Tuesday 24th August 2010 – Just look at the size of this!

Never mind the Winter of our Discount Tents, this is the Summer of the Monster Courgettes. This one has burst into life from being a cigar-shaped nonentity, is just a few days. Now it’s 44cms. I’ve got a luvverly bunch of coconuts indeed.

It’s so big that I only cooked half of it tonight, and with the spinach (out of the garden), carrots (ditto), beans (ditto) and chili (ditto) together with sone onions, lentils and garlic I made a huge mega-curry and there is enough to last for three days.

As well as the other half-courgette of course, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with that.

The pan was full to overflowing but as most of the courgette is nothing but water it soon simmers down to a reasonably size. And it was absolutely delicious.

Mind you, I’ll be eating courgettes until they come out of my ears. It’s the one thing that seems to do well here.

It was raining when I woke up and so after I let Terry and Simon into Lieneke’s house I carried on here – but not outside. The composting toilet will have to wait.

What I did instead was to carry on working in the bedroom – the first time for about three months I reckon. And I now have the back wall finished as well as one of the sides of the fitted wardrobe that I’m building. That’s what is going down the far side just there.

I can’t do the other side of the wardrobe as it’s out of there that the electric wiring is coming and I need to work out how I’m going to fit it. But it’s nice to see progress all the same.

The weather brightened up this afternoon and so I reckoned on a shower, but the temperature has plummeted. 19°C it was outside, and the water temp was only 31°C. But not to worry – I tipped a kettle-full of boiling water into the solar tank. That took the temperature up to … errr ….45°C so a half-kettle of cold water took it back down to 42°C and that was my shower sorted. Delicious! Mind you, won’t have to boil up water much longer as Simon gave me the boiler out of his van. It’s only 2.5 litres by the way but it will go nicely in the garage running off the excess charge over there. I’ve made a note of the maker and I’m going to see if they can do me a 50-litre one. That would be progress.

But the temperature is still falling, and with a clear sky, full moon and no clouds at all, it seems that the weather has turned (already!) and autumn is just around the corner. That’s depressing.

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Monday 23rd August 2010 – It seems that …

… my inolvement in Lieneke’s roof has come to an end.

All that remains to be done is the plasterboarding, followed by the pointing up of the end wall, and then the tidying up. No labouring of any description is required and so after opening up the house for Terry and Simon I was paid off (well, not actually paid off because I’m not actually being paid). And I am not displeased by this either, as you can imagine.

First thing that I did was to stack all of the wood. There are tonnes of new wood lying around here that I haven’t managed to put away over the last few months and all of that is now neatly stacked and I know how much of it that I have. That took all of the morning.

After lunch I was in the barn, finishing the tidying up of the workbench, fitted the new vice that I bought in July last year, and did some more sorting-out of stuff. I can actually move around now inside the barn and that is progress. And the stuff that I have rediscovered ….

Tomorrow I’m going to make a start on the composting toilet and get that fitted. That involves making a box to put the bin in, and building a couple of walls. So all of these demi-chevrons and cheap tongue-and-grooving will start to disappear.

High time I organised the hygene around here.

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Sunday 22nd August 2010 – You’ve no idea …

… how long I was standing on the birdwatching point at the back of St Gervaisd’Auvergne, watching this storm rolling across the ridge in the distance – the one that I live just a couple of miles behind.

Nor how many photos that I took either. What I was trying to do was to take a photo of a flash of lightning, and for a while there was plenty of that but I just wasn’t quick enough. And after a while the storm drifted off the the north-east as the wind swung round from the south.

But the storm was impressive from up there and you can see in the pic the sheets of rain that were falling down

I’d been round to Terry and Liz’s to discuss business and the like. We have a lot to organise – including trying to record SEVEN radio programmes at our next recording session. It seems that my trip to Canada (have I mentioned this yet?), if it comes off, clashes with Liz and Terry going back to the UK for a week and so we will have our work cut out.

But this morning (or what was left of it) and the early part of the afternoon I carried on with the tidying up in the barn. I’ve found tons of stuff I had forgotten all about and which is now all put in boxes, and I’ve cleaned up half my workbench. I can now get into the drawer where the power tools are, and that is real progress.

Once Lieneke’s roof is finished off (and I’ve been saying that for a while now) I can do some more and have the place looking just a little more shipshape. It’s about time, too!

