Tag Archives: eric hall

Monday 10th January 2011 – I had a little fun …

…with the Nikon this evening.

On the way down to Christiane’s, I noticed that the church of Gouttieres, situated on a hill right across the valley from the main road, was clearly visible with there being no leaves on the trees right now. And it’s always well-illuminated at night and I’ve often thought that it would make a good photograph.

And so on the way back home I found a suitable spot at the side of the main road, set up the tripod and spent a pleasant 15 minutes experimenting. Considering that I’m probably a mile away from the church and it was pitch-black, I don’t think it’s come out too badly at all.

We’d been down to Christiane’s to celebrate Epiphany (I know we are three or four days behind but so what? The rest of the Auvergne is 200 years behind) and to cut the “galette du roi” – a traditional European Epiphany event. We were about 10 or so people there, but it’s the quality that counts, not the quantity and we had a very pleasant evening.

Today though, I did something that I bet you would never ever consider that I might do – and that is I swept up in the bedroom and bagged all of the rubbish. So at least I can move around in there for the next stage of the work and not trip over anything. I need a sieve to sift the rubbish to rescue nails, screws, screwdriver bits and the like and in the absence of such I made one, by the simple expedient of finding a damaged 20-litre liquid container, cutting off the top, and drilling a huge amount of 5mm holes all over the container. I tried it on the rubble that came out of the chimney and it worked a treat, and so I tried it in the lean-to on the debris from the wood I’ve been cutting and it separated a pile of small kindling from a huge amount of sawdust. I’m clearly onto something with this.

Tomorrow I can make a start on fitting the false beam that will hide part of the electrical trunking, and I also have to go to see Bill to pick up this immersion heater that he wants to dispose of.

And talking of water heating, the batteries in the barn topped out today. The first time since November.

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Sunday 9th January 2011 – What a miserable day.

Well, at least, the afternoon was. I … errr … don’t know what the morning was like. And having gone to bed quite early (well, for me anyway) last night, all I can say is that I must have been tired. All of this hard work and the early start yesterday have been taking it out of me.

So with the grey clouds and all of the rain that I awoke to, I was surprised to see how warm it was in here. Hot stuff indeed I must be, for when I went to bed last night it was 13.4°C in here, and when I awoke it was 15.4°C. But it didn’t stay like that for long as a huge grey hanging cloud appeared and brought a cold snap with it.

We had a footy match this afternoon – Pionsat’s 1st XI against Cellule. And while Pionsat’s team was well ahead of the opposition on possession and play they couldn’t do it on goals and lost 2-1, and the two goals that Cellule scored were surrounded in controversy. Pionsat are rather naive when it comes to playing the referee and were well outmatched in this department.

The 2nd XI were at Miremont – a team that was in Division 1 last season and who where crushed 12-1 by the Pionsat’s 1st XI last season in one match. I would have liked to have gone to see that match but “a man cannot be in two places at once, unless he were a bird” as the legendary Sir Boyle Roche once said. And so I came home and tidied up a pile of papers.

In other news, if you have been following my comments for a few years now you will know that I have been making a series of predictions, many of which are coming to fruition. One of the things that I have been prophesying is that with Great Satan deposing a pro-western Sunni dictator in Iraq and paving the way for an anti-Western Shia dictator, there will soon be such an anti-western dictator that Great Satan will wish that it had never ever deposed Saddam Hussein.

And so we learn that Moqtada Sadr, he who led the Mehdi Army against the Septics in some fierce fighting in Iraq a couple of years ago, has returned to Iraq and accepted a post in the Iraq government, seeing as his party won 38 seats in the recent elections there.

Watch this space.

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Saturday 8th January 2011 – I had to go …

…and lie down for an hour in a darkened room today.

Yes, I’ve been to order my windows for the bedroom and the bathroom. A whopping great €1100, for which they wanted a 50% deposit on the spot. I’ve never spent that much money in my life, and you should have seen the moths come flying out of my wallet when I unlocked it. These windows at Lapeyre are three times the price of Brico Depot windows but then again they are supposed to be 100 times better. I hope so.

