Tag Archives: les guis

Thursday 14th August 2014 – I’VE BEEN SPENDING …

… my money again today.

I went out this morning to go to visit someone who was finishing off the work on his house as there were some bits and pieces up for sale. One of the items on sale was a solid, proper Indespension Plant Trailer – 4-wheeled close-coupled low-loader with built-in ramps, 3 metres long and built to carry a tank. It has low loader sides but they can be raised by boards so that the trailer can carry sand and gravel too and it isn’t half an impressive beast, especially when you consider that it will carry all of my scaffolding too as well as the Kubota tractor and whatever else is lying around here.

But not only that – it was what was on the trailer that caught my eye. I had a goot poke around at that and although it’s old, it was in good condition, not leaking and not smoking, and the price for the trailer and the load would have been what I would have had to pay for one of the brand new trailers that I had been looking at if I had to go to the UK to pick it up. Consequently, I bit the bullet and that was that.

I’ve got to go back with some money and then I can take a photo of my new toy and you can see what it is that I bought. UNtil then, I’ll leave you all in suspense.

Back here I put the second coat onto the fascia panel and the beams of the roof on the front of the house (at least, as far as I could reach). Then I went to lunch.

While I was eating my butty I was interrupted by a visit from a couple of people from the Mairie. They were newly-elected councillors familiarising themselves with the area, and they had a little moan about one or two things here.

And that was my clue. I explained firstly that the untidy and unkempt land isn’t mine but is actually the commune’s land. And why I can’t move my stuff around any better is that the commune hasn’t maintained the land for years so I can’t move stuff past it. ANd so if the commune wants me to do something, they need to do something first.

Furthermore, I had applied to the commune to buy the land. Readers with long memories will remember that I deposited my application on 8th May … errr … 2009 – over 5 years ago. And the commune has taken no action about my demand.

This led to an animated discussion that went on for an hour or two, and finally they saw my point. They promised that they would bring up the matter of my application at the next meeting of the council.

We shall see.

After they went, I spent a pleasant hour or so sanding down the facade of the house where I’d drilled through for the air vents and then filled it. That’s comparatively smooth now and almost ready to paint, but a sad discovery was that the crepi had dried out and so was no use at all. I need to buy some more now before I can paint the facade.

I then spent a while sorting out all of the electrical fittings and making a bracket to mount the outside light that I want to fit. And by the time I had everything ready, it was time to knock off.

It was a dull day today with just a couple of odd sunny spells – at least until about 22:30 when we had today’s torrential downpour. This summer is really getting on my nerves now.

-1

Wednesday 13th August 2014 – WHAT A DISASTROUS DAY

Wasn’t it just?

I hadn’t gone to sleep by the time dawn broke, and I remember switching off the alarms before going to sleep – that was at 07:30. But the reason for this was the worst rainstorm yet for the summer. Even with all of the windows closed, it was deafening on the roof and I really haven’t heard anything quite like that which was falling through the night. It really was most uncomfortable and depressing.

It was 11:50 when I awoke – that was the morning gone of course – and after breakfast (at midday!) I carried on with the website – no point in going outside.

By about 15:00 the rain stopped and so I went outside and started work. First job was to put the expanding foam under the eaves of the house. I did as far as I could reach and then had to clean out all of the insertion pipes with acetone so that I can use them again. But this stuff is interesting – “there’s enough expanding foam in the can to fill 85 litres” – yes, and enough propellant in the can to get about half of it out.

Next job was to dismantle to guttering, and the far end didn’t need much help from me to be dismantled, leaving me with the thorny question of how I’m going to refit the far end later, where I can’t actually reach it.

Once the guttering was off, I covered all of the wood that I could reach with a thick layer of LIDL’s famous wood preservative, and that took me up to knocking-off time.

Tomorrow I’ll do the second coat of wood treatment and then make a start on tidying up the wiring. Once that’s done, I’ll refit the guttering. I’ve a feeling that we’ll be going to need it.

0

Monday 11th August 2014 – AS I PROMISED …

… I spent the day carrying on with the back-up. I would love to tell you that it’s finished, but no such luck, and not for the least of the reasons that the photo partition ran out of space.

