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Tuesday 21st February 2012 – IT’S GETTING CLOSE …

… to my presentation time.

For those of you not clued up to what is happening, a few months ago I was at a meeting of the village committee here in Virlet where they were discussing the programm for this year.

Once a month, they have an “event” when everyone is invited, and they ask someone to animate it. When they were deciding on the events, they had most of the meetings covered, but one date stuck out like a sore thumb – 24th February.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that 24th February is a date of special significance for me, and so it seemed like an opportunity. As you know, I’m all very much in favour of integration and participating in community events. I should be feeding something back into the community of which I am part.

As a result I offered to animate the meeting on that date, and I’m doing a presentation of my 2010 trip around the Trans-Labrador Highway

Much of it was pretty straightforward but I seem to have run aground somewha.

for some reason that I haven’t quite grasped, a presentation done in OpenOffice and exported as a Powerpoint presentation only displays the first 37 slides (which coincidentally runs to about 1mb) instead of the entire load of … gulp … 123 slides.

I’ve not yet found a workaround for it either.

And this is where I am at the moment

And I only have until Friday to do it too.

Tuesday 14th February 2012 – IT WAS A PLEASURE …

… to wake up this morning with a temperature of 13.5°C up here in the room. It’s been a while since I’ve had a temperature like that.

Mind you, what wasn’t a pleasure was being woken up by a phone call at some ungodly hour of the morning. However, it did concern work so I can’t complain too much I suppose, even if it did get me off on the wrong foot.

After all of that, I went to beat the bounds of the property. As you know, we had a right caning of snow through the night and I wanted to see what the weather had done to the place.

The answer is, as you might expect, that I’m properly snowed in and I shan’t be going anywhere for a bit. Luckily I had the foresight to leave Caliburn up at he top of the bank

As an aside, you can see the Sankey trailer and the Minerva, and also the old orange central heating tank that Simon gave me to use to store biofuels in.

And while I was checking up on the house, I had a brainwave, And it’s so simple that I’ve no idea why I never thought of it before – and I’m kicking myself for having suffered like this these last couple of weeks.

And so I dashed off for a rummage in the barn.

In the apartment in Brussels I had a small white kitchen table with two drop leaves and I remember bringing it down here. That had to be around somewhere and eventually I found all of the pieces.

I brought it up into the attic and assembled it in the room, and laid all of the kitchen stuff on it. It’s now making quite a useful kitchen worktop up here and I wished that I had remembered it earlier.

This afternoon I didn’t manage to do very much as I had a whole series of phone calls one after the other, and so it was pretty much a wasted day. Still, there will be other days.

Tea was baked potatoes and spicy beans, cooked in the oven. This was an excellent buy, this new woodstove.

But the temperature outside just now is astonishing – minus 1.6°C. That’s over 10°C improvement from last night. If that kind of temperature transforms itself into a decent daytime temperature, I might even have some water tomorrow.

And not before time either – I’m now reduced to melting buckets of snow.

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Saturday 11th February 2012 – IT WAS COLD …

… this morning … "ohh what a surprise" – ed … 9.5°C or thereabouts up here at 10:00 am this morning.

But that really was no surprise really because at that moment outside it was a mere -12°C. This weather certainly is ridiculous.

Anyway a blazing wood fire had the temperature up to 18.5°C within an hour and that was the important bit.

I stayed in and cracked on with the presentation about the Trans-Labrador Highway that I’ll be doing for the village, and by 14:30 it was done.

At least the text and the graphics are. I just have to make a powerpoint presentation of the photos, and that won’t take too long.

From there I nipped into St Eloy-les-Mines and did some shopping. And I excelled myself. Some potatoes to cook in my oven, and also some more oven chips.

Saturday night might be curry night and it has been for as long as I can remember, but not when it’s cold enough outside that half a packet of frozen oven chips will stay frozen for a couple of days while I had the rest with a veggie burger and baked beans.

But in Carrefour there were some young kids running amok, nominally (but not actually) under the control of a young woman with earrings and piercings through the nose and chin and the like.

And when she spoke – yes, it was in English. and we came out here to keep away from people like that, snobs that we are. Jarspur and Hooray Henries one week, chavs the next week.

I picked my way delicately to Rosemary’s after that, eventually, and we had a good chat for a couple of hours.

and so back here where I have a big fire going and I’m not moving.

