Tag Archives: blog

Monday 9th May 2011 – I WAS CHASED …

… around the bedroom this morning.

And not by Percy Penguin (who doesn’t feature in these pages half as often as she deserves) either, but by a blasted hornet.

And at 07:3 too. Does it have no respect?

Yes, the blasted thing found its way in all right, but could it heck find its way out. And so it decided to awaken me. And by a few of the things that I said to it, you’ll understand the definition of “a rude awakening”.

So having had an early start, I was able to have a good crack at things in here and be out in the garden as early as 11:15. That’s not something that happens every day either.

I managed a really good day in there too and accomplished quite a lot. I even managed to have a little shower too – and it would have been a big one had the water not run out – Brain of Britain having forgotten to fill it the last time.

So a nice, reasonably-clean me headed off to the Anglo-French group.

Back here though, my blog host is down for maintenance. So you age going to have to wait until tomorrow to read this rubbish, aren’t you?

Tuesday 18th January 2011 – We were recording again today

This time it was for the programmes for Radio Tartasse – the next lot of four-weekly programmes to take them up to the end of February. Luckily I don’t have too far to travel because it’s an early start in the morning, like … errrr … 10:00.

This time we were allowed to do the programmes how we wanted to do them, and it went much better. Liz and I have a very good rapport and much of our stuff is done as ad-libs and you can’t do that if you are having to concentrate on pages of script. And they have also agreed to let us have copies of the recorded programmes so that I can stick them on our blog when I have the time and I’m not so tired. But that will come – you can be assured of that.

And so back here, and carrying on with my ceiling. and that’s what I did for most of the rest of the day such as it was. And I’m making good progress too. It won’t be all that long before it’s done. BUt it went dark at about 17:00 – at least too dark to work on the ceiling, and so I had an hour or so outside doing a little more clearing up. And slowly but surely it’s looking a little (but only a little) more respectable out here. But the weather has turned. It clouded right over and it’s gone cold. I even have had the heating on a little earlier this evening. But not that that worries me. Now that the weeds and brambles are dying down I’m uncovering a few of the old chevrons that we ripped off the barn roof and threw down to the floor. It’s all more firewood for the stove.

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Monday 17th January 2011 – It was Monday today …

… believe it or not, and this afternoon we went to the recording studio to record our radio programmes for the month of February. And no offer of transport from our sponsors either. It seems that whatever budget that was available was only for 12 months and that has now expired.

Anyway, with a view to not taking this lying down, I have taken some positive action. I’ve created a blog for the radio programmes that we do and the intention is that I will stream the radio programmes on there for the benefit of those who can’t receive them or who forgot to listen to them. And in addition to that I will be offering advertising space, at a very democratic €30 per annum for those who run a business or have a service to offer, or €3 per 15 words per month for small ads and the like, people buying and selling articles and so on. And with the money that we raise, we can pay our own travelling expenses to the studio.

So I need help in spreading the word about the radio blog, and I also need customers to buy the advertising space. If you can do your bit to spread the word it would be a great help.

This morning I was up early (just for a change) and with the new insulation that I bought on Saturday I was able to have a profitable couple of hours doing the bedroom ceiling. And it’s advancing pretty well in there. I’m quite happy with that. This evening though we were in St Eloy for the Anglo-French group and we were so carried away with the discussions that instead of finishing at 21:00 as is our wont, it was almost 22:00 when someone noticed the time.

Tomorrow we are recording again – at Radio Tartasse. I need to encourage them to let me have the radio programmes from their end so that we can put them up on the blog too.

I hope it all works!

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Sunday, 16th January 2011 – What a beautiful day.

Definitely the best of the summ… errrr … winter so far. Not only did we have the hottest temperatures of the winter, we had the sunniest too. Not a cloud in the sky all day. My batteries in the house are all fully-charged and the water heater (that uses up the excess electricity) ran for 2.5 hours and warmed up the water to 32°C. Not quite shower-warm but we are getting there.

But how ridiculous is this though, when just 12 days ago we had -8.4°C? It could only happen here in the Combrailles.

Today I finished off “holiday lettings” ready for recording tomorrow, and then I worked on a blog for the radio programmes – an important thing that needs doing seeing as we seem to be going nationwide (well – alright, into the Allier and the Creuse). The aim is of course to stream out programmes so that people who miss them or live outside the reception areas can pick them up.

So after that it was off to St Bonnet to watch Pionsat’s 1st XI give them a good spannering. and I arrived 10 minutes late to find that they were already ahead 2-0. They won 4-0 in the end and that included missing a penalty, thanks to an excellent double-save by the St Bonnet keeper.

But this match was well-planned to be played in mid-winter. The heat that was generated on the field both on and off the ball would have certainly melted any ice that might otherwise have formed in any traditional kind of winter weather.

And so round to Liz and Terry’s to rehearse our radio programmes this week. We are recording at Radio Arverne tomorrow and Radio Tartasse on Tuesday.

