Tag Archives: lie in

Friday 18th April 2014 – I HAVEN’T DONE A TAP …

… of work today, you know.

Well, that’s not true. Through the night I was out on the Saguenay River in the Province of Quebec. Mind you, that’s no surprise because I’ve been writing rather a lot just recently about William Price and the Clarke brothers, pioneers of the lumber and pulp industries around that part of Canada.

No alarm clock either and so it was 09:50 when I crawled out of bed. And why not? It’s a Bank Holiday.

And so all day I’ve been working on my web pages and I’ve arrived in Baie-Comeau at long last. This is where our 2010 journey branched off to go to Labrador on the Trans-Labrador Highway.

Followers of the 2012 journey will be able to come with me along the North Shore of the St Lawrence River all the way to the end of Highway 138 way beyond Natashquan, and then didn’t we have a surprise?

Apart from that, not very much at all. Cécile rang up for a long chat and that was about it.

I’ve not done anything that I was planning to do today – I’ve been quite leisurely. But I don’t begrudge it. If I can’t have a few days off over a Bank Holiday weekend, it’s a pretty poor do.

-3

Thursday 13th March 2014 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER DAY …

… where I’ve not been in too much of a hurry to leave my bed.

I put that down to still being awake at 03:45 this morning, and so getting up at … errr … 10:20 is not too unreasonable.

I’ve hardly done any work either – well – not that kind of work anyway. The house remains practically untouched. But noticing when I went downstairs that the batteries were aleady fully-charged, and at 12:30 there was 50.5 amps going into the dump load and the wires were pretty warm, that called for action. I plugged an extension cable into the overcharge circuit and wired the 12-volt fridge in. That calmed everything down a little. The water still got hot (68°C) but the wires stayed cool-ish and the fridge worked.

I’ll leave it like that until I fix up the new batteries that will replace the existing creaky ones and then I’ll wire in the fridge into the permanent circuit for the summer.

I threw out some food and veg peelings that I had forgotten to deal with before I left here (some of them could have walked to the compost bin on their own) and then unloaded part of Caliburn. For lunch I went to fetch the bread – to find that the boulanger had forgotten to come on Tuesday, and that was really the only reason why I had rushed home.

I had to go down the road to the Intermarché at Pionsat to buy a baguette.

GRRRR!

This afternoon I updated the Trois Rivieres pages of my Canada website

. I took a pile more photos of the town when I was there last year and so they needed to be added on and the commentary written. I’ve also reviewed a few subsequent pages of my drive down the Chemin du Roy

and that has spawned a couple of new pages too.

So I’ve not been idle.

But I do realise now why I try not to work on the computer between 19:00 and 21:00. I get so carried away with what I’m doing that I forget to make tea and I end up going hungry.

And it’s 5 years since my dear friend Liz departed. I can’t believe that it’s been so long. I hope that she is sleeping peacefully. My abiding memory is just before she went for her operation, she was making out a list of names.
“Are these the people that I need to contact to let them know your news?” I asked.
“Ohh no” she replied. “If it all goes wrong, this is a list of the people I’m going to come back to haunt”.

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Wednesday 12th March 2014 – NO PHOTOS TODAY, PEOPLE.

Yes, you can tell that I’m back home. And nothing exciting ever seems to happen around here and I never seem to do anything worth recording, especially as, having disconnected all of the alarms today, it was … errr … 12:20 when I crawled out of bed.And if it weren’t for the fact that I needed to visit the beichstuhl I would probably still be in bed right now.

It usually takes me a day or so to recover from a journey such as yesterday’s (I’m not as young as I used to be) and so a day of rest isn’t such a surprise really. And there was such a lot going on through the night (and the morning) that most of it slipped through my fingers. But I do recall running some kind of detective agency such as that of Hercule Poirot, and I had three girls working for me. The youngest was telling all of us about a superb proposition that had come her way and how it was going to make her a fortune, but it was the kind of proposition that had “SCAM” written right across it in illuminated capital letters and I really thought that, having worked for me for three years, she would know better than to fall for something like this.