Not only that, there are two other backups on the external hard drive too, one from a laptop of ages ago and the other is the continually-updated SD card back-up, and my next trick is to merge the two previous backups and then merge them in with the current one.

That won’t be easy as I need to keep the most up-to-date version of any file, and I bet that I’ll get it wrong.

So as far as I got, that took until 02:00 and then I crawled off to bed. But I did have an interruption. At about 16:OO Simon came round. That was “long time no see”. Anyway, it seems that his van broke down a week or so in Riom and was taken to a garage (the same one to which I took Caliburn in 2011) and they have been unable to fix it. The van needs to be taken – as a non-runner – to Montlucon. Could I help?

The van is too heavy for the trailer and also the towing dolly, but I do have something else and if I can find it in the desperate pile of rubbish that is the barn, I’ll go round and help him out tomorrow.

0

Sunday 10th August 2014 – AS FOR MY MAGNUM OPUS …

… I finished it yesterday. All 37,500 bytes of it. That’s 6,627 words and that makes it the 5th longest article that I’ve written for Radio Anglais in the four years that we’ve been going. And as I said yesterday, I’m now well in front of where I want to be and if I add in a recap about winter driving, what I’ve done this last couple of weeks should see us through to the end of the year and maybe even beyond.

That took me through to the early afternoon, and for the rest of the day I undertook another task that took hours and it’s still not finished yet.

I’m off on my travels in a couple of weeks time and as is my wont, I backed up the entire contents of the hard drive of the laptop, seeing as how I’m taking the laptop with me. Losing the laptop will not be the end of the world, but losing the data will be.

I remember doing it last year and it didn’t take all that long, but this year it’s taken an age so far and it’s still far from finished. In fact, it took me hours to understand why that might be, and it’s really ohh so simple. Each year that I’ve been to North America I’ve either had a new laptop or else there have been a couple of voyages very close together. This year however, it’s been 12 months since I last went and I’ve been up to an enormous amount of stuff in that period.

And then when you consider that last year, the laptop was brand new and there was hardly anything on it – in fact I remember leaving here without several of the important programs that I use regularly being loaded onto the machine and having to download one or two at the airport. I didn’t even have Paintshop Pro installed (and how that upset my routine).

This year of course there’s tons more stuff and it all needs to be downloaded not once but twice (belt and braces) and then sorted.

So that was the sum total of my day. I went out of the house twice – to fetch water for morning coffee and to take the stats at night, and I even forgot to cook my pizza for tea.

And I’ll have to carry on tomorrow too because I can’t leave this job half-completed.

0

Saturday 9th August 2014 – SOMETIMES …

… I have a bit of verbal constipation and I can’t find the inspiration to write very much (usually when it’s most important) when I’m trying to do something. On other days, quite the reverse happens and I can’t somehow manage to stop writing.

This morning was one of the latter days and between 09:15 and 12:30 I churned out a grand total of 4679 words on neighbouhood issues – and there’s still plenty to go at. This is is going to be another one of these mega-opuses I think, and it will put me well in front of where I need to be for when I return from Canada, which is just as well.

Once I’d done that, and had lunch, I braved the rain showers to go a-swimming at Neris-les-Bains. Once again, there weren’t too many people in the pool. And once again, they had opened up the sides of the pool. I’ve no idea why they do that. It’s not as if it’s summer.

It was raining as I left the swimming baths, and the rain increased in volume as I drove to the shops at Commentry. LIDL was having a sale of these elasticated ankle and elbow protectors and so I bought two of the former to deal with the issues of my cement burns, which still aren’t healing.

hanging cloud les guis virlet puy de dome franceOn the way back home, I was astonished to see this. My house is on top of that mountain and there’s a huge hanging cloud right over the top of it.

This is early evening in early August, remember, and a phenomenon like this is astonishing at this time of year in the evening. And back home, I found the place devastated. Bent branches and fallen leaves, and my verandah has flooded – only the second time ever that that has happened since I’ve been here.