The word on the streets is that things shall warm up dramatically on Monday night. The bad news is that we shall be covered in snow though. If it’s not one thing it’s another.

And once you get started, you’ll be surprised at just how many other things there are.

-1

Tuesday 7th February 2012 – I’M MORE AND MORE …

… impressed with this new little woodstove of mine.

Almost impressed, in fact, as I am with my galvanised steel dustbin.

Last night I cooked myself the rest of the oven chips, some baked beans and a veggie burger in the oven.

Tonight though, leaving the oven open, I cooked a saucepan of pasta, beans and lentils in a kind-of curry sauce. And it’s all working really well.

And I think that I’ve found the secret of heating the room even quicker.

A nail has fallen down the back of the fire and as a result I can’t close up the ash tray completely. It’s open about a quarter of an inch. and if I open the air intake just a fraction, it roars away like nobody’s business.

Another thing that helps is having turned the divan round so that it is across the room, it acts as a heat-stop and all of the heat is concentrated between me and the fire.

And while I’m sitting on the sofa, if I prop open the lid about 30° when the fire is roaring, the lid deflects all of the heat right into my upper body.

But this morning it was cold in here – all of 8.2°C in fact.

And that’s hardly surprising because last night outside, was -16.3°C, the coldest temperature that I have ever recorded here.

It was cruel downstairs. Even the orange juice was frozen solid.

I had to go to the mairie as well to check over the projector for this exhibition I’m doing on the Trans-Labrador Highway, and Caliburn had a little struggle to start – not that I’m surprised.

Back here I made a heat pad with that heated seat pad and some insulation, and throughout the afternoon it melted about 25 litres of water. I’m now seemingly melting more water than I’m using so that’s progress of a sort.

I’ve also made much more progress doing the ceiling in the bedroom, and the unexpectred good side of this is that in moving a lot of the stuff around, I’m finding loads of things that I have misplaced. Knives, saws, the large mitre clamps, and also the missing 650-watt circular saw for which I’ve been hunting for ages.

So tonight, with having a big fire in here, it’s quite warm and so I’m off to bed in a minute.

Tomorrow I need to use some of that excess water to make some polyfilla stuff to fill the cracks in the plasterboarding that I did the other day. 15 minutes will see me finish the ceiling as far as I can go and I can’t do any more until the joints in the wall are sealed and smoothed down.

-1

Sunday 5th February 2012 – SUNDAY …

… is a Day of Rest.

And so I did nothing – not even to write up my blog. I just stayed in here in the warmth, read the odd book, watched a film and did some more of my presentation on the Trans-Labrador Highway. And cooked pizza, garlic bread and rice pudding in the oven. I didn’t even manage to watch the superbowl – I was asleep a long time before that.

Mind you, I did actually do something else.

I’ve changed the furniture round in the room yet again and I now have the bed-settee going across the room in front of the fire where I can see the flames. That’s a much more logocal arrangement and it also helps to break up some of the draughts that circulate around the place.

I’m certainly living the nomadic life these days, aren’t I?

Thursday 2nd February 2012 – I HAVE TO BE …

… up at 06:00 in the morning GRRRRRRR!

Yes, having left Caliburn in the Ford garage at Montlucon and having arranged to pick it up today, the snow fell really heavily in the night.

And snowed to such an extent that Liz was snowed in at her home and couldn’t get out to go to work, and so couldn’t take me to Montlucon to rescue Caliburn and Strawberry Moose.

She doesn’t go back into work until Tuesday and that’s a long time to be without transport – not that there’s anywhere you can actually get to right now with all of this.

Anyway so ringing up the garage to tell them about the change in plans I ended up talking to a guy who I know who works there, and it turns out that he actually lives in Virlet.

To cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … he’s offered to take me there in the morning which is wonderful. The downside of this being that he opens up the garage in the morning and so leaves home at 06:30.

Still, beggars can’t be choosers.< So what did I do today then if I didn't go to Montlucon? Not much because when I went down to breakfast at 08:45 (early for once) the temperature in the verandah was -6.3°C and outside, a healthy -8.5°C. Yes, winter is here and you don't feel much like working. Back up here I lit a fire and did some more work on my presentation of the Trans Labrador Highway until the laptop battery went flat, and seeing that it was 13:00 I went to keep warm by cutting up some wood.

