Tag Archives: muesli

Tuesday 11th July 2017 – LAST NIGHT …

… the computer told me that it wanted to perform a major update.

It’s been telling me that for a while actually, but last night it blocked the screen and wouldn’t let me proceed until I agreed.

And so I set it to perform at 23:59 and left the machine running when I went to bed. When I came round this morning to look at it, it was showing … errr … 21% completed.

As a result, today has been rather a difficult day.

It didn’t start off too well either. I was wide awake at 06:40 and when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already preparing another mix of muesli, seeing as how I’d forgotten to do that yesterday.

With no laptop, I went and had a shower and sorted out a few other bits and pieces that needed attention, and while I was at it, I came across an 8GB memory card from the summer of 2015 that I hadn’t backed up. I made a mental note …

Round about 11:00 the laptop finished what it was doing, and so I launched myself into a programme of backing up the memory card. I wrote a couple of DVDs with the contents, and then found the 750gb external hard drive that I use to keep the (millions of) photos that I’ve accumulated over the years.

The ones off the SD card went onto there too, only for me to discover that I seem to have backed up this card on there some time in the past.

But while I had the external hard drive coupled up, I went about and did a major backup of the contents of my data folders.

I do a major back-up like this once every year or so – usually just before I’m taking my laptop with me on a major journey. In between times, I back up to a dedicated 64gb memory stick.

And how times have changed – I remember when USB ports became the thing with Windows 98 Series 2, and my back-up memory stick then was all of 256kb – with plenty of room on there for everything too.

And that’s where I am right now – this back-up is still going on some 10 hours later, and it probably won’t be until 11:00 tomorrow morning that it will be finished either.

It hasn’t meant that I’ve not been updating the blog though – in fact I’ve had another good day and I’ve almost finished October 2012. Just 104 “uncategorised” entries to rewrite, which might make you think that it will all be over soon.

But far from it, and for two reasons too –

  1. Many pages are “conjoined” pages – when I haven’t had internet access for one reason or another I’ve made a multiple entry as soon as I could. Since late 2013, when I started the new version of the blog, whenever I’ve not had internet access I’ve been writing up a page faithfully every night nevertheless and storing them up for a multiple-publication later. I’m going back over the conjoined entries and breaking them up into daily pages
  2. It seems that round about August 2012 the blog-host that I used back then (before I brought my blog in-house) started to make up tags and categories that my current set-up recognises. And they show up on a few of the pages from then. So these pages aren’t included in the number of “uncategorised” pages but they need updating nevertheless to meet my new, exacting … "and modest" – ed … standards.
    .

But what is exciting is to look at some of these old entries and what was going through our minds, and see how things turned out. A good example of this is the entry for 17th October 2012.

Here, Krys and I (whatever happened to Krys?) were discussing that we were having all the signs of an early winter. Krys remarked that she was “forecasting a bad and long winter this year”.

Well, the first snows fell just 10 days later – which is astonishingly early, and the last snowfall of the winter was on … errr … 25th of MAY. How about that for a prediction?

storm waves crashing on rocks granville manche normandy franceTea was the second instalment of the aubergine and kidney bean whatsit, and now I’m sitting at the window watching the teeming rain and the storm, with the waves crashing down on the rocks across the bay.

It’s a phenomenal wind that we are having – just the weather to be out there on board a three-masted schooner. I’d really fancy a run-out in this weather.

And I forgot to mention that some blasted English grockles, complete with thermos flask of hot tea, pinched my spec on the wall overlooking the harbour at lunchtime. I had to go and sit somewhere else.

And talking of comments, don’t be shy. If you would like to comment on the entries on this blog, please feel free to do so. Because of all of the spam that seems to be back on the internet these days, they will be “held” until I manually approve them, and then you’ll see your name in lights!

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Thursday 15th June 2017 – I BEAT …

… David Bowie into the bathroom by 35 seconds this morning (I know – I counted them) and so by the time he started to croon “Wake Up Little Sleepy Head” I was already riding the porcelain horse.