But, as I said, this summer is rapidly turning into a disaster. I’ve never ever known a year like it.

0

Friday 8th August 2014 – WOW!

What a storm!

It was totally stonishing. About 8mm of rain fell in about 30 minutes round about 22:30. It’s a long time since I’ve seen anything quite like it. I even had to close the roof windows as it was pouring in on me where I was sitting, and that’s not supposed to happen.

Mind you, it had been brewing all day. When the boulangère came by this morning, she mentioned that there might be a storm a little later. And it wasn’t long after that that we had the fist lightning flashes. They kept it up from about 12:00 until about 15:30 so I was pretty reluctant to go up on the scaffolding during that period, otherwise it would have been me frying tonight. That’s the one disadvantage of having metal planks.

When i considered it safe to do so, I went up there. Well, not quite – I had to round up all of the tools and fittings that I needed for the job. And that took several attempts to make sure that i had everything up there that I wanted. I drilled the hole, a 16mm hole, with the Hitachi battery-powered SDS drill and that went into the stone like a knife through butter. It’s a shame that the batteries are becoming tired in it now, because it really is one of the most useful tools that I have around here. I must sort out some new batteries for it.

Fitting my home-made eye wall anchor was straightforward – with a little persuasion from a hammer it went into the hole that I had drilled, but tightening it up was something else. With a little too much force, I reckon, I sheared off the wedge that splits the interior of the anchor. Then of course I couldn’t extract the broken one, and so I had to drill another hole and start again. This time I didn’t use quite so much force when tightening it, so I managed not to break it.

Fitting the turnbuckle was straightforward, but then actually fastening the guy wire was almost impossible as the length of the turnbuckle put it too far away from the scaffolding for me to reach it properly. I was lucky that the wire was quite long, as I was able to put a loop in the far end, pass the wire around the hook on the turnbuckle and then around a pivot (the framework upon which the wind turbine is mounted) and with a rope in the loop that I made, pull it back towards me again.

With it securely tied around the scaffolding, I could perform a major feat of gymnastics, balanced right on the edge of the scaffolding on the toes of one foot, and reach right out to the wire to fasten the wire rope ties (three of them) to hold the wire together.

Then dismantling the temporary fittings that I had made, I could tighten up the turnbuckle. And to my surprise, it pulled the wind turbine perfectly vertical instead of leaning over about 5° to the north.

All of this took me until about 18:20 and so for the remaining 40 minutes I did some (but not much) weeding in the vegetable plots. And as I knocked off, it started to rain. “Perfect timing!” I said to myself. And then we got the lot a few hours later.

i’m glad that I’ve fastened the wind turbine with a second guy wire. With just one, it was pulling it out of the vertical and of course, one isn’t very secure. Ideally it needs four and while I can think of a way to do the third one (and i might even do it some day) the fourth will be difficult. Nevertheless, progress has been made.

On Monday, I’ll start to attack all of the rest of the jobs that need to be done while I’m up there. Let’s see how long it takes me to finish them.

-1

Thursday 7th August 2014 – FIAT LUX

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

This morning, I was wide awake early, a good while before the alarm, but there was a reason for that. It was absolutely teeming down with rain. So much so that I couldn’t go back to sleep and so I was up pretty quickly for breakfast.

After breakfast I was on the website for a good few hours. The main part of my trip around the Saguenay is finished but there’s a lot of rewriting and editing to do and that’s probably going to take as long as writing it.

By 12:00 I would normally have gone outside to work but it was totally pointless so I rearranged my little office space here. Things are so much better now I’m here in my little corner on the new chair that I bought a year ago. That’s why I’ve moved all of the computer stuff over here. And Rosemary rang up too for a chat, which was nice.

After lunch, it was still teeming down and so I started on emptying out the wardrobe space in the bedroom ready to paint the walls of it. I chucked the stuff downstairs ready to file it away, but now it’s all heaped up at the bottom of the stairs, even worse than it was before.

That’s because I was sidetracked after having done about half of it.

There’s the plan to run some cable through the side of the wardrobe so that there will be some power and light there. That was what started me off on my little journey off the beaten track.