I didn’t quite do nothing though. With over 160 amp-hours of surplus electricity by 15:00, water temperature in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater off the gauge and temperature of 34°C in the verandah, I treated myself to the second electrically-heated shower of the year.

And not only that, there was enough hot water left for a shave too and for the washing up as well. And there was enough of that seeing as how I made a mega-lentil-and-green-pepper curry. On the gas stove too. The temperature up here in the attic topped 20°C today – a waste of time lighting the woodstove – I’d be burnt out of the room before the stove was hot enough to cook on

And do you remember the charge controller that packed up last year and mysteriously started up the other week? Well, it’s just as mysteriously stopped again..

-3

Sunday 16th February 2014 – SUNDAY AGAIN …

… and so in accordance with principles laid down for a long time, I had a nice lie-in (until 09:45) and since then I haven’t done a tap of work.

That is, I finished the radio programmes that I started yesterday, and then carried on rearranging my file storage system, and you’ll be amazed at how much room I’ve freed off on the external drives and there’s still plenty to go at yet.

Apart from that, I left the house just three times – twice to fetch water and once to fetch some wood. And that was that.

It wasn’t like that during the night though.

I was on the western seaboard of the USA and I got to hear about a safe that was being installed in a house so that the owner could put all of his valuables in there. I waited just until the safe was inaugurated and then went round there armed with a 3-metre length of 27mmx27mm lath (I’ve a few of those here as it happens). I attacked the safe installer with the piece of wood and I shot the householder, then made my escape with the loot.

Outside the house was a car with three people – 2 women and one man – who were waiting for me. I hopped into the car and said “where to?”, to which one of the women replied “Green Bay, Wisconsin” (home of the Packers as it happens).

Howeverwe were being picked off one by one by the Police and eventually there was just me, on foot, at the border between the USA and Mexico. I crossed into Mexico, and as I walked through the little fenced alley in no-man’s land (or “no-person’s land” as the legendary Turdi de Hatred once called it) I was admiring a llama grazing in a field. At the Mexican border I was admitted but the young Border Immigration officer wouldn’t stamp my passport. He said that just for a day visit it wasn’t necesary. However I insisted, saying that it would be a useful indication of my presence as well as being a nice souvenir of my visit and eventually he agreed to stamp it.

But why does all of the excitement happen through the night?

-3

Sunday 9th February 2014 – WITH IT BEING SUNDAY …

… I don’t feel bad at all about staying in bed until 10:30, even if I was in bed long before 23:30 last night. Decent sleep and li=ong lie-ins is what Sunday is made for.

And what else?

Absolutely nothing. The only times that I’ve been outside the house were to fill two kettles of water and to take ths statistics. And that was that.

I’ve been tidying up some files on the various external drives that I have – trying to bring some order out of chaos. Nietzsche said “out of chaos comes order” but Neitzsche never knew me.

And that’s your lot. I’m off to bed again now for another early night – ready to resume the conflict for tomorrow; See you tomorrow night.

-2

Sunday 19th January 2014 – IT’S SUNDAY!

And the thing that I like about Sundays is that it’s the day when I can do whatever I like (or even nothing at all if I so desire) and don’t allow myself to feel guilty about it or about doing anything more important.

Consequently, lying in my nice clean bed and refusing to leave it until … errr … 11:00 does not worry me in the slightest.

I did have one or two things that needed doing though. Liz had reminded me that we are in the studio for Radio Anglais tomorrow and so I had to finish off my notes about speed cameras and to prepare all of the hardware etc that we need. I also had to prepare some new data sheets for the statistics that I keep here, And what with all of that, it didn’t leave me very much time for anything else.

After that, it was round to Liz and Terry’s for rehearsals and I stopped off at Cécile’s on the way to check her mailbox for post, make sure that her house was okay and to take advantage of her washing machine. In the depths of winter I usually have to pay a launderette for my washing, so if I’mpaying someone I may as well pay Cécile.