Breakfast saw me demolish the last of the muesli (I had some supplies and so I made some more) and by 07:35 I was sitting on the sofa with the laptop on my knee.

This morning I spent part of the time dealing with correspondence. It’s backing up rather, and I had a rude reminder from someone about a form that I needed to fill in relating to Caliburn’s accident. And so I did that, bunged it all in some of those prepaid envelopes (I bought a supply of those) and posted it all in the post box opposite the magasin de presse – the newspaper shop where I buy my baguette.

Lunchtime was spent sitting on the clifftop overlooking the harbour entrance. It was cooler today and slightly windier so I stayed out there with my book for quite a while. In fact, it was after 15:00 when I came back here. And seeing how nice and comfortable I had been, I … errrr … closed my eyes for a while – in fact a darn while longer than I expected.

Tea was a mega-curry night. Onions and garlic fried in a saucepan, with a tin of mixed vegetable, a tin of mushrooms, a pile of peanuts, s bucket-load of bulghour and a selection of spices. Add to that a gallon of gravy browning and we had a meal fit for a King. Four Kings in fact, because there’s enough for three more days so that’s sealed in the vacuum jars in the fridge.

And apart from that, what else have I been up to?

Well, you know this 3D animation program that I’m messing around with? It’s quite good but its models are not transferable over to other 3D sites (but then it’s free, and not a couple of thousand quid so that’s understandable) and models from other sites are not transferable to it. But there is a program for building models and props from design primitives, and the finished products may be exported into *.cr2 format.

This program is likewise free and I downloaded it years ago, but it was so complicated that I abandoned it after several weeks of going nowhere. Its controls do not correspond in any way whatever with normal mouse controls and keyboard short-cuts and has no logical sense whatsoever (for example – to “Ring” the edges of the polygons that make up the design primitives, its CNTRL + … errr … K. What’s the logic behind that?).

Anyway, during one of my lengthy searches on the internet, I came across a series of no less than 24 videos that give a basic introduction to the program. And as the narrator freely states “this is only a basic introduction – there’s much more that you can find out about it elsewhere”. Yes, 24 videos as a “basic introduction”!

And so I’ve been gallantly working my way through them all. 8 videos so far, and I’m still on “control manoeuvres” – we haven’t actually done anything yet.

I have a feeling that this is going to be yet another long hard slog.

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Saturday 27th February 2016 – NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL …

… a bad night!

The guy across the road has eight or nine hunting dogs which he keeps in a compound about 40 yards from this house. They are mostly well-behaved, but they can have their moments. And last night was one of those.

They started off about something at about 20:00 and they were still at it at 01:30, which was the last time that I remember glancing at the clock and sighing. What made it worse was that I had a pain in my ear so I couldn’t use my headphones, and so that ruled out watching a film in bed. And so the whole idea of having an early night was totally wasted.

What made it worse from my point of view anyway) was that I remember absolutely nothing of my little ramble during the night. Just 30 seconds of garbled notes on the dictaphone telling me that my medical condition wasn’t improving – in fact, quite the reverse (so tell me something that I don’t know!). As a result I’d become something of an outcast and ended up living the life of an outlaw (in the traditional sense) in some kind of distressing and poverty-stricken circumstances(ditto).

Talking of the dictaphone, I’ve made an enormous amount of progress today. So much so that I’ve finished my Canada 2014 notes, finished the Germany 2014 notes, done some of the outstanding football notes and almost finished the France May 2014 notes. This is progress indeed.

I know that I clearly have nothing better to do right now, but I can be pleased that at least I’m taking full advantage of this now and bringing up-to-date a situation that I have let drag on far too long. Mind you, there is always something that comes along to disrupt the best-laid plans of mice and men and I don’t see this as being any different.

We had visitors today too and they stayed for quite a while, but it was nothing to do with me and s I left them to it.

All I can say now is that I’m going to try to have another early night and hope that the dogs behave themselves tonight. At least I’ll have a nice breakfast in the morning because I ran out of muesli today and had to make some more.