Apart from that, there wasn’t much of any excitement happening in Montlucon. I’ve bought another pile of stuff that I need to carry on working in the bedroom and I did my monthly shopping. But I had a huge GRRRRR at the Auchan. I have €8:50 in credit on my card there so I asked the girl to cash it up – but having checked me out she then forgot to do it and if I’m not careful I’m going to lose this money. I only have until the end of the month to claim it.

At Brico Depot someone from a florist’s left a note on Caliburn for me to go round there to chat to them – one assumes about solar panels and the like. But there was no-one at home so I dunno what that was all about. Next stop was the swimming baths at Nerys-les-Hughes where I spent most of my hour in the water watching half a dozen kids aged about 9 or 10 having a load of fun on a huge foam-rubber raft-type of affair. It’s a long time since I’ve seen kids have so much fun without any adults moaning at them.

I was told that tonight there was to be a football match at Pionsat – one of the matches that was postponed from December. But the place was in total darkness – apparently the game has been re-rearranged for tomorrow. But there were lights on at Marcillat. Their first team had a game and so I wandered off up there for a couple of hours. A Promotion League match this was. That’s about one division higher that Pionsat’s 1st XI but in all seriousness Pionsat’s 3rd XI could have stuffed rhe both of them – at the same time. The standard was pretty dire.

But you can see that I’m slowly emerging from my winter hibernation – I’m getting ready for footy again.

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Friday 7th January 2011 – Ooooh – look at that!

Now, doesn’t this look impressive?

Yes, the wall with its plasterboarding firmly in place.

You can see where I’ve had to fit the plasterboard horizontally – I didn’t trust myself to cut a piece (with 40mm of insulation glued to it) just 3cms wide – discretion was the better part of valour here – and it doesn’t look too bad at all. Just imagine what it will look like with a new window there.

To be honest, I’m quite impressed with how it has all turned out.

But there are a few things that have made a big difference, even if we don’t include some proper studding.

cutting the plasterboard. Simon taught me how to do simple sheets but I’ve been struggling with these sheets with insulation backing. But not any more – my tenon saw went through it all like a knife through butter and did an excellent job
forget hammering nails and other messing around. I bought a bag of 4.2x80mm screws specially designed for plasterboard and while they were expensive they did a perfect job and I wish I had used them in the attic.
when I was in the USA at a Home Depot, I found a pack of 4 screw bits specially designed for plasterboard screws. These bits have a kind-of capped head that stops the screw at the required depth and puts a little countersink in the board so that you can fill over the head. A pack of 4 cost me $4:98 and it is easily the best investment I have ever made from this point of view.

Yes, having the correct tools and equipment has made a world of a difference to all of this.

Neither the plasterboarding on this wall nor the one on the left is finished though, and there’s a good reason for this right now.

The plasterboard is only 2m50 tall and the wall is 2m80 high. It’s in the 30cmsat the top where I have run the trunking for all of the electric cable, and now I need to cut sheets of insulation to fill over and around it. Once that is finished off, I’ll fit some plain plasterboarding over the top, with the section for the front wall being castellated to fit around the beams.

Of course being Friday it’s POETS Day – i.e. Pi… errr … Push Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday and so I finished at 17:30, had a good wash and shave, and prettied myself up all ready for the shops tomorrow. And I have a list of things that I need for the room (starting with the windows of course).

But I’m as impressed with my plasterboard wall as I am with my galvanised steel dustbin.

Ohhhh – and I almost forgot. I told you that everywhere warmed up this last couple of days. Well, I’m having another night – in early January too – with no heating. In my little room the temperature is 13.6°C. Hardly the Cote D’Azur I know, but it’s still warm enough to sit here. In fact I’m not sure whether it’s to do with the temperature outside or whether it’s anything to do with the fact that the insulation on the wall in the bedroom is starting to do its stuff.