Once that was done and I had the wiring equipment out, I wired up the light in the cupboard at the back of the stairs. Finally, I fitted the light on the landing on the first floor. Final task was to run a negative wire from across from the other wall at the head of the stairs.

12 volt LED light bulb 1st floor les guis virlet puy de dome franceI fitted a 12-volt LED light in each of the sockets and, much to my surprise, it all worked perfectly, as you can see.

Now I have light in the cupboard at the back of the stairs, and there’s also a light on the landing at the top of the stairs. It’s all ever so impressive.

And what was even more impressive was that the sun actually came out later in the afternoon but seeing as I was well on the way to finishing the wiring, I carried on regardless.

It was even finished by 19:20 which was a surprise too.

If the weather is fine tomorrow, I’ll be back on the scaffolding. Otherwise I’l be carrying on with the bedroom.

-2

Wednesday 6th August 2014 – I’VE SPENT ALL …

… afternoon looking for my special wall anchors. I’ve no idea where they might be and I’ve run out of places to look.

These are special wall anchors because they don’t have a standard bolt or a piece of threaded rod in them, but a bolt with an eye on the end and they are designed for fastening ropes and that kind of thing.

I’m not even sure that I have any, but I did at one time have one because it’s in the wall with one of the guy wires for the wind turbine fastened to it. However, I can’t possible believe that I only ever bought one of them. I must have at least another four lurking around somewhere. And I need one to use for the second guy wire of the wind turbine – one of the reasons why I’ve put up the scaffolding.

Mind you, in my quest for the wall anchors with eyes, I’ve found tons of stuff that I had lost (like a load of red wire terminals), stuff that I’ve spent ages looking for in the recent past (like one of the missing black jump leads), and stuff that I had forgotten that I had, like a toolbox full of the tools out of the Passat. And many more besides.

I’ve been tidying up too, and how, and repaired some shelves that I had built years and were about to collapse (it’s amazing how much my technique has improved). I’ve also ended u tidying all of the keeklamp fittings and sorted them out into sizes. I’ve also sorted out all of the ancillary fittings inclusing the turnbuckles and while most of them were size M12, I found an old one that was an M10.

And that gave me an idea.

I found a M10 wall anchor and took out the threaded rod, leving me with just the shaft. Then I dismantled the M10 turnbuckle and tried to fit the end with the right-hand thread into the empty shaft of the wall anchor. And much to my surprise, not only is it the same thread, it actually is just about long enough to reach down for the splitter.

home made wall anchor hook les guis virlet puy de dome franceSo now, about 15 minutes to knocking-off, I have my special Wall anchor. It’s not an eye but a hook which is not as good as an eye, but it’s the best that I can do and it might even work. I can fit that tomorrow and that will be the first job done, I hope.

Mind you, I’m impressed about all of the tidying up. I’ve not seen that part of the barn looking quite like this before.

-3

Tuesday 5th August 2014 -I’VE PUT UP …

kwikstage scaffolding front of house les guis virlet puy de dome france… the scaffolding at the front of the house. It took quite a while because it’s not easy to do it on your own and it becomes more difficult the higher up you go.

Not only that, it was quite hot today and so I was melting away in my overalls while I was up there.

However, by 18:00 it was all compleded and I accomplished my first task, namely to take off the shutters that I fitted in 2000 and which have slowly fallen to bits ever since.

This morning, after a decent night’s sleep for a change I was up early and working on the website as usual. But I’d been on my travels during the night again. I’d been selling all of my furniture at an auction including the valuable stuff that’s stored in the barn. Someone who had belped me considerably was really interested in the big dining room table but couldn’t afford however much it was going to be, and I was certain that it would fetch a substantial sum. However, seeing as how this person had helped me so much, I asked how much she could afford. She showed me her chips (it was as if we were doing this in a casino) so I resolved to push the price right up until any other bidder dropped out and take whatever money that this girl had.

0

Monday 4th August 2014 – I HAD A …

… bad night last night.