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Friday 22nd January 2016 – MY LITTLE 3D EMPIRE MADE THE NEWS …

… during the night. Someone was using my 3D Characters and settings to make some kind of party-political broadcasts in the real world. He said that he could name ten or so names of people who were up to no good in society. We of course said “such as?”, but when he replied, he named just three names which just goes to show how much rubbish is being spoken today. We can all think of three people without being prompted and he was trying to impress us with his knowledge and … err … exaggeration.
After this, we had Nerina putting in yet another appearance on our nightly voyages. We were still married, still together and we had a small child of about 18 months. We were both in the offices of the European Union doing something there. We had parked the car in the underground car park and we were on level 25, which was well-underground. We had had a good wander around the building and Nerina had gone off for a coffee in the small coffee bar there. I’d had to do something else and ended up being considerably delayed so I had to run like the wind down the stairs into this cafe but couldn’t see Nerina at all. But who was there was one of a family from Shavington (who on earth were they?), one of three boys, who gave me an estimate for the supply of some champagne and I was taken aback by this because it was one of the other brothers who was dealing with this. He was talking to me as if I knew what was going on, which I didn’t really, and anyway I was more interested in where Nerina might be. Suddenly, he clicked. “Ohh yes, it’s my other brother who should have brought you this, isn’t it? But he’s having to drive the tractor because the third brother is ill, so he’s given all of the paperwork to me”. At this moment, Nerina put in her appearance. She’d been in the ladies’, and on coming out she didn’t see me and so went straight off upstairs. I had to separate myself from these boys who were being quite friendly (and I was enjoying them being friendly too) to go off after Nerina. She had come out on the wrong level on the car park, 2 levels further down, and had to walk back up to the car again. When I caught up with her, we got into the car adnd I asked her what the plan was for the evening. She replied that she intended to go out and get drunk. I could see that she was totally fed up about something.Trying to cheer her up, I asked her to tell me exactly what she wanted really to do. “The weekend is yours!”. By now, Nerina had transformed herself into Liz’s daughter Kit. she was really, realy depressed and I felt like saying “why don’t we wait until Friday and you come up north from London and then we’ll go on to your family home in the North-East. I’ll run you back on Sunday evening”. Somehow, though, I couldn’t make the words come out. Anyway, we ended up going to see some friends of mine who ran a junk shop. There were all kinds of things there in the shop, including a set of ancient scales for weighing a baby. Tomake it work, you put the baby on the scales and thenjumped up and down on the floor to make it vibrate. It was something like an amusement ride for the baby so that was what we were doing with ours. Whilst all of this was going on, I was stroking their young black cat – a really friendly black cat. But then I noticed a really large and fresh flea bite on the cat, just above its eye. didn’t want to stay there after seeing that, especially with the baby there. The child wasn’t to happy about having to leave its game, and Ket was unhappy because I wouldn’t tell her why we need to go. And these people were unhappy too because we were having a good time and I especially enjoyed their company.
I was off to Finland later, with a guy from Stoke on Trent who once was a very good friend of mine. We’d been out in the wilderness and come back down the dusty road to rejoin the main road (something like the road junction at the back of Baie Comeau in Quebec where Highway 389 joins Highway 138). We turned left there and a couple of hundred metres further on, we needed to turn right at another major road junction by a fuel station. There was an enormous – and I do mean enormous – traffic queue here turning right as if there was some kind of road accident or other obstruction blocking the way. We were waiting for hours to move and in the end, we became thoroughly fed up and did a U-turn to go the other way. We found some fuel, because we needed it, and then returned to the road junction. Even though we had been away for ages, we found ourselves right behind exactly the same vehicles – a big silver tanker and a caravan come to mind. They hadn’t moved an inch. However, just as we pulled up behind them, the vehicles all started to move off. We turned round the corner and almost immediately had to stop at some traffic lights. We were in the third lane, with the vehicles that were going to be turning left 100 metres further on (it’s drive-on-the-rght in Finland of course). THis was however the wrong lane – we needed to be right over on the right-hand side of the road. I wound down the window on my side (apaprently I was passenger) and put out my right hand to indicate that we intended to pull out and muscle into the traffic on the inside. When the lights changed and everyone started to move off, there was no-one on the inside of us and no car within 50 yards of us. Plenty of room for us, I thought, so I told him to put his foot down and we can go. He was much more timid than that however, saying that there were too many cars. I would have gone, and so would many others, but the result of all of this hesitation was that we lost our place. There wasn’t room for ages and so we ended up sitting there. He wouldn’t carry on to the left either, do a U-turn up the side road and come back to the main road either so we just sat there, our right-hand indicator on, waiting for a space. And of course, the inevitable happened. A car coming up behind us, seeing the green traffic light, put his foot down, not realising what we were doing, and ploughed straight into the back of us.

