Tag Archives: eric hall

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.

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Thursday 20th October 2011 – I THOUGHT …

… that you might like to see like to see a photo of inside the lean-to now that the wall is finished for now. As I have said before,I’m quite impressed with it.

The part that I have built up is the part that has been pointed. The unpointed part is what remained after it fell down, and that will be pointed in early course. It depends how the weather holds out after I finish the house wall (yes, that’s the next task).

In fact, it occurs to me that the best way to judge how much work that I’ve done on the wall is to look at this photo to see what it looked like last year before I started in earnest.

So this morning I started on the web site again but not for long as Terry came round. He’d been working at Lieneke’s. It’s nice to see good friends and have a good chat about this and that, for a change.

This afternoon, I packed up an export order of bits and pieces – yes folks, my first export order. How about that? We are making progress all the time, which is very nice to see, and very welcome too. and once that was dealt with, seeing as how the weather wasn’t so good, I’ve started breaking the concrete food trough in the ground floor of the lean-to, as that’s where the wall that will support the steps will be.

Mind you, the steps won’t be there for long as I have a cunning plan about that.

But the concrete is tough there – it’s reinforced and armour-plated by the looks of things. I’ve broken the shafts on two sledgehammers, flattened two batteries on the SDS drill, and chipped about a hatful off with the pick-axe. I’m on the lookout for some dynamite now.

As for the frog that I told you about the other night, well thanks to Krys (and how nice it is to see you again), the frog now has steps in and out of the plant trough. He’ll probably fall in somewhere else now.

And the temperature? 1.8°C at the moment. Winter is acumen in. Lhude sing Rudolph

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Wednesday 19th October 2011 – THERE’S SOMETHING …

… really so satisfying about finishing a job that you started. And seeing as I started on this back in 2002 (well, sort-of, although I didn’t really get going until last summer), it’s high time as well.

Yes, I’ve finally topped out the wall at the end of the lean-to, as you can see in the pic. It took about three buckets full of stones,2 buckets full of gravel and about 4 buckets full of lime mortar, as well as about 3 hours of work.

Mind you, I’ve picked up an enormous lime burn on my left thumb and it isn’t half painful. I’ve tried soaking it in water but it still hurts.

So when I finished the cementing I tidied up in there and that’s a first isn’t it? And then I went down the garden and found one of the sheets of corrugated iron and put that on over where I’ve been working, to keep the rain off because we’ve had 15.5mm of that today.

And I have to say it – I spent 10 minutes just looking at the wall. I’m really impressed with how it came out and, of course, we’ll have an earthquake tomorrow so it will all fall down again – you just wait and see.

As for the weather, well it’s rained on and off for most of the day and the temperature has plummeted. It’s just 3.7 °C outside right now.

Apparently it’s snowing in Germany and snow has also been seen in Scotland and on high ground in the North of England. This is early and I don’t quite like the sound of it at all.

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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

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Monday 17th October 2011 – THERE’S A LOT …

… to be said for being up at 08:00 in the morning at the first tinkling of the alarm clock. It means that by the time you have breakfasted and done your 3 hours on the laptop, there’s still two hours before lunch.

And it’s just as well because it took me a while to empty Caliburn ready for this furniture removal, and then there was still some time to do another little job that I’m thinking of.

You might recall that the 12-volt immersion heater has stopped working and had something of a meltdown. I had a good look at it and what has happened was that the heater element has folded downwards and shorted out against the metal sides. This has

produced a short-circuit that has melted all of the plastic causing the wires to short out (and why the fuse didn’t blow is a mystery to me)
the arc that was created has burnt a hole in the bottom of the drum.

Despite the catastrophe (and it could have been 10 times worse if the insulation had caught fire) I was still impressed with the heat that must have been generated from just 500 watts and my surplus energy.

But at least now I know why the heater elements are fitted vertically and not horizontally – it stops them shorting out like this. The issue with that though is that you need running water into the tank to make sure that when you drain the tank it refills instantly so that the element is never exposed to the air.

That won’t work for me because of course I don’t have running water. My solution would be to go for a non-conductive material like plastic, it I would find a plastic tank that would take water up to 70°C.

Anyway, the result of this is that I have no dump load for my surplus energy and so I had a cunning plan.

>When I was in Canada last year I found some black sockets formy 12-volt circuit and I bought a dozen with the idea that they would be so different in appearance to the usual white ones that it would evidently have some significance.

I cut out the wire from the dump load controller and put the black socket into the line. You can see it at the top right of this photo.