On the way back, I was stuck behind some kind of car that thought that it was amusing to drive at 60 KPH on the road between St Gervais and Pionsat. I know that in places it’s quite a tortuous, sinuous road, but in other places you can put your foot as far down as you like with no difficulty at all. And so I did.

In the gridiron tonight, the Broncos were looking very effective as they swept aside a rather dad-looking Patriots side. Nothing spectacular or special, which probably means that they might be second-best in the Superbowl, but then again their fans will argue that they didn’t need to do too much this evening.

We shall see.

-4

Sunday 5th January 2014 – IT’S MY LAST DAY …

… of seasonal break today. And how did I celebrate it? I started by staying in bed until 10:30 am. Mind you, with all of the rain, I didn’t really want to get up anyway.

And after breakfast? I did nothing at all. Not even any housework. Just carried on working on these web pages that relate to my Canada 2013 voyage.

I watched a film this evening – The Horse Soldiers starring John Wayne.

I can’t believe that it was the film that he followed Rio Bravo because Rio Bravo is a classic yet The Horse Soldiers is an awful film. The plot is rubbish, the script is dreadful and quite a bit of the acting is thoroughly wooden. And how William Holden could put in such a pitiful performance when you consider what has to be a masterpiece of a role in The Wild Bunch. That will be one of life’s most important mysteries.

As for tonight’s gridiron, The Chargers stuffed the Bengals and the Packers can’t get going against the 49ers. I’d normally stay up to watch the rest of that but I’m going to bed. I’m back to work tomorro.

-3

Friday 3rd January 2014 – I DIDN’T GO OUT TODAY …

… either. And once again, wide awake while it was still dark and that wasn’t enough foor me to leave the comfort and safety of my own bed. In fact, we had to wait until … errr … 10:30 before I rejoined the land of the living.

Breakfast started the day as I meant to go on – I dropped my coffee all over the downstairs floor and that was that.

I’ve spent all of the day working on the web pages for my voyage to Canada. There’s tons of stuff of course and it isn’t going to write itself. When I start on summer hours, I work on the website from 10:00 to 12:00 and work outside until 19:00, but we are a long way from there right now.

Cécile rang up for a long chat at lunchtime, and that was really everything that happened today. A quiet day by any standards – I’m building up my strength ready to start work in earnest on Monday.

-4

Wednesday 1st January 2014 – HAPPY NEW YEAR!

It didn’t start off as being too happy though. The mango-flavoured artisanal lemonade clearly had an effect on me because I was up and down like a jack-in-the-box through the night.

Of course, you really wanted to know that, didn’t you?

I eventually raised myself from the undead at about 09:30 and had a leisurely, prolonged breakfast drinking coffee, watching DVDs, and listening to the high winds that we are having again.

Later, I caught up with something that I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while.I copied most of my music onto the copmuter ages ago and a few years ago when I bought my SD-card hi-fi I copied it onto SD cards to play it up here. And I bought a car radio with an SD-card socket, so that I could play it in Caliburn too.

I’ve been buying quite a bit of music recently too as you know, but I’ve never updated the SD cards, and so, as I had a pile of 2GB SD cards hanging around here doing not very much at all, I’ve copied as much of my music as possible. I would have done all of the rest too but I’ve run out of 2GB cards. If I can’t find any more anywhere, I’ll have to do the rest on some 1GB cards that I might have somewhere.

I’ve also been working on the website. I’ve let the Lesguis site run down a little so this afternoon I did the 2009 page and the 2010 page.

Maybe, if I don’t feel like working tomorrow, I’ll do the 2011, 2012 and 2013 pages and that will be bang up-to-date.

So Happy New Year again. I wish you all for 2014 exactly the same as you wished everyone else for 2013.

-5

Saturday 21st December 2013 – TO THOSE OF YOU …

… who believe in these things, a very happy Solstice to you. For those of us who are concerned with the supply of solar energy, then the days will start to lengthen tomorrow and personally, I can’t wait for that.