So that’s enough travelling for one day, in my opinion. And I don’t know where it all came from either because I had a bad night’s sleep too – not going to sleep until very late and being disturbed by all kinds of things. In fact, when I went downstairs, I crashed out, slumped over the kitchen table until the nurse arrived.

Liz and Terry went off to do the shopping after breakfast, and I carried on building my 3D set for my practical work. You may remember that this course requires me to build a 3D bedroom and fit it out as far as is practical to go so that the occupant of the room can be clearly defined by the objects on view. I’ve worked out a stunner, which I’ll show you in due course. I’ve taken 160 snapshots from different camera angles, with the camera in the ceiling and slowly spiralling down to ground level, and what I need now to find is a free mvoie-maker program to turn them all into a short 10-second film. And my ending is a killer, even though I say it myself.

I’d run out of muesli too, so Liz bought me the stuff that I need, for I make my own. Porridge oats,, corn flakes, all bran, sunflower seeds, almonds, dessicated coconut, trail mix and whatever else happens to be around the house. The best way to start the day (if the blood-man comes on time).

After lunch I sat and vegetated for a while. I really don’t remember too much of what happened. I’m clearly not feeling myself these days which is just as well because it’s a disgusting habit anyway. But to bring me round, not only did Liz make a coffee but we had some more vegan Christmas cake too, and I’m all in favour of that.

I was in bed early too – by 20:30 too. Not one of my better days, this one. I’ve so much to do before Wednesday so I beed to get myself into gear. I’m not going to make any progress at all like this.

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Tuesday 17th November 2015 – I’M FEELING A LITTLE …

… bit better today.

With having crashed out yesterday afternoon, it was gone 02:00 (more like 03:00, I reckon) when I went to bed. As for the alarm at 07:30, well, the least said about that the better. 09:30 it was when I crawled up here, and then I had to make some muesli as I’d run out yesterday

I had a good day on my course and astounded my tutor with an observation that I made about an Iron Age encampment in the vicinity of Hadrian’s Wall. But with the late start, it was after midday when I finished.

I crashed out again for an hour or so, but then found from somewhere the energy to go outside.

First thing that I did was to fit Caliburn with new windscreen wipers. The ones that were on it were the originals since 2007, so eight-and-a-half years is some going. They weren’t much good, in fact. but when I was at the Auchan the other day, they were having a sale of windscreen wipers and so I took advantage of it, ready for the winter which isn’t surely far away.

Apart from that, I’ve started to empty Caliburn. There was food in there (tins and stuff), some of which dates from before I went to Canada in August, as well as a pile of washing that Liz did for me. It can’t stay in there for ever so I made some space in the downhill lean-to and most of it is stacked in there. Some other stuff, including the washing, I dragged up here (and I do mean “dragged”).

Tomorrow, I’m going to be brave and carry on with the emptying, including the tiles and the tile cement. I may not be up to much at the moment, but tiling doesn’t take too much effort and with the old electric tile-cutter that I have, that doesn’t take too much electrical energy

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Tuesday 14th July 2015 – HAPPY BASTILLE DAY

That’s right – the story goes that the reason why the French stormed the Bastille on 14th July was because it was a Bank Holiday, all the shops were closed and they had nothing better to do.