As winter approaches and the solar energy begins to die down, I’ve unplugged the fridge from the main circuit because I no longer have the charge to run it 24 hours. That will have to wait for next Spring.

What I’ve done is to move the fridge into where the water heater was and plugged it into the black socket. That way, from now on it will only switch on when there is surplus energy which isn’t too bad in winter. When there isn’t enough sun to run the fridge it will be cold enough to do without it anyway

It’s only 75 watts instead of 500 that the water heater gave out but nevertheless it’s better than nothing and it’s something useful to do with the surplus current.

What I also intend to do in the long run for the coming winter is when I wire in the big Studer inverter that I have, I’ll use the 600-watt one wired into the dump load circuit and couple up a small 400-watt oil heater that I have. I’ll put that in my room up here and it’ll take the chill off the place in the winter whenever we have plenty of sun.

This furniture removal this afternoon – well, I won’t say too much about it except that I was there at 14:00 as planned and Caliburn was all loaded before 14:30. For the 90km drive, we finally arrived at the house at … errr … 17:40 and it wasn’t until 18:10 that we got back under way.

So never mind the plans that I had about doing the washing and so on – we were lucky to make the Anglo-French meeting tonight in time. Still, what can you do in circumstances like this?

And so tomorrow I’m hoping to be back up the wall again. It might be finished this week – you never know.

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Sunday 16th October 2011 – IT’S A MYSTERY TO ME …

… how it is that Pionsat can play so dismally against mid-table opposition in their own division in the league and yet totally demolish a team two divisions higher up when they play in the cup.

Today it was the turn of Nord Combraille to come to Pionsat for a cup match and with the Miners being two divisions higher up, we were expecting something of a struggle.

But not so. Pionsat were all over a poor Nord Combraille side and demolished them completely, winning 3-1 at something of a canter.

You can read the match report here if you like.

The thing that is probably even more bizarre is that once again in a cup match, Thomas takes the opposition by the scruff of the neck and while his display isn’t quite as scintillating as two weeks ago (but then not by all that much either), it was streets ahead of his performance for the 2nd XI (4 divisions below Nord Combraille) last week when it took me almost an hour to realise that he was on the pitch.

And we had a gorgeous day for it as well. Here I was complaining the other day about the weather and yet for the last two days we’ve had proper summer days, the kind that you would be pleased to see in August. This weather is certainly bizarre.

Tomorrow I’m furniture removing and then going to the Anglo-French group. But I can’t wait to carry on with the house here. I’m getting all keen and enthusiastic and that’s not like me at all these days, is it?

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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?

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Friday 14th October 2011 – WINTER IS ON ITS WAY

This is just a small part of the huge flock of geese that assembled over my place this afternoon. They had been honking for about an hour and eventually they all put in an appearance right over me, coming in from every direction possible.

They circled around for a while, formed up in a huge echelon, and then departed hence. It wasn’t half impressive watching them do all of this and the noise was astonishing. But it is a fact that when they leave they take the sun with them, so I’ll be battening down the hatches and sorting out the firewood

And as as aside – why do birds fly south in winter?

Answer – “it takes too long to walk”.

And while we are on the subject of the weather, on the TV Monday night the weather forecaster promised us sun from Wednesday until next Monday. But I don’t know where it’s all gone too because we haven’t had it yet and the temperature has now plummeted.

Today was a momentous occasion outside on the wall of the lean-to because the beam is now in place where it ought to be. But it’s a bit of a disappointment because it’s about 0.5 inch too high in the vertical plane but about 0.5 inch too low under the chevrons. That means that the central beam is about 0.75 inch too high and the end where I’m working.

Ahh well.

Still, it’s progress I suppose. and from here on, the back-filling is pretty straightforward. It’s not going to take too long to finish off now and then I can plan my next step – always assuming that it doesn’t finish me off first.

But one thing is for sure – it won’t happen on Monday as I have a furniture removal to do – to Issoire.

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.

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Wednesday 12th October 2011 – I DIDN’T ….

… didn’t do so well this morning.

Put that down to a 05:00 bedtime and you will understand. I’m having major sleep issues right now.

And so with what was left of the morning I spell-checked all of my Canada notes (and that wasn’t a 5-minute job either) and then started on the web pages. There are only about 800 photographs – something of a change from the 2500 of last year. I clearly wasn’t working hard enough

This afternoon I carried on with the wall.

