

i’m glad that I’ve fastened the wind turbine with a second guy wire. With just one, it was pulling it out of the vertical and of course, one isn’t very secure. Ideally it needs four and while I can think of a way to do the third one (and i might even do it some day) the fourth will be difficult. Nevertheless, progress has been made.

On Monday, I’ll start to attack all of the rest of the jobs that need to be done while I’m up there. Let’s see how long it takes me to finish them.

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Thursday 7th August 2014 – FIAT LUX

And we aren’t talking about Italian cars and washing powder either.

This morning, I was wide awake early, a good while before the alarm, but there was a reason for that. It was absolutely teeming down with rain. So much so that I couldn’t go back to sleep and so I was up pretty quickly for breakfast.

After breakfast I was on the website for a good few hours. The main part of my trip around the Saguenay is finished but there’s a lot of rewriting and editing to do and that’s probably going to take as long as writing it.

By 12:00 I would normally have gone outside to work but it was totally pointless so I rearranged my little office space here. Things are so much better now I’m here in my little corner on the new chair that I bought a year ago. That’s why I’ve moved all of the computer stuff over here. And Rosemary rang up too for a chat, which was nice.

After lunch, it was still teeming down and so I started on emptying out the wardrobe space in the bedroom ready to paint the walls of it. I chucked the stuff downstairs ready to file it away, but now it’s all heaped up at the bottom of the stairs, even worse than it was before.

That’s because I was sidetracked after having done about half of it.

There’s the plan to run some cable through the side of the wardrobe so that there will be some power and light there. That was what started me off on my little journey off the beaten track.

Once that was done and I had the wiring equipment out, I wired up the light in the cupboard at the back of the stairs. Finally, I fitted the light on the landing on the first floor. Final task was to run a negative wire from across from the other wall at the head of the stairs.

I fitted a 12-volt LED light in each of the sockets and, much to my surprise, it all worked perfectly, as you can see.

Now I have light in the cupboard at the back of the stairs, and there’s also a light on the landing at the top of the stairs. It’s all ever so impressive.

And what was even more impressive was that the sun actually came out later in the afternoon but seeing as I was well on the way to finishing the wiring, I carried on regardless.

It was even finished by 19:20 which was a surprise too.

If the weather is fine tomorrow, I’ll be back on the scaffolding. Otherwise I’l be carrying on with the bedroom.

-2

Wednesday 6th August 2014 – I’VE SPENT ALL …

… afternoon looking for my special wall anchors. I’ve no idea where they might be and I’ve run out of places to look.

These are special wall anchors because they don’t have a standard bolt or a piece of threaded rod in them, but a bolt with an eye on the end and they are designed for fastening ropes and that kind of thing.

I’m not even sure that I have any, but I did at one time have one because it’s in the wall with one of the guy wires for the wind turbine fastened to it. However, I can’t possible believe that I only ever bought one of them. I must have at least another four lurking around somewhere. And I need one to use for the second guy wire of the wind turbine – one of the reasons why I’ve put up the scaffolding.

Mind you, in my quest for the wall anchors with eyes, I’ve found tons of stuff that I had lost (like a load of red wire terminals), stuff that I’ve spent ages looking for in the recent past (like one of the missing black jump leads), and stuff that I had forgotten that I had, like a toolbox full of the tools out of the Passat. And many more besides.

I’ve been tidying up too, and how, and repaired some shelves that I had built years and were about to collapse (it’s amazing how much my technique has improved). I’ve also ended u tidying all of the keeklamp fittings and sorted them out into sizes. I’ve also sorted out all of the ancillary fittings inclusing the turnbuckles and while most of them were size M12, I found an old one that was an M10.

And that gave me an idea.

I found a M10 wall anchor and took out the threaded rod, leving me with just the shaft. Then I dismantled the M10 turnbuckle and tried to fit the end with the right-hand thread into the empty shaft of the wall anchor. And much to my surprise, not only is it the same thread, it actually is just about long enough to reach down for the splitter.

So now, about 15 minutes to knocking-off, I have my special Wall anchor. It’s not an eye but a hook which is not as good as an eye, but it’s the best that I can do and it might even work. I can fit that tomorrow and that will be the first job done, I hope.

Mind you, I’m impressed about all of the tidying up. I’ve not seen that part of the barn looking quite like this before.

-3

EPIC HALL

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