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Saturday 21st August 2010 – Here’s an interesting photo.

The time is 17:47, the air temperature outside underneath the solar shower is 31°C, and the water in the solar heating tank, all 20 or so litres of it, is 44°C.

Today has been a right scorcher right enough and I almost scalded myself when I had a shower. Believe me, 44°C is really hot and I am ever so impressed that I have managed to heat to this extent 20 litres of water in a black plastic container with an old caravan window over the top

But that’s not all either. The automatic water heater ran for several hours and I had 44.5°C in that. And that’s 50 litres of water in an open bucket with a 12-volt heater element floating on top, heated by surplus energy from the solar panels that would otherwise be dumped. Just imagine what the temperature would have been if it had been 30 litres of water in a sealed and insulated container.

That’s going to be my next trick – making an immersion heater, and I have a 30-litre container all lined up for use. All I need now is the time.

I reckon that the water heating, in summer anyway, is making great strides, and I have plans for the winter too. They involve some of that flexible copper tubing would round the chimney of my wood-burning stove. I also have 3 solar panels and a 400-watt wind turbine in the barn and I don’t use the power from there all that much – just the lighting in the barn, the washing machine and charging up the power tools. So if I made a portable immersion heater then in winter I could take it to the barn and rig up an automatic water heating system over there. I reckon that the batteries in the barn were fully-charged on an average of one day in two throughout last winter. Probably not by much, but nevertheless it will be worth seeing what happens over there and what results I would get.

While we are on the subject, I bumped into Simon at LIDL today. He had a 12-volt water tank in his van and he took it out a while ago. He’s offered it to me so I’ll install that in the barn for now and see what happens.

I had an expensive day out shopping today and I blew a mammoth €35. And all on the usual stuff today – nothing exciting or extravagant. I don’t know where my money goes. And while I was in the Carrefour I had to give directions to this Dutch guy who was looking for a public convenience for his little girl. And it wasn’t until we’d been talking for a few minutes and he said “are you English? I think that your Dutch is excellent” that I realised that we had been talking in Dutch. Well – he might have been, and I was replying in Flemish – ik spreek een beetje Vlaams – but I’m really going to have a go at remembering some of the languages I used to be able to speak.

What got me thinking about languages too was that I had a visitor this evening – the guy off this building site who wanted to talk about solar panels. He studied in the Soviet Union round about the same time that I was driving buses there and I reckon that I can’t remember anything at all of all the Russian I used to speak.

I’ve also been tidying up here. I have some tie-wraps with screw-holes that will be ideal for a job that we are doing on Lieneke’s house. But can I hell find them and my place is just a total tip. It’s high time I exerted myself to make an effort – yet another job for when this perishing job on Lieneke’s house is finished

Friday 20th August 2010 – I’ve had a TV …

… on in here this evening.

Even though I keep on telling people that I don’t have one, there actually is one here in the corner. And even though I keep on telling people that I don’t watch it, I did today.

But it’s not an ordinary TV. Dave who follows this blog (are you over there or over here, mate?) will remember it because I was with him at Hexham market when I bought it.

It’s a little portable TV that works off 12-volts and what is so important about it is that it has a built-in VHS player. It cost me all of, would you believe, £15.

Now I have tons of VHS videos stretching back for almost 30 years and for the last heaven-knows how long I’ve been looking for a 12-volt player to watch them on, so this TV thingy was the answer. And when I was in Brussels back in April I brought some of my cassettes back here. Tonight I sat back and watched The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Mind you, the reason why I spent the evening doing just that was because once again I’m completely worn out. We have now formally finished the roof and it doesn’t half look impressive as you can see in this photo.

The part from the right of the roof light on the main roof, where the moss has been cleared off, has been stripped, extended and refitted – and the chimney has been re-pointed and sealed at the base.

And then the lean-to, which formerly had a flat roof, now has a pent roof – we raised that up at the back and fitted new tiles. It’s been finished off today with the edging tiles that protect the woodwork from the elements.

All in all we can be well-pleased with all of the work that we have done. I have to say that I think that our stonework is magnificent, especially when you consider that we’ve never done anything like this before!

There is some pointing that needs doing on the side wall of the house. Some of the stones are quite loose and it might be that one might fall out and drop on the roof that we have done and we don’t want that to happen. There’s some pointing that needs doing round about where the flashing is too – just above the top row of roofing tiles.

