… putting these two crossbeams in. This is where the door into the room will be.
You can see that the old beam in centre-pic is pretty well eaten. I can’t rely on that supporting the weight of people continually coming and going, especially when I knock down the wall underneath it in the very near future, and so it needs plenty of reinforcement to spread the load.
But these beams have to go in exactly right if they are to do any good. Millimetre-perfect is almost essential so you have to cut the lets undersize and the beams oversize and file them down until they fit. That’s what takes the time.
This afternoon I was interrupted by a couple of visitors. Firstly, Terry and Liz turned up, to borrow back their cement mixer. Terry, keen reader of my blog that he is, has suggested that I go with him tomorrow late afternoon to collect a ton of gravel and take it to his house.
“You have to say the magic words” I said.
“Liz is baking” he replied.
After Terry and Liz left I carried on and fitted some more flooring and tried out Rhys’ idea of screwing the plasterboard. Lucky I bought a pile of 4×60 screws. And with the drill on the lowest speed setting and with a low torque setting it drove the screws up nicely. I’ll try some more of this.
But I wasn’t at all in the mood for carrying on working as my second group of visitors brought me some news that has left me numb. Followers of my blog from its previous home will recall that back in early spring I had an “interaction” with a local farmer that got rather out of hand and attracted the attention and involvement of the local gendarmes.
Criminal charges were preferred and a summons was issued, and when the gendarmes went to serve it on the aforementioned farmer, I very much regret to say that they discovered him no longer in a position to receive it.
I’m totally devastated by this as I’m sure everyone else in the locality is. I don’t hate anyone at all so much that I wish them dead. This guy, much as he was a thoroughly obnoxious character, was quite simply a guy living a traditional French peasant lifestyle and caught up in a changing world with which he was in no condition to cope.
I just hope that wherever he has ended up, he is happier there than he clearly was round here.
So we can deduce several things from this:
1. Don’t argue with Eric, you might not live to regret it.
2. Eric likes plenty of screwing.
3. An offer of chocolate cake will most likely get Eric to do anything.
That’s terrible news Eric. Don’t take it personally though. There was obviously far more going on in his head than just his contretemps with you. Perhaps it was the final straw but who was to know that eh? Hope you feel better by now. Krys
Hello Krys and welcome back. You have been sorely missed.
It’s just one of those things that happen in life, I know, but had I known that he was the sensitive type rather than just plain aggressive I would have handled things far, far differently than I did.
Hi Eric. I’ve not been well, but I’m back now 🙂
You’d no way to know if all he showed was the aggresive side. But I guess it’s something we all need to keep in mind when dealing with others.
Glad to hear you are getting your stove. It looks like you’ll be really needing it soon. Autumn has arrived all of a sudden.
Autumn has arrived suddenly? You’ve known about its impending arrival for the last 9 months!
A shame you don’t understand what I meant.
I’m sorry to hear that you have been ill, Krys. I hope you are feeling better.
I know what you mean, though, about the weather. The temperature has plummeted tonight and I froze at the footy. Rhys lives in the spendid warmth of the Gulf Stream coastal belt of South Carolina. They don’t have winters there – in December and January they have a little bit of cool rain.
Jammy so and so! It’s perishing here at night now and the leaves are starting to turn all sorts of pretty colours. I was hoping for one of those long indian summers they keep promising, but all we are getting is apache rain 😉
I live in a hurricane zone too.
We had torrential downpours yesterday and today. I don’t need to water my new trees at the moment 😀 Tomorrow being dry after I return from work at 1-45pm I shall complete digging the 4th hole and plant the 4th tree.
I knew there had to be a good reason for living here. Add that to the lack of poisonous insects and (all but one) snakes, no volcanoes and only tiny earthquakes and the UK can’t be too bad…
I was over there for Rhys’ wedding in April 2005 and I remember the night we went to pick Itze up from the airport. We had just a little bit of rain then, didn’t we?
But having said that, I would willingly swap any part of the UK for any part of South and North Carolina. You can see for yourself by reading on from
http://www.erichall.eu/2005u010.html
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I like the fact that in the US, if the criminals start waving knives and guns or shooting at you, you get to shoot the blighters dead.
Always allowing for the fact that your aim under pressure and stress might not be as good as you think it might be and you don’t hit some poor innocent bystander instead.
And always allowing for the fact that someone with a gun or knife already in their hand is going to be quicker off the mark than you are, bearing in mind the time it takes to reach for your weapon and doesn’t knife or kill you first before you can produce your weapon.
Statistics show that in an armed struggle with a habitual criminal and a novice, its usually the novice who is killed, and by his own weapon too. What’s wrong with fighting armed gangs off with a pizza like normal people do?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/americas/7782122.stm
I wish I had had a pizza here when our late farming friend came round to see me. I spent an hour and a half fighting him and his pitchfork with my bare hands, and still won at a canter.