But I had plenty to do, such as trying to find this insurance sticker. I’ve waded through all of these papers and some have been filed, some have been put tidily in a box and the rest have been filed under CS. But as for the insurance sticker, well, not a glimmer of it, I’m afraid. I’ve no idea where I might have put it.

The only thing now is to contact the insurance company and ask for a duplicate. And then that will guarantee that the original one will come to light immediately.

I’ve also done the notes for four days’ travel around Labrador and I’ve now arrived back in Newfoundland. I’ve also done some research as well and found a few really good e-books about the region that I have saved to read at my leisure.

Not only that, I’ve collected the details for a couple more months of radio rock shows and made up the icons for the albums so that I can build playlists.

But all of that was later first job, before I’d even had breakfast, was to make some muesli, seeing as how I’d run out.

All in all, I’ve had a busy day, despite it being a Bank Holiday.

Finally, I’ve made a huge aubergine-and-kidney-bean whatsit and that will keep me going for four days. It won’t take much to warm up, the food for the next few days, and it won’t make much washing-up.

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Saturday 20th June 2015 – WHAT AN AFTERNOON!

I’ve been sitting here all afternoon waiting for the battery on the laptop to expire. I’ve been extolling the virtues of the impressively long battery life, but it does have a drawback.

I dunno if you remember but I’ve been having memory issues with the new laptop. It simply isn’t powerful enough to run Windows 8.1 and after a while, it slows right down and it is necessary to restart it.

However today, I was distracted by a few things while I was copying a few things from one external drive to another. When I came back, the machine was showing an error message “insufficient memory to run these programs please close …” and then it listed all of the programs. Like Firefox, VLC player and the copying software. That was all that was open.

If that weren’t bad enough, it wouldn’t respond to the ctrl/alt/del escae mechanism to enable me to close the programs, and the cursor had frozen so I couldn’t access the menu.

While I was fiddling around with this, the screen switched off and won’t restart, and this is where I’ve been for the last 7 hours, waiting for the battery running out so it will all go into suspense.

I cant switch off using the crash button because this will stall all of the hard drives in mid-operation and that can have fatal results as we know. So thank heavens for the ancient Aspire 722 with its smashed screen and broken keyboard. I’m giving serious thought to refurbishing it and pressing it back into service.

Last night I was playing football for Pionsat, up front with Anthony. I passed the ball to him and the keeper dashed off his line to clear the ball from Anthony’s feet, but missed his kick and stubbed his toe, injuring himself. Everyone stood around waiting for the ref’s whistle but it never came so I shouted to Anthony to play on So he kicked the ball towards the goal but, incredibly, it was going wide from such an easy position. So he had to run after it and pop it into the net. At which point the referee disallowed the goal as he said that the game had stopped, although he had never blown the whistle. This led to a huge and heated argument.

It was all rather reminiscent of an incident in gridiron a few years ago when a thrown ball was intercepted but not caught or deflected out out of play. It was therefore still a live ball (classed as a fumble) but everyone stood around for a good 30 seconds looking at it before a player suddenly realised what had happened, picked it up and ran for home.

From here, I went on to Australia and went into an office which was an old brick-built circular building with, exceptionally, the (male) receptionist sitting in the centre of the room with his back to the door looking inwards. I had a small office on the ground floor and I was doing all kinds of personal things there, without realising until much later that there was a CCTV camera looking right at me.

Outside, it was hot and dusty and bright sunlight, and I had to walk acrosss the road to the trafic light and take up my position to run home amid all of the traffic, reckoning that even over a very long run I could keep up with rush-hour traffic on foot. I remembered an overhead railway with all kinds of brightly-coloured locomotives passing by.

This brought a feeling of déjà vu, with something that I had done in a particular nightly ramble several years (during one of the previous incarnations of this rubbish) ago when I used to go running from our old house in Davenport Avenue Crewe via Shavington and Stapeley into Nantwich and then back home via Wistaston. That of course relates to the “incident” in 1994 when I was caught up in a certain event in the middle of the night in Brussels and then had difficulty sleeping for years afterwards, so I started running around the city late at night in order to tire me out. But that didn’t work because I found my second wind pretty quickly and ended up doing half-marathons every night.