But last night anyway, not being able to sleep until 04:30 or thereabouts (shouldn’t have had all that coffee yesterday), it was pretty hard to be awake when the alarm went off at 07:30 and it wasn’t until about 09:20 that I crawled out of my comfortable bed.

The trouble with this sort of thing is that one doesn’t feel up to doing much when one is awake and after breakfast and cleaning out the fire, I was a little “distant” for a while. But then the shops were calling and I headed off to St Eloy. I bought nothing special except the fresh vegetables – Christmas isn’t the same without sprouts, broccoli and leeks to go with my seitan slices and roast potatoes, that’s for sure.

I didn’t do too much this afternoon either – I remember making a coffee when I returned home and then the next thing that I remember was that it was 18:15, so I made myself one of these home-made potato and onion pies for tea for the next few days, and that was that.

Outside right now, we’re having a howling gale. there has been plenty of wind just recently and I’m glad that I have my wind turbines.

-1

Wednesday 6th November 2013 – AFTER SOMETHING OF A LEISURELY MORNING …

… in which it was something like 10:00 when I crawled out out my stinking pit, I started to work. But I do have to say that it was nice to wake up at home in my own bed with all of my own things around me. You have no idea just how much I’ve missed all of that over this last 10 months or so.

So what have I been doing? The answer to that is that being fed up of living in a tip, I’ve grasped the bull by the horns and there are now 5 sacks full of waste paper from up here as well as 2 sacks full of ordinary rubbish. And I can even see the top of the coffee table, which is very good news indeed.

I’ve also made a conscious decision that I will no longer use paper to light the fire. Having used firelighters for the last couple of times of fire-lighting, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is much less ash in the fire than there ever was before, and also the glass window of the fire isn’t tarring over as much. So that is going to be a little progress. It makes more waste paper here to be disposed of, but that will mean all the more for the recycling bins.

Another thing that I’ve done is to clear the kitchen table up here. I have the old white table that I used as a wallpaper pasting table and it’s in a pretty disreputable state. Covered with clutter of course and so I’ve sorted out a lot of that and when I finally reach it in the van, I can bring up the nice table and chairs that I liberated from Marianne’s and they will look quite nice in here. I’ll need to buy one of those oiled table cloths because I don’t want to ruin the tabletop but I can do that on Saturday at the shops if I go to Commentry.

Finally, I’ve been sorting out the web-hosting issues that I’ve been having just recently. I’ve been told that the management of the web-hosting company that I’ve been using have all left their posts, meaning that the company will eventually run down and close, with the loss of all of the data. One of the employees however, with whom I’ve had dealings with before, has accessed the company’s server and saved all of the files to his own server and so we’ve been engaged this last week or so (hence the “outage” of my organ) setting everything up. However, we did hit a snag. The guy dealing with my webhosting tells me that it seems that my domain name had expired and the credit card, which was linked to the domain name via an automatic renewal, has also expired, consequently the registrars were … errrr … proving difficult. Of course, that brought everything to a standstill until I contacted the registrars, and the following conversation ensued –
“Yes, your domain name has expired”
“When?”
“11th April 2013”
“So why didn’t you automatically renew it?”
“Well, your credit card has expired”
“When did my credit card expire?”
“Err … 30th September 2013”
“So what happened between 11th April 2013 and 30th September 2013?”
“Err … can I call you back?”
“No – I would like an answer now, especially as you have been giving my webhosts some very misleading information about my financial situation”

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that my website is now back on line and all seems to be hunky-dory, for the moment. But it really was starting to be just like the bad old days of 4 or 5 years ago when my then-webhost thought it clever to impress her new masters by using her power over my website as a weapon.

I hope that we aren’t going back to those days.

-6

Sunday 11th August 2013 – “WELL I’LL BE …

… a suck-egg mule”, as the legendary Arthur Hunnicutt said to John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and James Caan in the magnificent El Dorado.

As you all know by now, I used to work for a major pan-National organisation and I used to keep my finger on the pulse of what was going on.