Whether it was the two cups of coffee that I had yesterday late afternoon, I don’t know but I was still tossing and turning in bed as the dawn was breaking. I managed to be out of bed at the usual time and I had breakfast, but I don’t remember too much about the rest of the morning. I didn’t make much progress on the website.

After lunch I went outside and, for the first time in 5 years, I cleaned out all of the stuff that was in front of the house. And there was a load of rubbish too. When I finally get round to doing it and finally have the time, there will be tons of stuff going down to the dechetterie.

That took ages to do, as you might expect. But once everything was moved out of the way, I started to fetch the scaffolding round from the farmer’s field. I’ve now started to put it up, and it’s not easy when you are on your own. It takes ages to start it off as you need to make sure that all four sides are perfectly level by adjusting the feet, and then you need to make sure that both pairs of sides are perfectly parallel.

Once the first row of the first bay is up (which is where I reached at 19:10), starting off the second bay and then building upwards is pretty straightforward even if it takes a great deal of effort. I’m hoping that I can finish erecting it tomorrow and make a good start on the things that I need to do.

-1

Sunday 3rd August 2014 – I HAD A LOVELY …

… afternoon out today. Rosemary rang up this morning for a good chat and so we agreed to meet up at St Eloy at 15:00.

At St Eloy we went to the cafe by the little beach at the lake and ended up staying there chatting until 20:00, such is the way of things. But it was lovely to get out and about for a change and the weather wasn’t quite as bad as it might have been.

Rosemary wasn’t the only one to phone up either. I had Julie on the phone for ages having a lengthy chat this morning too.

I had something of a restless night last night and was awake quite early. When I finally got out of bed it was only 08:40 and that was rather disappointing – so much for my nice Sunday lie-in.

After breakfast I finished off the tourism part of the Radio Anglais programmes and then hunted down some topics for the main text. I wrote two small articles that might do for three weeks or so – there’s planty of stuff in store that will fill in for the rest of the time.

I’ve also found another good topic that I can expand upon and if I do that next weekend I’ll be ahead again, which is where I want to be. I need to get ahead as much as I can with my impending voyage to the colonies.

-2

Saturday 2nd August 2014 – WHOSE SILLY IDEA WAS IT …

… to open the sides of the swimming baths at Neris-les-Bains today? It wasn’t actually all that warm today. The water temperature was 29.5°C in the pool but the air temperature inside was just 21°C. That’s a long way short of the usual summer temperature of 28°C.

I should explain that when the pool was built, it was a nice open-air Art-Deco swimming pool but these days there’s a marquee over the top of it, with sides that can be rolled up in the summer.

But today was not the day to do that.

There weren’t all that many people in there today either which was a disappointment. No attractive women of the opposite sex to ogle. Yes, I still eye up all the ladies, but I can’t remember why.

After the swimming baths (which unfortunately did little to relieve my cement burns) I went off to Commentry to do my shopping, and I was back home by 19:00

Before going swimming though, I’d been working on the programmes for Radio Anglais. I’ve prepared another live concert – something that takes me ages to prepare but having heard one that was edited and spliced by the people at the radio station a few months ago, I’m going to be doing them myself. I’ve also written almost all of the notes for it too.

That just leaves the tourist information for out travel guide, and with a bit of luck I can finish that off tomorrow.

0

Friday 1st August 2014 – I’VE FINISHED …

rear of house lime morttr cement pointing les guis virlet puy de dome france … the rear of the house this afternoon. I put in two big buckets full of lime mortar before lunch, and then two-and-a-half buckets full went in this afternoon.

Not only have I finished the pointing that I wanted to do, I managed to cut down a pile of brambles embedded in the wall between the field and the public highway on the other side so that I could get to part of the wall of the lean-to that badly needed doing, and I’ve done that as well.

While I was cleaning off all of the tools and so on, the 19:00 time signal went off and so it was 19:10 when I knocked off. Later, I crashed out once again while watching Carry on Columbus
. Many people think that that is probably the best thing to do while watching the film – it had some dreadful reviews – but I personally think that it’s a film that is rather underrated and deserves more credit than it ever received.