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Thursday 6th January 2011 – I had a gorgeous tea tonight.

I finally managed to get my long-promised Bangers, mash and baked beans this evening. and it was gorgeous. The leftover vegan sausages from Christmas (and weren’t they nice?), a tin of baked beans, and I found a tin of spuds in the emergency supplies.

Yes, a tin of spuds, for all of mine have ended up in the compost. I know that you are supposed to keep them in a frost-free room but nothing round here is frost-free when the temperature reaches -13.5°C outside, and the whole crop had gone.

In the bedroom, the wiring is almost finished and I’ll soon be able to do the boarding. And I’ve been having tremendous fun with it all. There’s conduit and trunking and wires all over the place and it’s like 3 plates of spaghetti. Of course I don’t have a clue what I’m doing but that’s not anything that has ever bothered me in the past. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating and that’s when we will see if the place catches fire or not.

All last night and today we had a howling gale. It’s blown in one of the panes of glass in the bedroom window to match the other one that a rock fell through. I can’t board this one up as there won’t be any light getting into the room and there’s no point replacing the glass so I’m going to be freezing to death in there while I’m working.

But what I did do today was to dismantle the dump load from the electrical set-up in the barn and use the charge controller to measure the current being produced by the big wind turbine. And there was that much wind that at times there was quite a charge being registered. I’m going to have to get a decent charge controller with data facilities for the wind turbine that I’ll be mounting on the house. Stuck on a short pole attached to the fence that was going around like the clappers too in this wind.

This evening I was outside working until 18:10 before it went black outside. I’m using this final half-hour of my working day to have some sort of desultory tidying-up of the outside of the house and barn. Heaven knows it needs it, with the place having been covered in scaffolding for the last two summers. But for some reason that I don’t quite understand, I’ve been feeling quite enthusiastic today, the best I’ve been for quite a while. I think that I’m making some kind of rapid progress, which is cheering me up.

I’m not used to this.

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Wednesday 5th January 2011 – I bet …

… that you’ve all been waiting to see what my room looks like with the plasterboard on the front wall, haven’t you? So you are all in for a disappointment today.

Most of the studding is now done and it was a realistic expectation to put some of the plasterboard onto the walls, but we had a slight logistics problem about that. If I were to do the walls, I wouldn’t be able to get the wiring for the lights into the correct position – that needs to be done first. And so I spent all afternoon wiring. And that also involved putting some of the studding onto the ceiling in between the beams so that I can fasten the conduit in position.

And so all in all, there wasn’t much visual progress even though a lot of work was done.

At about 17:30 it was too dark to work in the bedroom and so I went outside and did a little clearing of where the new raised beds are going to be. And at 18:05 when I knocked off, it was just about possible to see what it was that I had been doing. The nights are getting shorter whereas my vegetable garden is getting bigger.The heap of wood in the lean-to is getting smaller too and I can actually see the concrete floor in places. A really good fire of garden rubbish to get rid of all kinds of stuff including the kindling in the lean-to that I am never going to use – that will be something to aim for in March when the weather improves.

But the weather today was good. This morning was bright and sunny with a cloudy and windy afternoon. The batteries in the barn are fully-charged and in the house we managed to get onto “float” mode – where the batteries equalise themselves. So it’s not far short of fully-charged here either. These last 3 days of good weather have done wonders for my charging system.

In fact, all in all, I was mostly in a good mood today with the way things ae panning out here. But sorting out my … gulp … 2400 photos of Canada is filling me full of nostalgia and I’m wishing I was back there.

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Tuesday 4th January 2011 – It was Terry’s turn …

… to ring up this morning.