This morning, I had to make some more muesli for breakfast and then I started on thie mega-back-up that has led to all of these problems.

I hope that thgis problem is all going to clear itself up soon because I can’t go on like this.

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Sunday 19th April 2015 – I HAD A NICE LIE-IN …

… this morning – but I nearly didn’t!

When I woke up, it wasn’t even 08:00 but if anyone really thinks that I am going to heave myself out of my stinking pit at that time of a morning on a Sunday, they are mistaken. I turned over and went back to sleep – and it was a much-more-respectable 10:30 when I finally awoke from the dead.

First job, after the usual offices, was to make another load of muesli, seeing as how the muesli drum was empty. For the benefit of my readers, it’s a pile of porridge oats with cornflakes and bran sticks mixed in. And then a bag of nuts, some trail mix (you know – the dried fruit, raisins, coconut shavings and the like), some dessicated coconut and anything else around here that looks nice. Sunflower seeds, sesame seeds and so on.

After breakfast, I finished off the live concert that I was engineering and I do have to say that it’s the best one yet. Tons of stuff has been hacked out, tons of stuff added in, and now that I’ve worked out how to overlap tracks and dub sound effects and so on, it comes out really well.

Working under pressure is a great way of pushing back the boundaries of knowledge with a computer program. When you know that a task is useful and that it seems logical for people to want to do it, then it’s sure to be there in a program somewhere and you need to spend the time to ferret it out.

When I first started to work with Audacity, the program that I use for sound engineering, I remember posting at length about how disappointed I was with it, and how I wished that I had the older program that we used in another lifetime – Polderbits – back again. But credit where credit is due. I’m becoming much more used to Audacity and each week I’m discovering more and more facilities and functions, and I’m now a quite happy little user of the product.

For lunch, I made some hummus again. A pile of chick peas, tahini, water, olive oil, turmeric, cumin and garlic. I remembered that I had fetched from Marianne’s an ancient electric stick-mixer and with that I made a hummus 10 times easier than I have ever made by hand.

The I sat down to watch the football. Next week is the final match of the Welsh Premier League season (already!) and Bangor are playing Rhyl. There cannot be two clubs anywhere in the footballing world that hate each other more than these two, and Rhyl will be going for the throat. They’ll do Bangor no favours whatever in their battle to avoid relegation. And Cefn Druids have an easier match against Carmarthen Town.

So today’s match against Prestatyn is vital to Bangor. Bangor are just two points ahead of the Druids and this is their match in hand, so they must get at least a point from this match to be safe. And of course, it’s being streamed live on the internet.

For once, the Bangor players remembered to turn up and while in the first half they were struggling a little (even conceding a penalty, but the Bangor keeper saved it) in the second half they came good and raced into a 3-0 lead before I’d even settled down.

Towards the end, Lee Beattie for Prestatyn scored what must be a contender for the Goal of the Decade – you won’t ever see a better goal than this one.

I was round at Liz and Terry’s later. We’re recording the Radio Arverne programmes tomorrow afternoon and so we had rehearsals to do. And Liz made a nice meal too.

Now I’m going to have an early night – I deserve it.

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Thursday 27th September 2012 – TODAY WAS A DAY …

… of finding things.

We started off, quite dramatically, by finding the missing mobile phone.

The good news is that the SIM card might actually still work.

The bad news is that the phone won’t, which is hardly surprising seeing as it’s been outside in the rain for the last 6 weeks and I found it in a puddle right where a load of water would regularly drop on it.

What’s surprising about this is that it was just outside the barn door, right where I walk at least twice every day without fail, and how I haven’t seen it before today is a total mystery.

Even more surprising is that if I heard it “bleep” 5 weeks ago up here in the attic – which I’m sure that I did – then there’s nothing wrong with my hearing, I’ll say.

Back in 2006 my dear departed friend Liz gave me an old Nokia ‘phone. It never worked properly and despite buying a couple of new batteries, the battery life worked out to be about 18 hours on stand-by.