I put another two rows on that corner and infilled with stones and concrete. That should do the trick. Really, the stones are only the cladding and it’s the concrete that will be taking all of the weight of the beam and the roof.

Another two rows on there tomorrow and I’ll be able to put the beam in position. That should be fun on my own seeing as how heavy it weighs. But once it’s there I can build up the rest of the side wall.

I must admit that I’m looking forward to doing that and getting it finished. But I don’t think that that’s going to be any time soon

Tuesday 11th October 2011 – AND JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… I was up with the cock this morning.

But that’s enough about my disgusting personal habits, an early start meant a good morning on the computer and what with the glorious day that we had (summer is back) I put on line the Radio Anglais
website and also the updated footy website with the matches from the weekend. That’s a huge job finished, and finished quite early too.

I’ve even made a start on the Canada 2011 web pages, and that’s enthusiasm, isn’t it?

>This afternoon I went and attacked the wall. The breeze block that I had put in the other day had set nicely so I scavenged around for some decent square-faced stones from where the wall collapsed in 2002. It took ages but I found some really good ones and I slowly started to rebuild the corner. It’s a case of cementing two large stones carefully in place at the corner, and

then infilling behind them with several layers of stones and liquid lime mortar – building up little by little. Once the infill reaches the height of the corner stones, I can put another layer of corner stones in place and then infill behind them.
rebuilding lean to les guis virlet puy de dome france While it’s all setting and I’m waiting for it to be dry enough I did some more pointing of the wall.

Anyway, I’ve now two rows of corner stones in place above the breeze block and if you think that this is slow progress, then you are right but it needs to be slow and precise.

The large cross beam that you can see will be sitting on that corner and will be taking the weight of the roof, and also the two sides that meet there will be passing their weight onto it as well. There’s not much room for error

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Monday 10th October 2011 – AFTER ANOTHER …

… late night last night I wasn’t in too much hurry to raise myself this morning, even though for once I heard all of the various alarms.

Mind you, I wish I had hauled myself out earlier because summer has come back, and with a vengeance too. Nice, bright and blue even though the sun is rather watery.

And we are promised this weather until at least Sunday, although I’ve heard all of that before.

I spent the morning working on the football match reports from the weekend. I’ve done the 3rd XI and the 2nd XI reports, and I’m halfway through the 1st XI report. I’m hoping that I can finish that tomorrow and then turn my attention to the Radio Anglais site and bring that up to date.

After lunch, I made a start on pointing the outside wall of the lean-to at the corner where it’s pretty unstable. And I’m not sure that I like what I see there. It’s been pointed once but with cement. The cement has not adhered to the stones but to the old mortar in between. And as the water has infiltrated behind it, due to the absence of roof, the cement has worked loose and fallen out, taking the mortar with it.

And that’s the root of the problem here. What I’ve been having to do is to gently pry out the cement, rake out the loose mortar, fill the gaps with stones and then use lime mortar to point between the gaps.

I now have it stable – well, after a fashion.

What I have done is to put a breeze block in at the upper corner and then I infilled behind it. That will give me something solid and level to start with, which is the most important thing to do.

I can build up from there tomorrow and see how far I can get. But it’s all a mess and the only real solution is to knock it all down and start again, and I’m not doing that.

At the Anglo-French group tonight, Christiane came along – the first time for ages that we have seen her and that was quite nice. Things are picking up.

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Sunday 9th October 2011 – I HAD A …

… nightmare drive out to the footy today. I was hammering Caliburn on through the bends when twice the front end broke right away and I was all over the road and almost off it. I had a look at the tyres and although the front are quite worn they weren’t bald by any means but it didn’t half slow me down after that.

But a short way further on I found someone else who had been taken unawares and I came to the conclusion that the road must have been awash with diesel for some reason or other.

Mind you, I was lucky to be up in time for the footy and if Percy Penguin hadn’t have phoned me at 11:30 I would probably still be in bed now. That was because I was chasing a rodent around my attic at some silly time of the morning. God knows how the thing got in but I can see me having to check the defences again to see if there’s a mouse hole anywhere.

>Braving the rain (all 18 mm of it) and the hanging clouds that gave me hardly a moment of solar energy, I went off the St Angel to see the 3rd XI play – or at least, the 1st half of the match.

And what a transformation they were from last year. 1-0 up when I left, and they could have had a bagful with a little more luck.