And I have piles now, but enough about my personal life.

After lunch, which was exciting as the water in the water jug that I was using to fetch water from the container in the barn was freezing over in just the time it took to walk 10 metres,

Another thing that I did was to into the bedroom and made a good bit of progress on the ceiling.

I had a few phone calls, not the least of which was from Dave in Hexham and that’s always a pleasant surprise.

Cooking tea was exciting. -7.0°C in the verandah and the food was freezzing rather than cooking, and washing up with snow is exciting too. But I’m not going far – in fact I’m off to bed. I need my beauty sleep.

06:00 in the morning. Hah!

-2

Sunday 29th January 2012 – IT’S BEEN SUNDAY TODAY …

… and so I had a nice drive out in the countryside in the freezing (and I do mean “freezing” weather. In fact as far as Terjat, where the home team was playing Target in the Allier League 3rd Division.

It’s a beautiful setting up there at Terjat, and you can see right across the valley to the snow-covered hills in the background. It’s over there somewhere in those hills, at the back of Montaigut where I live.

Another thing about Sunday is that there’s no alarm clock and so with no-one ringing me up at some stupid time of the day, I can lie in until 10:24 without the least pang of guilt, in clean sheets and bedding the bed in its “double-bed” position, back in its old place by the little window.

Luxury!

The temperature in here was 13.2°C and that’s another thing that I like about this new fire that I’ve bought. With the old one, there wasn’t enough residual heat to keep the room warm once the fire went out and the temperature would often drop into single figures overnight.

But this fire keeps warm for ages and it’s maintaining a reasonable heat (up to now, anyway). and first thing that I did, even before breakfast, was to light the fire again. And I’ve been warm all day, which is really impressive and just what the doctor ordered.

In the warmth and comfort of my attic I’m well on the way towards the end of my presentation of the Trans-Labrador Highway – one or two more days and it will be done, I hope.

The football promised to be a real struggle, in the cold (coldest day of the winter so far) and the wind. And with Turgid being 3rd from bottom of the lowest possible league in the Allier, and Target being one place below them, I’m not quite sure what I expected. But it wasn’t much.

But having been overly critical of the football in the Allier, I have to say in fairness that this was a good game. Turgid played quite well, helped by the fact that Target, while they weren’t “bad”, they were rather clueless and ran out of ideas whenever they had the ball.

In the Allier, where there is no official referee, it’s the away side that provides the referee. And so it was a Target referee in the middle today. And he disallowed no fewer than three Terjat goals (two for offside – on one occasion overruling the *home* linesman) and one for pushing in the box.

To be fair I have to say that I was in no position to make any judgement.

But despite the handicap, Turgid scored two more goals that were allowed by the ref, and should have had three or four more. Had those disallowed goals been given and had Turgid won 5-0, it would have been a fair reflection of the match. Third from bottom in the worst league in the area?

Not on this showing they aren’t. I’ll be keeping my eye on the fixture list for whenever Pionsat don’t have a Sunday match, and I’ll wander along here again.

And this evening, with a rip-roaring fire and 24°C on the thermometer in the attic, I carried out what is fast becoming a ritual on Sunday evenings, and cooked pizza and garlic bread and rice pudding in the oven bit of my stove.

At €270 or however much it was, this woodstove is proving to be something of a bargain.

-4

Saturday 28th January 2012 – IT JUST GOES TO SHOW …

… that those people in football clamouring for a winter break mid-season quite simply don’t have a clue about whatever it is that they are trying to say.

Here we are in the Puy-de-Dôme, having had our 6-week winter break in the mildest winter in the area since records began, and the football season restarts this evening.

And today we have had the heaviest snowfall of the winter and so all the matches are postponed.

So much for the winter break

But not that I am complaining too much. I spent the morning and some of the afternoon working on my presentation of The Trans-Labrador Highway for the local village social evening in a month’s time. and I’ve managed to reach the outskirts of Goose Bay – i.e. well over halfway.

It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good.

But at about 13:30 the snow stopped and we had a little thaw. That was the cue for me to race off to St Eloy and so some shopping.