I’d been on my travels again during the night.

I ended up playing in goal for Pionsat’s football club through the night.It was an indoor match in some kind of Sports Centre. And I was total rubbish. I must have let about 5 or 6 goals in in a space of about 5 minutes but luckily no-one noticed 3 or 4 of them that had squirmed out of my grasp or under my body. I do remember Pionsat’s regular goalkeeper (no-one I knew) having a shot at goal that bounced off the sidewalls five or six times before finding the opposition net

From there I went into a little gift shop to look at the Teddy Bears. There was nothing that I particularly fancied but I do remember that I was carrying so much stuff with me that it took me four trips to get out of the shop. There were several cars parked outside and a few of them had left their lights on so I wrote some notes to stick underthe windscreen wipers of the cars. One though, a big white American muscle car thing, had a few kids playing in it and so I gave the note to them to give to their dad.

While I was working on the website I was interrupted firstly by the boulangère, and then Rosemary telephoned me for a chat. So one day I might even finish what I’m working on if I’m lucky.

0

Thursday 31st July 2014 – THE WEATHER …

… didn’t improve too much today, but at least it didn’t rain and there was plenty of blue sky. I even have some hot water in the 12-volt immersion heater that uses the excess solar charge.

The day started as it meant to go on, with me dropping my breakfast all over the floor downstairs. That was rather a shame.

And I didn’t go outside until after lunch either. I was working on the website as usual and then became sidetracked in some research that I had been doing and which ended up with me having to rewrite a pile of stuff that I had just written.

Back outside, I finished off digging all of the roots out of the back wall of the house and it looks pretty good there, although it took ages to do that. Next task was to start to chisel off a pile of loose cement from the rear wall, and that wasn’t a job of five minutes either.

By 17:00 I was ready and so I mixed up a pile of lime mortar. Two big buckets went into the wall where I’d chiseled off the cement and pulled out the roots. I’m about one third of the way along. Three or four more big buckets might do the trick next time that I’m out there.

And I finished bang on 19:00 too. That was good timing.

0

Wednesday 30th July 2014 – THIS MORNING WAS THE FOURTH TIME THIS SUMMER …

… that I’ve disconnected the fridge as there has been insufficient power this last 24 hours for it to function adequately. I recall having done that twice in summers in the past since the current set-up was established in August 2009, but four times from May to the end of July (and this is before we talk about August and September) is verging on the absurd.

Last night too I closed all the windows in the attic and I was sitting up there in a sweater. That’s the second time that this has happened this summer. All in all, it just shows you how depressing this summer has been so far

There was a similar summer to this once when I was living in Brussels. Everyone who went away in July came back drowned, many of them long before their holidays were over. Together with the wet, mild winter that we had, this is probably one of the worst years that I can remember so far.

Going downstairs to make breakfast there was a big hanging cloud everywhere again and we were totally stuck in it – hence the decision to unplug the fridge.

However as the morning went on this strange orange thing in the sky did put in an appearance and by the time I made it outside there were even some bits of blue sky visible. That was the cue to put a great big bucket-load of lime mortar into the cracks in the wall on the lean-to. That took me until 14:25 when I knocked off for a rather late lunch.

After lunch I dismantled the scaffolding as I no longer need it. Everything else that needs doing I can reach from the floor. It’s not as easy as you might think dismantling a scaffolding on your own and I nearly dropped part of it on my head.

I spent the rest of the afternoon digging roots out of the main wall of the house. The stinging nettle and thistle roots came out fairly easily but the bramble roots are proving to be difficult and the two big tree trunks that represent the base of the ivy
are proving to be almost impossible. I’ve made some progress, but only with the help of an axe, a couple of masonry chisels and a large crowbar.

If the weather is fine, I’ll carry on chiseling out the tree roots. Then I can fill in the gaps with a load of lime mortar. Hopefully whatever tree roots still in the wall would be killed off by the lime mortar and I shan’t be troubled by ivy again.

But with the blue sky and the sun that came out, I plugged the fridge back in. Now I can unplug it again next time we have a spell of a couple of days of hanging cloud

0