And now I’m back home in my warm unheated attic – two consecutive days that I haven’t had the heating on here – watching the Jets and the Patriots. And listening to the adverts – including one for Viagra “seek medical attention immediately if you have an erection that lasts for four hours”. At my age, it wouldn’t be medical attention that I would be seeking, I could tell you. It reminds me of the time that a new machine tools factory opened up in Crewe, and the proud owner put up his sign “O’Malley’s Tool Works”. So I rang him up and told him “so does mine, but I haven’t put up a sign about it”.

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Monday 3rd January 2011 – Liz rang me this morning.

“Are you okay, Eric?”
“Yes, fine thanks”
“That’s okay, but we were worried about you. You haven’t blogged for a couple of days”.

So my blog does serve some useful purpose – it lets people know that I’m still there. Not ALL THERE, of course, but then again you can’t have everything.

First job therefore was to put on line the blog entries for the weekend that I had … errr … overlooked to do.

As for today though, it was a much better day than we’ve been having just recently.

I woke up to about an inch of ice on the windows (outside of course) and a gorgeous Alpine morning. And if it had stayed like that all day it would have been wonderful.

But of course it was all too good to be true and by lunchtime had the clouds drifting slowly back.

However, we managed about 175 amps of energy – the second-highest since I’ve been back from Canada – and that has made a difference to my batteries. They’ve been quite down for a couple of weeks.

And inside the house I’ve finished all of the insulation in the bedroom and I’ve made a good start on the counter-battens.

Tomorrow will hopefully see me start fitting the plasterboard.

I’m having a little issue with fitting part of it and I’m going to have to put some of the boards on sideways. The sheets measure 2.50 by 1.20 and normally they would be fitted upright.

But the distance from the wall to the edge on the window is 1.24. A strip of 4cms would look pretty silly and you can also see that if I turn the board sideways-on, I can cut it so that it will do two strips with a very minimal waste.

So that’s what I shall be doing.

And Terry wants me to give him a hand with the scaffolding. “We’ll do it on a nice day” he says. So that will be some time in May then, I reckon.

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Thursday 22nd October 2009 – FIAT LUX!

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

This photo here was taken at about 20:00 this evening and the reason that you can see inside the room here is that I now have four lights all properly connected and switched!

They are in fact four of those 12-volt LED lights that I bought from LIDL a few weeks ago and while they may not look very bright; that’s just 4 watts of lighting in there.

Dunno about you, but I think that’s quite impressive.< And that's not all. I now have 12-volt power all around the room, and also mains power too. My electrical day was quite profitable and, much to my surprise, everything worked straight away. I didn't need to make any adjustments at all.

I’ve not done the 6-volt circuit yet though because I ran out of time doing the 230-volt lighting so I’ll do that tomorrow morning. And neither have I done the telephone. In fact, I dunno how to wire up the telephone plug so I’ll have to do some research into that.

Liz and Terry are coming round to pick up some stuff so I told them that if they can’t find me anywhere, look to see if there’s anything black and shrivelled stuck to the ceiling. That’ll be me having made a false move with the mains wiring.

But talking of Lux, the washing powder, do you remember the advert from the 1960s?
“If it’s safe in water it’s safe in Lux<" I wrote to them at the time "Now, about my goldfish ....”

In other news, I’ve been spending more money that I don’t have.

I’ve effectively abandoned night action photography because the lens on my camera won’t stop down far enough to let in enough light to take effective photos. And when I crop them they are far too grainy, as you will have noticed.

But that’s the problem with budget lenses – and by that I mean anything under about 500 quid and I don’t have that kind of money.

Rhys and I were discussing that last night and he found a second-hand lens, a Pentax 100mm f2.8 telephoto on the internet . If you don’t know much about photography, basically it’s one and a half times as long as the maximum on my zoom lens (which is a 17mm-70mm) so it needs less cropping, and it only needs about 2/3rds of the light that mine uses. It’s an old lens but they had a very good write-up and were much in demand by action and portrait photographers back in the old days.

And the price? Well, only $129 (plus $40 postage from the USA). I’m not going to get anything better than that on my limited budget so I’ve bitten the bullet and it’s on its way to here. I hope it works properly and does the business for me, as I’m not going to get anything better without spending a real shed-load of money.

And in other other news, this blog attracts quite a wide audience. It has its regular followers and contributors, but it also has a considerable number of lurkers who just quietly read it. I was talking on a messenger program last night to one of the aforementioned lurkers – Sheila – who I haven’t seen around for some time. It appears that Sheila’s mother has suffered an aneurysm – the same that did for poor Liz back in March – and while she has had the operation the prognosis is not too optimistic.

So what would be nice would be that we all find a quiet minute or two and think about Sheila and her mum and send them both some positive vibes. They could do with some right now.

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EPIC HALL

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