I’m not sure how we are going to do the pointing though – I’m not standing on a ladder that’s canting right over the lean’to onto the side wall of the house, so there!

As usual there was some mix left and so I added wome water and a huge bucket-full of gravel and then tipped it into my wall. You can see how much the wall has grown by just looking at this pic and comparing it with the earlier ones.

There’s still quite a bit to do yet and it’s going to need pointing when the levels have been built back up, but it’s still impressive.

And after a shower (summer is back again) I came up here and watched a video. And why not? It’s the weekend. Shopping tomorrow, relaxing on Sunday and then what may well be the final week at Lieneke’s as we get cracking on the bathroom. That shouldn’t take long and then I will be back working properly on here again.

And about time too. I have tons of work that needs doing.

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Thursday 19th August 2010 – There’s no photo this evening, people.

The truth is that I was rather carried away with things and ran out of time.

It was 19:42 in fact when I knocked off. And that was after an early start too. Terry rang me as usual only today it was to St Gervais d’Auvergne to meet up, and then off to Blot l’Eglise to rescue the scaffolding. And was it heck dismantled – the people who had hired it were still using it. So we turfed them off, dismantled it and then loaded up the vans. Back to Terry’s to unload and then it was lunchtime already. But at least moving the scaffolding in two vans was a workable option after all of the excitement with the trailers we have been using.

This afternoon I was labouring for Terry who was on the roof and for Simon who was building framework and fitting plasterboards in the bathroom. It’s a good job that I suffer from schizophrenia so that both of me can manage with tasks like this.

And we didn’t finish there until 17:30 either, and with a full bucket-load of mortar I set off to attack my wall. It took ages of course, much of which time was spent hunting suitable rocks, but half of that wall has now been built up to the level of the chevrons, which is exciting news. A nice bucket of sloppy liquid gravelly concrete went on there a treat. For that half of the wall it’s now mostly a case of infilling with whatever rocks I can find and then concreting them into position.

And that took me until 19:42, as I said. And when I’ve been working like that I don’t feel like much else. But tomorrow is another day – in fact, it’s POETS day.

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Wednesday 18th August 2010 – First pic today …

… features the roof of the lean-to. Terry went and fetched some more tiles this morning and while he was away Simon and I finished up building one of the side walls.

You’ve seen the breeze-block version of this photo a couple of days ago – that’s what it looks like inside. What we have done since then is to clad the wall with stones.

It looks quite impressive and from a distance you would never ever guess that it isn’t a real, traditional stone wall. Mind you, the pointing might give the game away. I bet that you have never seen pointing this good on a traditional stone wall.

So now that all of the tiles are on, what’s needed is to put the flashing at the top against the wall and then to do the edging tiles.

And we would have finished that today too except that this afternoon we had an almost-continual downpour. But now that we are authorised to do some work inside the house we cracked on with that instead.

What we did was to rip off all of the old plasterboard off the wall of the bathroom. Now that we have effectively redesigned the bathroom we need to rearrange the plasterboard in there and the easiest was yo do that is to start with virgin walls.

But it was cold, wet and miserable today. I was hard-pressed to point my walls with the leavings in the mixer, but it was a shame to leave it so I wasn’t going to let it all go to waste.

And tomorrow morning I have to go round to near Menat and rescue the scaffolding. The hire period is now up and there’s a customer waiting.

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Tuesday 17th August 2010 – Tomorrow the World!

Do you remember that plant that I showed you a photograph of the other day – the one that had taken over the greenhouse? It’s actually a gherkin plant and here you can see it leaving the greenhouse and setting out for Montlucon.

At the rate that it’s going, it’ll get there before any UK Council Worker or British Rail porter will, that’s for sure, and who knows where it will head for next?

I’ve been gardening again today. Or at least, this afternoon.

We had done as much as we could on the roof today. The cement on the stone cladding on the side of the house hadn’t quite set and you can’t put too many stones on a cladded wall like this in one go, and the tiles that we had ordered for the roof hadn’t arrived.

We hadn’t had instructions from Lieneke about the inside of the lean-to either, and with Terry and Simon needing to price up some more material, we decided on a half-day on the roof.

I dug up the garlic and weeded the onion bed – that was the first thing. Strangely, only half the garlic had taken and the other half was in its single clove. The latter I replanted in one of the herb troughs to see what happens. But there’s nothing like enough garlic – I’ll need to bear that in mind.