For that reason I never really used it, and went to all kinds of lengths to replace it.

However I did lose count of the number of times it’s been pressed into service in an emergency and as I found it in Caliburn the other day when I was a-hunting the dictaphone, it’s now currently back in service.

At least until the new phone arrives.

I wanted an unblocked Samsung (so I just have one set of leads) tri-band (to use in North America) with bluetooth (for the hands-free kit in Caliburn), camera (so I don’t have to keep carrying the Nikon on odd little trips out) and memory slot (so I can use it as a walkman).

But I quickly abandoned that idea. The prices are unbelievable.

In the end I settled for another Nokia – a factory-refurbished 6230 for just £22 seeing as there are no chargers with it – and I have all of that anyway.

So in the mood for finding things, I then found the missing timer switch off the tabletop washing machine – just as I was fitting the machine with a plug with a built-in switch, of course.

The plug off there I fitted on the chop-saw that I bought ages ago and that works a treat too.

I also uncovered three battery chargers – two of them being the 7-Day Shop ones that I use for charging up AA and AAA batteries. And not just the chargers either – a further mega-search turned up some power cables for them.

So they are now fitted with North American 110-volt plugs – I use them for my 12-volt DC domestic circuit because they can handle high amperage and they are sufficiently different not to be confused with 230 volt stuff – and they are ready for action.

The third battery charger that I found is also for AA and AAA batteries, and why this is so interesting is that it has screw-holes on the back so that you can fix it to the wall.

This is quite an ancient machine too and I was pleased to see because I have a cunning plan for it. It was that I intended to screw it into the back of Caliburn and wire it into the ignition system so that there will always be some batteries on charge there.

No power cable, though.

But seeing as I was in the mood I turned out the barn and actually managed to find it, which astonished me.

While I had the ignition system dismantled, I took the opportunity of dismantling the power lead for the coolbox that I installed in Caliburn. I threw away the cigarette lighter plug (I hate those) and wired that directly into the ignition circuit.

And so we’ll have cold drinks wherever we go too.

I also unearthed a pile of connectors that I’d been looking for for ages, and a few other exciting bits and pieces as well. And I did a few other things, but I can’t rightly remember now what they were.

But I shan’t know myself at this rate, will I?

On the subject of finding things, by the way, I know that this might not be relevant but Heather came round this afternoon.

She has just come back from the UK and had brought me my order of porridge oats as well as some Rich Tea biscuits for Rosemary.

It’s the first time that Heather has been round, so she had to call at the doctor’s on the way for the Yellow Fever and Plague vaccinations before she arrived.

But at least I can now make some more muesli.

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Thursday 5th July 2012 – 24mm of rain.

hanging cloud les guis virlet puy de dome franceThat’s what we’ve had so far today. And this photo aside tells its own story – a nice hanging cloud drifting slowly up the valley behind the house. That sums up the weather – it was like that all day and I’m fed up.

In other news, I had to make more muesli for breakfast, and it seems that I have run out of desecrated coconut. That’s not very good. And after breakfast I worked on the web pages for a while but I’m also not ashamed to say that I went back to bed for half an hour too – this weather is so flaming depressing.

Later on, I switched the inverter on and sanded down the polyfilla that I had put on all of the joints of the plasterboard in the cupboard – may as well take advantage of the weather. After lunch, I put another layer – the final one – on the joints. At the next available opportunity I’ll sand that off, paint the walls and fit the new laminate flooring. Then I can build the shelves and start moving the stuff in there from out of where the bathroom is going to be.

I had an hour in the lean-to too and I’ve sorted out a pile of stuff in there too. That was something else that needed doing. And then, by way of surprise, it stopped raining briefly at about 18:00. Briefly, I say, but long enough for me to finish putting the first coat of of wood treatment on the exposed new wood on the lean-to. When I have the chance, I’ll put the second coat on there and then paint the rendering.

It’s amazing how much you can do when you have the time and place to do it all. I really Am starting to become organised.

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