As many of my former “workmates” are constantly in the news and as I know their fashion of thinking, I can usually have a pretty shrewd guess of which way the wind is going to blow.

Many of my predictions on these pages (although not all of them, I have to say) have been proved right and have truly come to pass.

And as you know, I’m going back through my blog right to the very beginning in order to tidy it up, and I discovered that back on January 1st I had made the prediction that you see about three quarters of the way down this page.

What price my predictions now, heh?

Anyway, I’m glad that I had to get up and go to ride the porcelain horse this morning, otherwise I would still be in bed even now.

Mind you, 10:45 am is a decent time to heave myself out of my stinking pit. However, I haven’t done a tap today, except to work on bringing another few early pages of my blog up to current standards and to correct the shortcomings in the importation.

I have however had to amend yesterday’s blog entry.

Annie, who lurks in the background, finally burst into the public eye today (hello, Annie!) to point out that Edith Cavell is actually buried at Norwich Cathedral. Yes, it was only the funeral service that took place at Westminster Abbey.

And so for tea, I had the usual Sunday offering of pizza and garlic bread, followed by humble pie for dessert (and we aren’t talking about Steve Marriott and Peter Frampton either).

In other news, Cécile and her mum might be coming to visit.

There’s tons of small stuff littering the apartment that is too time-consuming to sell and much too good to throw away.

It’s basically free to anyone who wants to come here and pick it up as long as they give me a hand to move stuff and load Caliburn with what’s coming back to the Auvergne.

Cécile’s mum has never been to Brussels and so it seems like a good idea for them to come, take away what they want, and give me a little hand too.

And in other other news, last night’s dream has mostly flowed away out of my memory but I do remember someone stealing the washing machine in mid-wash with all my clothes in it.

That prompted me this afternoon to have a shower and do a machine load of washing. That needs to be up-to-date too if people are coming.

-16

Sunday 28th July 2013 – I HAVEN’T DONE …

… a tap today!

Well, not quite true, but I certainly haven’t done anything exciting, and the only time I left the apartment was to go to buy a baguette.

I had a lie-in (well it IS Sunday, a day of rest) which was just as well, as I was having an exciting dream. I was up a mountain heading for some ski slopes and I took a different route and ended up higher in the mountains than usual watching the people skiing down a different slope about 200 feet below where I was standing. I’ve been on this ski slope in another dream quite a while ago. That time I was in my red Cortina parked up on the side of the road on a sharp hairpin bend in all of the snow and I do remember in that dream that I was in the mountains, more or less in the same place, and there was no snow and I was taking a different route to somewhere that I knew well but wanted to avoid the masses. But back to this dream – I had to go out of somewhere and I had no shoes so I was busily trying to fasten some thick triangular slices of fruit bread or cake to my feet with thick lumps of butter.

Yes, I’m definitely cracking up.

Anyway, today, I’ve starting a new project.

When I transferred this blog onto my site here the other week, the images and tags didn’t come through correctly. There are piles of images that didn’t show up, and the tags have come through any old how.

One thing that I used to do was to prepare monthly pages of photographs and also monthly pages of what I was up to on the farm.

I let all of that go as a result of my visit to Labrador in 2010 when I became snowed under with work,

But now that my blog is in-house, I can use it to fulfil both of those purposes with not much effort.

Consequently I’m having a go at updating the images and linking the tags correctly. It’ll take me a bit of time but it’s much more preferable than doing it twice again for the same result.

I also spoke to my niece’s youngest daughter in Canada – little Amber (isn’t Skype wonderful?). She’s heard that I’m coming over at the end of August and so she’s given me a little shopping list. I just hope that I’ll be able to pick up the stuff for her;

And as well as going to Canada, I’m also pushing to boat out – quite literally – to Agistri.

That’s a small island off the coast of Piraeus in Greece and Trixi is holding a singing and yoga course out there in October.

I need to work on my singing if I’m ever going to be any good and as it all sounds quite intimate and relaxing, I’ve booked myself a place out there. It’ll be good to have a break like that and I’m quite looking forward to it.