The match at St Angel was so interesting that I ought to have stayed and if it wasn’t for the fact that I am now the official press reporter for the 1st XI so it seems, I would have done too for they won at a canter, 3-0

Meanwhile, the 1st XI went down 3-2 to a pretty mediocre Royat side. For once the Pionsat defence was mostly tight and in the right place at the right time for once, except in the left-back position and with a good left-sided defender on the bench, that was the only substitution that the trainer didn’t make.

For once though, the attack misfired and it was a log, hard game. It was only a couple of high “route one” balls into the box that gave them the two goals.

And so back here in the rain again and ready for tomorrow and starting work again.

But I still can’t get over this weird (lack of) substitution at left back. Franck the trainer has been making a few bizarre decisions lately.

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Saturday 8th October 2011 – WINTER …

… is definitely here now, just as I predicted last weekend that it would be.

Freezing cold, damp grey and depressing with hardly a drop of sunshine.

I was up before the alarm, which makes quite a change for just recently, and in Montlucon for the shops quite early. Disappointingly there was nothing that was exciting there and I spent almost nothing. Just a few Louis de Funes DVDs reduced in the Auchan.

But while I was in the Auchan in the TV section you couldn’t move for people watching the televisions. France was playing England in the rugby and had a pretty comfortable victory, much to the delight of everyone (including Yours Truly) in the shop.

I had to visit Monsieur Bricolage as well and they had two things that caught my eye – a two-storey wooden cabin – a display model – reduced to €5000 which is cheap, and also a small wood stove with a kind-of top oven for €275 – and I was sorely tempted by that.

The swimming baths at Neris-les-Bains has been taken by surprise by the cold spell. They didn’t have the heating on and so we all froze to death in the pool – all 10 of us in there. That’s a far cry from last week when it was packed out to the gunwhales.

At the footy, Pionsat’s 2nd XI played Aigueperse and won 2-1 in a hard-fought match.

In the first half they were all over the opposition and should have had a hat-full but in the 2nd half they went to sleep as usual and allowed the opposition back into the game. And they would have struggled if their opponents hadn’t missed a penalty.

>We had a floodlight failure too for about 20 minutes, to add some spice to the entertainment.

Overall, what with all of the drizzle it was all quite a depressing day. A foretaste of things to come, I reckon

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Friday 7th October 2011 – I WAS WORKING …

… on the lean-to wall again this afternoon

And I bet you are waiting for me to say that I was building it up. But you would be wrong for I was actually demolishing it.

Well, part of it anyway.

It all started off with me searching for stones, and that entailed rooting around on the floor in the corner near they might have fallen. To do that I needed to hack my way through the brambles and trees and so on and that took a while.

Once I managed to get over there, I uncovered quite a few as well, but I also uncovered quite a few cracks in the wall that I hadn’t noticed. And they are going to need dealing with.

So having rescued some of the stones I also set about rescuing the wooden beam that acts as a lintel for the support of the roof chevrons. That was bought new in 2002 or whenever it was but I never got round to positioning it. Anyway, it’s now roughly in place and tied onto the chevrons over where I’m working,so that it doesn’t fall down again.

But getting it up there led to knocking down a pile of stones that were there. But that’s not a problem – if they won’t stand a clout with a wooden beam they needed recementing.

But the tragedy was when I was reaching over to hold the end of the beam up – I put my foot on the wooden board that I’d used as shuttering when I started to repair the front of the wall all those years ago – but that broke free and fell taking a few breeze blocks and a pile of stones with it as well, and all in all it’s something of a mess.

But then again, that can’t be helped. I’m going to have to start lower down the wall on the outside I reckon and point all of that corner of the wall to hold it all together before I build up any higher. I’m going to have to do it anyway sooner or later but that corner is definitely melting slowly away and urgent attention is required.

>But what was impressive was that the concrete infill that I used back in those days to repair it – that’s all held up and it’s stronger than the actual stone wall itself. I’m impressed with that.

So having decided on something of a plan, I mixed a pile of mortar to start on the pointing, only to be denied by a torrential rainstorm. At least my tarpaulin roof is holding well up, and gave me some shelter while I used the mortar that I had just mixed to point the inside of the wall that I’ve been building up this week.

But talking of rain and so on, the temperature dropped to 5.8°C last night – the coldest for ages. I have all of the windows closed, the fridge switched off and a jumper on.

And I don’t know what happened to the cacophony of alarm calls this morning. I somehow or other managed to sleep all the way through it and it was 10:33 when I woke up. But all the photos are now up to date thanks to another morning session on the computer, and I can now turn my attention to other things.

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EPIC HALL

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