And while weeding, I noticed the onions. Nothing like enough of them either but they are there all right.

I also tidied up all of the wood at the front of the barn – the left-over new stuff at least. I need a rainy day so that I can have the time to stack it correctly inside without having to worry about working on Lieneke’s roof. In fact I have tons of jobs to do really – let’s hope that this week will see us finish the roof.

You’ll notice a couple of little changes in the lean-to too. I’ve moved a couple of sheets of iron and now the end wall is totally exposed. I’ve fitted (at the top, at least) two demi-chevrons that will guide me in forming the top of the long wall.

There was a full drum of waste in the mixer when we knocked off and it was a lovely chalky mix and so I did a pile of pointing, including that corner of the other lean-to where I lived for a while and which was getting damp.

I cleaned out the mixer with stones again. built a couple of thin walls and poured the mixture in between. I hadn’t quite sealed the wall as you can see and so some of the stuff leaked out, but it’s progress all the same.

A solar shower (the summer sort-of came back today) and that was my lot.

The automatic water-heater switched on too – and a temperature of 45.5 degrees. This is looking quite optimistic.

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Monday 16th August 2010 – We start off today …

… with a couple of photos that features the inside of the roof, by way of a change.

Don’t mind the loose lath that is on top of the wall just there – we will be moving that in due course. But the rest of it looks pretty impressive.

You’ll also notice the black damp-proof membrane up there. That’s to stop the snow drifting in underneath the tiles and falling inside, something that’s a real problem around here in winter.

You can see that we have extended the walls by mounting breeze blocks all the way up and we’ve put chevrons on there.

You will also notice the cross-beam that we fitted to the wall of the house the other day. The chevrons are supported on that. The cross-beam goes all the way across the wall of the house and it’s a good job that there were three of us to lift it as I remember it being flaming heavy.

From the outside, however, it looks even more impressive. We had quite a few tiles left over from when we did the roof of the house and so we nailed the laths to the chevrons and popped the tiles onto the roof of the lean-to.

We didn’t have quite enough as you can see if you look at the top left-hand corner, and so we’ll have to go and pick up some more tomorrow. But we aren’t ‘arf cracking on with the job and we can be proud of this.

So my day has been spent in non-stop cement mixing – load after load after load, with a slight break to go to the quarry for more sand. So I’ve mixed a ton and a half of sand since the other day. No wonder I’m exhausted.

And so when we knocked off I went round the garden, weeded the carrot patch, pulled up some carrots, beans, spinach and a courgette, and sowed some lettuce and parsnips.

After crashing out I made tea – lentil courgette and split pea curry, with carrots spinach and beans. All followed by fresh strawberries. And it was gorgeous.

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Sunday 15th August 2010 – The weather seems to have changed.

Last night the temperature in my room dropped below 20°C, the first time for ages. And that was with the windows closed too.

Outside, it’s been gradually falling little by little and it dropped as low as 9.1°C. A sure sign that winter is on its way. And it’s only mid-August too! A depressing thought.

I should have gone brocanting today but instead I stayed in. And now my little room looks quite tidy. What a way to spend a Sunday. But it was looking rather a tip in here and its not going to get any better what with doing this roof and so on. We are back on there tomorrow.

And that’s it, really. I’m blogging early as I want to have an early night. I need to keep my strength up.

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Saturday 14th August 2010 – A good few weeks ago ….

… I went to a talk about the history and one of the items that was discussed was the local railway network. With this area being situated on a coal seam and the existence of coal mines all over the place there was at one time a railway network around here that was much more comprehensive than you would think at first.

And most people immediately think of railways as being standard-gauge – 4’8.5″ with substantial earthworks and the like, and there is a great deal of evidence for that, especially for our famous railway down the hill here that was opened to traffic in 1932 and did’t even last 25 years.

I drive regularly (or I used to when I used to go to Brussels) along a certain road that runs into Montmarault from the Montaigut direction and I’ve been convinced that I’ve seen traces that correspond to what the Ordnance Survey would call “dismantled railway” along the side of the road, although there is nothing on any map that I have ever seen that would confirm anything.

But at this talk one of the items discussed was the railway line that ran from Marcillat en Combraille to Commentry. Now Commentry was a major ironworking centre and Marcillat has the remains of a few huge limekilns and so a line bringing the lime from the fields to the blast furnaces seems like a likely proposition. But the only line here as far as I am aware is the old standard gauge line that used to pass down here and which doesn’t go directly to Commentry.