“Are you doing much?”
“Not really” (I was chopping wood, as it happens)
“Fancy coming round here to give me a hand with the scaffolding?”
“You need to say the Magic Words”
“Liz is baking bread”

Round at Terry’s we put up the scaffolding on the end of the house wall and attacked the satellite dish. Although Terry and Liz can pick up the Hotbird satellite, Astra 2, which is the British satellite, remains quite elusive. After a few hours at the adjustment we managed to find a couple more satellites, but still no Astra 2. Careful research showed us that the Astra 2 satellite is 4° lower in the sky than the others and so this involved tilting down the dish, but then it was pointing straight into the barn of the house across the road.

Next job therefore was to raise up the dish as high as we could get it so that the antenna would clear the barn. So we built the scaffolding up to 8.5 metres and refitted the brackets and pole so that the dish would be at the highest point possible. Next problem was that the cable wasn’t long enough to reach the dish in its new position but that will have to wait until tomorrow as it was 18:01 (I made a note of that) and we lost the light. And isn’t that a far cry from just about two weeks ago when the light went at 17:20?

Today though was lovely and the drive down at Liz and Terry’s was magnificent. It was a beautiful Alpine morning with a few scattered clouds here and there.

Not so good here at my house though as I could only manage a mere 158 amp-hours, in contrast with the 195 (for that was what it was) of yesterday. But “only” 158 amp-hours – that’s more than I received in a week just a short while ago.

But it’s freezing again tonight and we may well have a lower temperature than last night’s -8.2°C but tomorrow they are talking about a rise in temperature and rain clouds.But for me I’d much rather have the freezing temperatures and the bright sunshine – my batteries would welcome the juice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow will hopefully see me start fitting the plasterboard.

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

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

So that’s what I shall be doing.

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

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Sunday 2nd January 2011 – AFTER YESTERDAY …

… where I didn’t do very much at all, it is my pleasure to announce that today I did even less.

Sundays on or near Bank Holidays give me even less of an incentive to do anything – apart from having a lie-in of course, and that kind of thing goes without saying.

Still, plenty of stuff to nibble on up here, some good DVDs and that kind of thing.

And did I go outside?

Ahh yes – I must have done. otherwise I would not have been able to take the stats, would I? But that’s about the only time, I reckon. It certainly isn’t any more than that.

So tomorrow my holidays will be over and I’ll need to get a wiggle on and start working again.

It’s not going to do itself, is it?

Saturday 1st January 2011 – HAPPY NEW YEAR!

And quite right too!

Wishing everyone the compliments of the season, and me too because regular readers of this rubbish will realise that it’s been a long time since I’ve had any.

it’s a Bank Holiday today and so that means a lie-in, and then a day of leisure where I do as little as possible.

Not quite though, because François was having a get-together and because regular readers of this rubbish tell me that I need to get out more often, I decided to go. It never does anyone any harm to socialise – including me.

The usual crowd was there of course – not very inspiring unfortunately. But nevertheless I’m glad that I went because Bill was there and at least I can have a good chat or two with him.

The good news to come out of that is that Bill has offered me an immersion heater – 100 litres – that he’s just taken out of his house. I’ve been looking for a small one like this for quite a while.

If I can change the element from 230 volt to 12 volt then this will go nicely in the barn to use as a dump load for the excess solar energy, assuming that we ever get any more decent sunshine.

Not sure when that might be.

Friday 31st December 2010 – Happy New Year everyone.

And this year seems to have gone out with a whimper. I managed once more to sleep right through the alarm clocks – all of them – and so it was rather a late morning start. But once breakfast dissolved itself I set about chopping some more wood.

Not that I need it (I’m rather overflowing up here right now) but with needing some space in the lean-to and being depressed about the general overall quality of the stuff, I’ve stood some more outside and covered with some more of that clear plastic roofing stuff. The idea being that if ever the sun reappears, it might dry out the wood under the sheeting.

I also chopped up a huge bundle of kindling as there was plenty of that in the way too and it needs to be moved on.