And I was back by 15:00 with the usual stuff, but also two Harry Potter films, the director’s cut versions, for €9:99 the pair. I’ll have to see what Herry Potter is up to – so far I’ve managed to avoid those films (except for one that I caught a glimpse of – in French – with Marianne over Christmas).

This afternoon I’ve turned my room around again. I’ve done a lot more sorting out, repositioned the furniture and by the time you read this I will have the bed back where it used to be. Only this time, with a proper array of chests of drawers behind it for the clothes.

What inspired this was the fact that the new large set that I bought in IKEA in the spring, and the medium sized set that I acquired at a brocante 18 months ago fit together nicely and are exactly the right size to fill one of the alcoves.

But I’m surprised at all of the bedding and stuff that I seem to have acquired since I emptied out Expo. I can see me having a really good sorting out one of these days.

I’ve left Caliburn on the road at the top of the lane in case the weather continues to turn nasty. From there I can drive him out.

Because tomorrow afternoon, Terjat, who I saw last Sunday in a basement Allier 3rd Division clash, are at home again. If I can move around, I’ll go for a nosey to see if they really are as bad as they looked last week.

-4

Thursday 26th January 2012 – I DON’T SEEM …

… to have done very much today.

Mind you, that’s not very much of a surprise considering that I managed to sleep through all of the alarms in here this morning and was … errr … somewhat late in raising myself from the dead.

In fact, much of the morning was spent sorting out the wood that is leaning against the end wall of the barn, and then sawing up a dozen or so lengths.

The strange thing is that while the woodpile is slowly increasing, the number of lengths of uncut wood standing up against the wall doesn’t seem to have decreased.

Perhaps I have hit upon the secret of the self-reproducing wood supply – something that reminded me of the story of the Irishman, granted two wishes by his fairy godmother, asked for a bottle of Guinness that refilled itself every time he poured some out of it.
“And your second wish?” enquired the fairy godmother.
“I’ll have another one of those bottles”.

This afternoon I carried on with the wiring in the upstairs of the lean-to.

Most of that time was spent looking for equipment of course, but I now have two lights and two pairs of 12-volt power sockets. They are all wired up, but they aren’t wired into the circuit of course – I need to drill a 40mm hole right through the stone wall into the house to do that, and that’s something that is going to have to wait for a bit.

I’ve a drill that will do it – a 1050-watt SDS drill, but with the current that it draws, you need a brilliantly sunny day. And while a strange golden thing did pop out from behind a cloud for 5 minutes, it’s been about 9 days since we have seen the sun.

It shows just how lucky I was with that little dry spell earlier in the month that enabled me to do the roof of the lean-to.

Regular readers of this rubbish in one of its several predecessor forms will recall that I bought 2 x 400-watt wind turbines from the manufacturers in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 2002. One of them flies proudly above the barn but the other one is in the back of the barn because the blades on these turbines are rather brittle and I’ve ended up having to make up one set out of the two that I had originally. And the manufacturers never ever replied to any of my mails asking about buying s new set of replacement blades.

So a couple of weeks ago I bit the bullet and contacted a company in the USA that makes parts for home-build wind turbines, and I’ve bought a set of blades from them, complete with hub, to fit on the other wind turbine.

In what was left of my working day, I’ve assembled the blades onto the hub unit and what I intend to do tomorrow is to resurrect the abandoned wind turbine and stick the blade and hub assembly onto it, and then shove it onto a pole somewhere where it will catch the wind.

These blades have the lowest drag co-efficient of any after-market wind turbine blades and so I’ll be interested to see just how they perform.

-4

Tuesday 1st November 2011 – THE ONE THING …

… that I like about having made some space inside the house is that when it rains I can work indoors. And the one thing I like about it raining is that I have plenty of work to do that can be done indoors as well.

And so what with the pouring rain this morning I brought inside the struts for the stud wall-cum-ladder that I’ll be fitting inside the lean-to and I spent much of today working on them.

And to such an extent that I have two of them – the front two – now fitted and screwed into position. Mind you,that involved working in the dark with a torch because we are now on winter hours of course and it goes dark at 17:45.

The bit in front (nearest the camera) will be the wash room, where the washing machine and stuff like that will eventually be installed. Then we’ll have the steps up, and then a little workshop or something behind it.