But further enquiry revealed the existence of the “lignes economiques” – a whole series of narrow-gauge lines that ran on light railway principles with the minimum of earthworks, and the border area between the Allier and the Puy-de-Dome was littered with these lines. Anyone who has seen the the Father Brown film will recall what a “ligne economique” looks like.

The relics that I have seen not too far from Montmarault are in fact part of this light railway system but my attention for the moment has been seized by a narrow-gauge line that used to run from Marcillat to Commentry – and points beyond, as I have discovered. I’ve tracked down a list of the names of stations along the route but a casual look on an Internet satellite viewing program hasn’t come up with anything. That’s a shame – long-time readers will remember that we tracked down a bridge of James Brunlees by spotting it on a satellite viewer.

One place however has crossed my mind as I have crossed it on many occasions. The railway passed through the village of Durdat Larequille somewhere and not too far from there is what looks like a hollow fold in the ground with what might be a bridge over it. And so on my way back from Neris les Bains I stopped for a look.

I’m right about it being an overbridge but if it’s for a narrow-gauge locomotive and train then it would have to be flaming narrow. I couldn’t stand upright in that tunnel under there

There’s no evidence to suggest that the bridge has been infilled to any extent, suggesting that at one time it might have been of larger size, and I can’t see what might have been a track bed of a railway running to and fro underneath it.

I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that this may well not be a railway bridge after all, and that’s a disappointment – I had high hopes for this.

Yes – I was in Neris today. The weather is becoming colder and colder and there was no chance of a solar shower and so after shopping in Commentry (which was boring, I have to say) I went off there. 29°C in the water and only 20°C in the baths itself – but that’s because some person had for reasons best known to him-or herself decided to open up the side of the pool. It used to be an open-air pool complete with poolside cafe but it’s now covered with a balloon-type of marquee. And who on earth would want to open it up today in this weather?

But now I’m nice and clean so I’m going to change the bedding and have a good night’s sleep. And I need it too. I didn’t have the alarms on this morning and when the phone rang I crawled over to it and answered “ok Terry – see you in a bit” only to hear a French voice on the other end. Yes, I was totally out of it this morning. I’ll have to do better tomorrow.

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Friday 13th August 2010 – When we knocked off this evening ….

… there were still two buckets full of mortar left in the cement mixer.

And so “waste not, want not”, I took it round to my house and built up some of the wall of this lean-to that I have been slowly repairing.

You can see that I’ve built up around the central beam of the roof.

But I had an idea about this. Building with stone uses a lot of cement and you always end up with a filthy mixer full of dried cement and the like so I heaved a bucketful of gravel and a bucketful of water into the mixer to clean it. The gravel will scour the drum and the water will move it round.

I built a very narrow wall on the outside of the wall and a very narrow wall on the inside of the wall, with a large gap in between them. And when I finished and went back to the mixer the drum was quite clean with a load of what looked like very liquid concrete swilling around in it.

I tipped that into a bucket leaving the mixer nice and clean, and took the bucket down to my lean-to and poured the concrete solution into the gap. All nice and runny and you could hear it slurping its way down the fissures in the rocks and soaking into all the dry joints. It’ll take a while to set but when it does it will have done wonders for my stone wall. I shall be cleaning out the mixer like this every night.

As far as the house roof goes, we are making enormous progress and if things hold out we may well be finished on schedule – and won’t that be a first?

You can see in the pic that we have built up all of the walls so that they are of the right height and all of the carpentry is now on. It won’t be long before the roof is finished, and then we will need to build up the outsides of the walls with a stone facing. Once that’s complete we will need to seal the top of the roof into the wall of the house and then just a few more small jobs will finish it off.

Mind you I didn’t want to get up this morning. I had slept through the alarm and was having a very pleasant dream for a change when Terry rang me to make sure I was awake. It’s sad when you have dreams like that – you don’t ever want them to end.

But it’s the weekend and I’m having a weekend off. I reckon that tomorrow I’ll go shopping in Commentry and then for a swim at Neris. The warm weather has let me down for the last few days and I haven’t been able to have a solar shower. If I’m not careful I’ll be picked up on radar soon.