Once that was done I connected up a couple of batteries to the Rutland WG901 wind turbine on the barn roof. We’ve had quite an amount of wind just recently and it seems to be a shame to waste whatever electricity is generated, especially when I have a few batteries loitering around and doing nothing. I’m planning to move the solar panels and the main batteries up that end in due course, but that’s not going to be for a while, until I get a huge load of 32mm saddle clamps.

Arno’s bed is now moved, and once we finished he invited me back home to look at his house. He asked me if he could give me something for my diesel, which was nice of him, and so we settled on a nice hot shower. I explained my difficulties about having a shower, to which he retorted “Yes – you aren’t a member of the OUSA Executive Committee any more” – keen reader of my blog is Arno. But a shower meant a lot to me just then. Nice and clean for New Year, and it saves me having to drive all the way to Neris and paying €3:00 for an entry. So that was fine by me.

I’ve also finally managed my Christmas dinner this evening – it was warm enough to stay down in the verandah for the one hour and 45 minutes it took to cook it. A slab of soya protein, with vegan sausages, roast potatoes, sprouts, chicory, carrots, broccoli and some thick gravy. Over a week I’ve been waiting for this, and it was well worth it.

What was even nicer was that it was followed by some Christmas pudding (I got to that today as well) and soya cream. And that was lovely too. It was just a pity that I’ve had to wait all this time to get to it.

And so that’s the year all done and dusted. And for 2011 I wish every one of you exactly the same as you wished on everyone else for 2010.

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Thursday 30th December 2010 – SPRING IS SPRUNG.

Yes, quite unexpectedly we had a Spring day today. A weak, hazy sunshine for most of the day with a cloudy late afternoon-evening. And it was quite warm too – 10°C outside for some of the day.

I chopped up some more wood for burning and I’ve had to start on a second pile as the first pile is in danger of overbalancing. Wood is not something that I’m short of, although I do wish that it was of better quality.

I’ve carried on in the bedroom as well and most of the wall is now studded and insulated. It won’t take long to finish that off but it’s unlikely to be tomorrow as I have to go out to move this famous bed.

Mind you, it’s nice having music to work to. It seems to make the time pass quicker and it makes me more enthusiastic. In fact I’m quite pleased at how this bedroom is coming on and I’m thinking that maybe it won’t be all that much longer until it’s ready for occupation. Maybe a month or two. And then I can start on the bathroom.

But of course there’s the gardening to do. I need to build the new greenhouse, shift the old Ford Transit around, make some more vegetable beds and so on.

Even though things are progressing quite nicely at the moment, the work is just backing up and backing up. No danger of it ever being finished.

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Wednesday 29th December 2010 – I FINISHED MY CD PLAYER THINGY TODAY;

It’s made out of the old CD/SD card stereo out of Caliburn, a pair of speakers that I bought ages ago for the LDV, and then a pile of scrap wood I had lying around, the leftovers of various projects.

It’s really heavy and solid, which is just as it is supposed to be. No tinny rattles and reverberation, just good heavy and solid bass – exactly as I want, and it works perfectly once I worked out that it isn’t the red that’s the live cable but the yellow.

It does exactly what it is supposed to do and I’m impressed with it.

But before that I spent ages cutting up a huge pile of wood. It’s quite damp and airless but simply pulling it out of the lean-to is doing it a little good. And it won’t be long before I can start to use that room for what it is intended to be – a kind-of washroom and gas bottle store, the outside composting WC, some stairs up to the first floor and a general storage area.

It’s nice to see it emptying, and quite quickly too. In fact, if I knew where my huge sledgehammer was, I could demolish the concrete feeding troughs in there and get started on that tomorrow.

After lunch I started on some more studding on the front wall and I now have another length of this space-blanket insulation on there. It won’t be long now before all of that is done, and then I can start on the plasterboarding. This will be done with the huge sheets that have the insulation built-in and they are not going to be easy to cut and manoeuvre.

But once it’s on, then that will be that indeed.