The thing I like about the US are the sentences. Over here they get tea and sympathy and the victim gets blamed for traumatising the poor wee darlings. The Howard league seems to think we can cut crime by doing away with prisons. Mind you they are probably right. If we decriminalise crime then we won’t have any will we? Problem solved.
Hmmmmm. I’m not convinced by sentences of life plus 80 years and life plus 100 years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/americas/7929898.stm
Me no understand and me no see the point.
I have visions of hundreds if not thousands of prison cells occupied by rotting cadavers and skeletons.
The thing you have to realise about criminals is that most of them are just thugs – as thick as two short planks.
From the Chicago Tribune of September 22, 2009
Ill. homeowner kills armed robbers
Police say an eastern Illinois man shot two people to death after they forced their way into his home and tried to rob him.
Vermilion County Sheriff Pat Hartshorn says the two masked men held the homeowner on the floor at gunpoint Monday night and choked him while demanding money. The sheriff says the alleged robbers were 22 and 17 but didn’t identify them or the homeowner.
Hartshorn says the men let the homeowner go when his wife said she had expensive jewelry upstairs. While the men focused on a jewelry box, the homeowner grabbed a handgun and shot them.
Hartshorn says another 17-year-old waited in a pickup outside. He drove away but was arrested a short time later.
Indianola is about 10 miles southwest of Danville.
Yeah but a life sentence equalling 7 years is pretty much a joke isn’t it. The figures you are quoting are ususally handed down for multiple crimes where the crimes are set to run consec… one after the other rather than concurrently as happens over here. That has always struck me as a ‘kill 1 get 1 free’ offer and it’s insulting to the victims families when it happens. To me it’s simple, or it should be. Take a life and you spend the rest of yours in prison. incentives not to do it again wouldn’t be needed if sentences meant something. Then we’d have an incentive not to do it in the first place!
Nothing contributes more to a safe society than the certainty of detection. Severity of punishment doesn’t mean much. If they know theyll be caught, they won’t do it in the first place. Criminals play the lottery – they know 90% of the time they’ll get away with it. The other 10% is just an occupational hazard. Combine with that the fact that gayboy organisations such as the Howard League want people to see criminals as nice, normal people instead of the warped turds they are and the media’s glorification of violence and crime and you’ll see where the problem lies. It lies squarely at the feet of Rupert Murdoch etc.
Life without parole is a common-enough sentence in the USA though – next time I see one I’ll post it up. I’m bound to see one tonight.
But you are right in one sense about the fear of detection. That’s why in the old days the penalties were so savage – because with minimal chance of detection, fear of the punishment was the only way of preventing crime. In modern society with the rate of detection being so much better one can tailor the punishment to suit the offence that was committed. The fact that punishment is now veering towards the draconian again tells its own story about the detection rate. And maybe that’s where the resources ought to be targeted.
Money spent on plod, plodding the streets is more effective than money spent on jugging the crooks. When plod is plodding, he costs $20,000 a year and two or three plods can plod an entire town every day.
If plod runs around in a panda car, he goes so fast and can’t leap out and spot crimes, can’t hear things happening. He misses everything.
The fact that plod can wander in the direction of something interesting, can pop into businesses and chew the fat means a lot more crime gets prevented.
Every prosecution costs a bucket load of money. Better to spend that money on prevention rather than blowing it all on prosecution and jails. Mind, when the crooks are in jail they should be made to work to pay the costs of their prosecution etc.
I’d agree with you to a point. But it’s becoming a badge of honour to have been picked up and gone to court and screwed the system. The police around here do their best, but the courts and the parole system are the problem. We had a case recently where a toerag assaulted a vulnerable old man who nearly died as a result of his injuries. The Judge jailed him for 5 years, which was the maximum he could, only to meet the guy a few weeks later in the local supermarket. When he investigated the guy had been realeased early with 95% of his sentence unserved for *good behaviour*. Can you honestly tell me that that is either justice or a deterrent?
Yes Krys but that’s for different reasons. How many brain cells do you need to be able to work out that if you are going to “get tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime” you are going to be sentencing many more offenders to prison sentences, so you are going to need many more prisons to house them?
Obviously many more brain cells than this blasted government because they did not build one single extra prison and so they were having to release prisoners after a couple of days because there were no cells to house them.
Just catching up with your blog Eric – sorry to hear that news.
The sooner we can gather up the worst criminals, illegal immigrants etc and dump them in the middle of the Atlantic with directions to swim North, the better.
Yes, Mike, the news is appalling and thanks for the sympathy.
“Life without parole” –
http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/w/watanabe_masumi.html
I knew I would find one.