That’s really all the excitement for today – I haven’t done very much else, although I made myself a really wicked aubergine and bean casserole kind of thing, with enough left over for two more days as well. I suppose that’s fairly exciting.

Tomorrow if the weather is good I’ll put up the scaffolding on the lean-to and plan the erection of the wind turbine. And if it rains I’ll carry on with the stud walls in the lean-to. That’s what I like about having choices.

But I forgot something.

If you have been following my website you will recall that I’ve been talking about the Nova Scotia Museum of Industry, and in particular the restored Mobile Technical College, “Shopmobile 5“.

Anyway I’ve had an e-mail today from the person who was in charge of the restoration project and he’s sent me a pile of photos, together with a promise to sort out a pile more stuff for me if I want it. Do bears have picnics in the woods?

I suppose that that’s exciting, isn’t it?

-2

Wednesday 26th October 2011 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… I was up early this morning and I managed to have a really good go at the website this morning. I’ve left Trois Rivieres and arrived at Cap-de-la-Madeleine where I’m having a good wander around the pilgrimage site.

Absolutely fascinating and full of the most unexpected irony.

So this afternoon I was up the wall on the ladder, and in the wind too, chiselling out the old sand-and-clay mortar from the top of the wall. There was so much that came out that I had to do two large mixes of mortar and that still wasn’t enough to do that bit.

And it was exciting up there for several reasons.

I was carried away with what I was doing and it wasn’t until it suddenly went dark that I realised just how late it was. 19:05 when I knocked off this evening.
there was all kinds of noise going on in the brush in the field next door and all of a sudden two wild boar shot out and ran across the field. The first wild boar that I have seen properly here as well. They are bigger and heavier than I expected and the earth moves when they run. They have a hell of a speed as well. And the racket that they make is astonishing. I was really surprised.
You’re probably wondering why I didn’t take a photo of them, and indeed I would have, except that I was up the top of the ladder and the camera was down below. After all, it’s difficult enough trying to manipulate a bucket of water and a paintbrush, a hand brush, a bucket full of stones, a trowel and a hawk full of lime mortar when you are up the top of a ladder, never mind a camera as well.

Tonight I made a curry and seeing as I have no courgette left I used tinned mushroom and tinned chick peas. And it didn’t half come out well too. And there’s enough for another two days as well. Ohhh the luxury!

So tomorrow I’ll be back up the wall. And quite right too.

-2

Friday 21st October 2011 – TODAY WAS ….

… a quiet day or at least it should have been. But Terry and Rob came round to fix Lieneke’s barn and no-one can sleep through the kind of racket that those two are capable of producing.

But what about last night,hey? Temperature plummeted to -1.9°C. A minus temperature – winter is flaming well here, right enough. I’m even contemplating lighting a fire shortly if we don’t have an improvement

However, never mind that for a moment – three hours and more on the computer and my visit to Trois Rivieres is well-advanced.

Trois-Rivieres is on the north bank of the St Lawrence between Montreal and Quebec. It’s the oldest industrial site in North America and the newsprint capital of the world. In fact all of my visits to the area have been overwhelmed by the smell of wet paper from the pulp mills so I’ve always kept well clear.

This year though I found myself in the town and my opinions of the place rapidly changed. The town seeps history from almost every pore and I’ve completely changed my opinion about the place.

This afternoon though I had to wait for Terry to move his van before I could get out to the post office and post that parcel. And I fell through the floor when I found out the price. I bet that it’s cheaper to fly to Canada and deliver it by hand. It makes excess baggage charges look a bargain

To the bank after that to sort out a few financial details, and then to Bill’s to fix his computer again.

This evening it’s POETS day of course and so I finished early – spending half an hour or so sorting some papers that date back to 2004. And there’s so many of them that it’s going to take a while.

Tomorrow it’s shopping and as I have so much to do it’s going to be a St Eloy les Mines quick half hour-type of shopping. And the washing is building up here and so I might visit the local launderette and sort it out.

>But I’m not really looking forward to tomorrow. I’ve finished all of my stock of Canadian vegan cheese slices and that is a catastrophe.

-2

Tuesday 18th October 2011 – It’s been progress on all fronts today.

This morning I had a good go on the website. For the last couple of days I’ve been making a start on the pages for the month I’ve just spent in Canada, and I’m actually on Day 4.