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Thursday 12th August 2010 – I shan’t be sorry …

… to see the back of this roof. The rainstorm that we were promised for today never arrived and so we were up there all day. Well, Terry and Simon were mostly. I was out for some of the morning looking for supplies. And you can’t believe that a builders’ merchant would have no 40×27 laths in stock, and not expect any more until September. I had a little bit of a hunt to track some of them down after that.

But once I returned and we carried on with our production line method of roof-building, we made enormous progress as you can see in the photo below.

We’ve attached chevrons to the top crossbeam that we fitted to the house wall a couple of days ago, and you can see them fitted to the other crossbeam that we embedded in the cement on the top of the wall that we built up previously.

And now it’s all looking thoroughly impressive. I reckon that another 10 working days or so might see the job completely finished. And I shan’t be sorry for a moment.

So when we knocked off this evening I had to move Caliburn, and Simon got into his van and piddled off – and so did Terry – leaving me to put the tarpaulin on all on my own. Luckily Terry remembered and came back to help, otherwise it would have been embarrassing.

Once everyone had cleared off I took my life in my hands and moved the methane digester that had been by the barn. And once I had manhandled … "PERSONhandled" – ed … it down to the compost bin that I built the other day I tipped it all in and covered it with wood ash.

That’s the end of my experiments with the methane digester for now and I’m not sorry about that either. I can sit out on my terrace now.

After that I came in and crashed out again. I’m totally whacked. I’m not as young as I was and it’s not so very encouraging.

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Wednesday 11th August 2010 – We’ve been at this roof all day.

We started off by hanging a chevron (or rather two chevrons fastened together to make one long one) off the side wall of the house to attach the roof beams to. And that would have been so much easier if the holes for the anchor bolts hadn’t been drilled so deep that I needed to hunt down my lengths of threaded rod. And it would also have been easier if we hadn’t have got the SDS drill bit stuck in the wall!

But once we had organised that we finished building up the wall we started yesterday and then made a start on the two others. We need to keep these two level with each other so that we can cover them up with the roofing sheets at night.

Terry was doing the bricklaying, Simon was cutting and I was labouring. And it’s hard work mixing load after load after load of lime cement and then in my spare time bagging sand (we had to go down to the quarry with the Sankey trailer to buy another load).

.

But we weren’t out there for all of the afternoon – we called it a day after a while because it’s absolutely p155ing down outside. You can’t work outside in this kind of weather.

We heaved the two left-over sheets from my barn roof onto the area where we were working to keep the rain off our working space and Lieneke’s bathroom and then we all went home. I for one don’t fancy the idea of mixing cement with an electric cement mixer in the pouring rain.

Shocking, what?

But all of this work is wearing me out – so much so that when I got back here I crashed out for a bit. I need to keep my energy for tomorrow

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Tuesday 10th August 2010 – Awwwwwwww Bambi!

Keen readers of my outpourings will know that I have something of an interest in the local wildlfe. There’s such a lot of it about of course, and examples thereof feature in these pages at regular intervals.

You might remember the fox that I featured on here a week or two ago, but anyway here’s a deer that I noticed down across the fields about 400 metres away as I was tidying up after finishing work this evening.

I thought at first that it might be Bambi but judging by those antlers, maybe not and he would probably be quite offended at the thought. He’s maybe come to challenge Strawberry Moose
for possession of the local herd but Strawberry Moose would soon see him off.

Anyway, he’s cute (I hope that it’s a “he” anyway) and I’m glad that I have a high-quality lens on the new Nikon D5000. He certainly merits a photograph or two on my blog.

In other news, we are making progress on the roof of this lean-to.

The front part of the wall has all been built up level, inside and outside, and we’ve put the horizontal wooden beam in position, embedding it into the cement and packing behind it with stones and cement.

The wooden beam is important because first of all it gives us a nice straight level and secondly, we’ll be fixing chevrons and laths to it in the long run so it needs to be good.

We have also been making good progress with the inner lining of the far wall. We are lining it in breeze blocks, and you can see the slope that we are starting to put into it. When the breeze blocks are all in place we’ll be putting a cladding of stones on the outside.

Terry and Simon have been doing the masonry work and I’ve been spending most of the day mixing the cement and doing all of the fetching and carrying.

It’s wearing me out but it’s clearly doing me some good. It’s been a long time since I felt as exhausted and I’m going to bed just now before I fall …..

ZZZZZZZZZZ

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EPIC HALL

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