Believe it or not, I have never been to Greece before.

-6

Tuesday 23rd July 2013 – WELL I MADE IT

And if you ask me very nicely, I’ll make you one like it too – which is a story that I have told before, but don’t let that worry you.

I left home just after 21:00 – stopped for 5 minutes at the Carrefour at Montmarault to drop a little fuel in (I was going to fuel up at the Carrefour in Riom earlier but of course we went in Liz’s car instead), then 15 minutes at Melun for a total refuel and a stretch of the legs.

I arrived here at 04:05, which has to be something of a world record seeing as how it’s about 732kms. Good old Caliburn.

But I cheated really, because I’ve abandoned my traditional route over the mountains and despite the péage, these days I’m doing it all on the motorway.

Well, not quite.

I’m leaving the motorway at Fontainebleu, passing around the town and heading for Melun where there is a cheap petrol station, and then onto the N104 – the Francilienne – at the other side of the city.

That cuts a huge chunk off the journey and completely misses out the suburbs of Paris. It’s much less stressful and I’ve had enough stress right now.

Except of course when someone in a Porsche Cayenne is overtaking a long line of traffic, sees the radar, slams on his brakes and cuts in right in front of me. He got both barrels of Caliburn’s horn and when he pulled alongside me to … errr … remonstrate with me, he got what can best be called an “offensive gesture” too.

I was in no mood for messing about.

Anyway, I can’t believe that I left the apartment in Belgium in such a tip. I really don’t know what happened. It was as if I had been chased out by zombies and if Marianne had seen how it looked, she would have turned in her grave.

I went more-or less straight to bed and then up at 11:30, and a leisurely day recuperating. And also doing two big machine-loads of washing.

Now everyone makes mistakes of course, but what counts in life is how you get out of them. And here’s an object lesson in dealing with issues.

Tuesday night is cheapo night in the pizza place down the road – all medium pizzas at €5:95 and as I didn’t feel like cooking after all of my exertions, down I went and ordered a Country Vegetable without cheese.

When I returned (having picked up some wooden crates on the way back) I found that they had given me a ham pizza with cheese by mistake, so I rang them back to complain.
“Ahh – it’s you who had the ham pizza then. What’s your address?” which I duly told him.
5 minutes later the manager was round with my pizza. “I made you a large one, to make up for the inconvenience” he said, so I put some cheese on it and ate it all, musing to myself that “that’s how you get out of an embarrassing situation”.

Yes, hats off to them.

So an ealy night. It’ll be a day or two before I recover from the jet-lag.

Luckily tonight, I found Marianne’s cooling fan. And I needed it too.

-6

Sunday 7th July 2013 – YES, IT IS …

… Sunday today and, as is usual for a Sunday, I’ve done next-to badger-all.

I say “next to” of course because in my effort to bring order out of chaos I’ve tidied up the kitchen table and given it a scrub, and I’ve also tidied up around the floor a little.

That’s not too bad considering that it was 10:00 before I heaved myself out of my stinking pit.

Not quite as bad as last week when it was 11:00 but it’s still good enough.

And I’ve made a startling discovery – I’m running out of water.

I know that that might be hard to believe after the weather we’ve had this year but remember that it’s at least 6 months since I cleaned the filters.

The volume of water that’s been cascading down the roof and into the pipework could easily have disturbed stuff in the settling tank and blocked the filters.

I’ll have to have a good look at that and lean the filters – it’s either that or there’s a split in the tank.

And Cécile came round with some more of my stuff from her house.

After much deliberation, she’s arrived at the logical decision which I had been expecting her to make, and it’s what I would have done too in the circumstances so I can’t say that I blame her.

She’s put Ice Station Zebra up for sale and she’s moving out on Thursday to take care of her mother full time on the Ile d’Yeu.

I’m going round on Wednesday to rescue the rest of my stuff and take a pile of her rubbish down to the dechetterie, and that will be that.

I don’t know when we shall meet again, but it will probably be at Philippi.

-3