You might therefore be thinking that in another 10 days or so at this rate I’ll be finished, but I bet it will be nothing like. The first three days were pretty uneventful – it was on the fourth day that everything started to happen. I can see this being more like 10 months before it’s done.

This afternoon I’ve been up the wall again. Not as much progress as I would have liked, but the chevrons at each side of the wall that I have been doing – they are now nailed down to the beam and the outer and inner faces to the wall are now completed.

I’ve been infilling with crushed breeze block and a weak concrete mix and I’m about halfway up the centre of the final part of the wall. It won’t be long now until that’s done too.

It’s a shame that I couldn’t finish it this evening although I was doing my best. I was beaten by the dark (and I really DO mean dark) because it was 19:25 when I finally knocked off.

We also had some excitement elsewhere around the premises. I have a pile of dustbins, buckets and so on all around here in crucial places catching the rainwater to be used in the garden or in concreting and the like. A few days ago, the friendly frog who lives around here hopped into one and couldn’t get out. Luckily I noticed him and was able to liberate him.

This afternoon he had managed to do exactly the same thing. I saw him there when I went to wash my hands, and so I fished him out.

But badger me if, this evening when I went to fetch some water for washing up, he hadn’t gone and done exactly the same thing again.

That’s three times I’ve rescued him – if he ends up in there again tonight, well I’m afraid he’s on his own.

And we had some wind today – and serious wind as well, gusting up to 26kph which is not far short of a record for here since I’ve had the anemometer installed. All I need now is to fit the wind turbine up there and I’ll be happy. It’s high time it was in the place where it ought to be and doing the business

-1

Saturday 15th October 2011 – WE SAW …

… the geese yesterday but this morning there was a horde of some other kind of bird assembling ready to fly off for the winter, and this is sad. In fact it’s more than sad – it’s depressing. Autumn is coming to a close already.

No idea what kind of bird they might have been. I know that I’m a keen birdwatcher, but that’s not concerned with any kind of bird that you might see flying about in the air over my property.

And so this morning after my 4 hours sleep (I was still up at 05:39) I was up and breakfasted and then I attacked Canada 2011.

But not before I had taken a shot of the work that I’ve been doing. You’ll see how much I’ve built up over the last couple of days, and you’ll also notice that the beam is in position where it should be.

When I restart work next week I’ll be building up the stonework so that it meets and infills the woodwork. And tipping cement and lightweight concrete into all of the gaps, that will hold everything nicely into position.

It’s all good stuff, make no mistake about this, and it’s coming along nicely.

In St Eloy les Mines I bumped into Bill and we went for a coffee and a chat to put the world to rights.

But in LIDL I also encountered a woman who was discussing things with her 4 year-old son “Do try to control yourself, Jasper”
Help! We are being invaded by Hooray Henries.

Back here my return was serenaded by the sounds of flute being played in welcome. Yes, it IS that time of the year and Lieneke and the others have turned up. And how well Lieneke looks. She’s dropped about 20 kilos over the last year and it really suits her. She’s probably losing years as the rest of us are adding them on.

And no footy again tonight either. whatever am I going to do until tomorrow?

-1

Thursday 13th October – Just for a change …

… nothing happened today that was any different than the last few days.

I managed an early start for once and spent the morning on the computer. I have all of the Canada photos properly labelled and in some sort of order and so I’ve been sorting out my notes and putting the correct notes with the correct photos.

And that’s not as easy as you might think either. I’m … errr… somewhat disorganised. Anyway I’ve managed over half of that and if things go according to plan I can finish that tomorrow morning.

This afternoon I was back up the wall again and much of the time spent there was sorting stones so that I can find the best ones to use in the corner. That’s not easy either.

But anyway,I’ve now put the stones in right up to where the beam is going to go,and now I just need to find two stones for the side of the pillar. Once that is done and they are in place I can infill with stones and concrete and then drop the beam in place.

And when the beam is in place I can fill in the back wall behind it. That’s tomorrow’s work anyway.

And you can tell how carried away I was – it was well after 19:00 when I knocked off and that’s not like me at all, is it?

I’ve also finished the last of Tuesday’s courgette and lentil curry. That was a shame as I had been quite enjoying that. It’s fun to think of 1001 ways to use up a Combraiiles Courgette.

-1

EPIC HALL

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