Finally, I hunted around for more wood from the pile that I cut up 18 months ago and which was scattered to the four winds when we put the scaffolding up. A few more loads was recovered and piled up in the heap at the side of the lean-to and now that’s overflowing with wood with plenty more to come.

This woodpile is getting out of hand now – it’s amazing just how much wood you can have from just doing a bit of hedge-trimming.

And I’m in demand too. I’m wanted on Friday afternoon to help move a bed and then deliver it to Espinasse and then I’ve been invited to the Reseau Rural‘s New Years Day party on Saturday.

Yes, after all of the disputes that went on over the “Temoin de Whatsit” and the Teilhet goatslayers (for which I am still awaiting an apology by the way) a few years ago, you might think that my sudden surge to popularity is a sign of my own good character and likeable qualities that have been sorely missed by the members.

But the cynic in me tells me nothing of the sort.

In fact, following the spectacular collapse of the Reseau a short while ago and the general level of (dis)interest shown by anyone else, there’s only me doing anything (namely organising the Anglo-French Conversation Group) and hence there’s only me that has an active e-mail list of all the members.

And so if you want to hold a New Year party and invite everyone you need to come to me for the list of addresses. And you can hardly ask me to send out an invitation to everyone and NOT include me on the list of invitees, could you?

But then again, the definition of a cynic is someone who sees things as they are and not as they are supposed to be. And that’s me to a Tee.

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Tuesday 28th December 2010 – BACK TO WORK TODAY

Well, sort of.

And with not too much enthusiasm either, particularly as the morning opened with a rainstorm. Not all that much, but enough to start the thaw and with the snow sliding off the barn roof (metal roofs are wonderful) we were on our way.

I spent the morning chopping a huge pile of wood and there’s enough to keep me going for a week with that. A mixture of wood from the lean-to and wood from the old laths on the barn roof and all of that should burn quite nicely.

I’m also collecting wood that’s been lying around the place, and stacking it in the impromptu pile under the left-over bits of plastic roof from the verandah. And that seems to be working – they are drying out a treat under there.

This afternoon, after a long chat with Liz, I fitted the new radio into Caliburn. That’s a useful piece of kit because it contains not just an SD card slot but also a bluetooth telephone receiver and thats what I really wanted.

Trying to talk to anyone on my bluetooth “oyster” is pretty nigh impossible in Caliburn when I’m on the move. This has a mike that hangs down from the ceiling and plays the received calls through the radio speakers. That’s much more like it.

And so I then started to build the box to put Caliburn’s old radio CD player into – that will be my mobile workshop music player and household CD player too. I didn’t finish it as, no surprise, I ran out of light.

I had another weird dream as well last night. I’ve been having a few of these just recently. It concerned an area of a town that I reckoned was Crewe and how this whole area had been abandoned ready for demolition – the only premises still occupied was the derelict and run-down attic in which I was living and which was a total shambles of dereliction and decay – much worse than how I’m living right at the moment. And I recall having had this dream before. The dream then went on to feature a white Mark IV Cortina, and white must be about the only colour of Mark IV Cortina that I’ve never actually owned. And this one was being transported on my towing dolly.

But it wasn’t half a strange dream.

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Monday 27th December 2010 – BACK TO WORK TOMORROW

And so I had another quiet relaxing day where I haven’t done very much.

But I’ve made an important discovery – and that is that my little portable DVD player that I use for watching films – it plays CDs as well. And in all the time that I’ve had it, and after all that I’ve tried to find a CD player for up here, then I wish I had have discovered that earlier. Ahhh well.

The weather today was rather depressing though. It started off really nicely with some sun but by the time that midday came around it was heavily overcast again and rather depressing. But after the excesses of the last few days it’s warmed up a little and even managed to return a “positive” temperature reading at some point in the day.

Tomorrow I need to cut a stack of firewood as I’ve worked my way through the stuff that I had ready. And I’ll go for the dry stuff – the old laths in the barn. That has burnt beautifully, much better than the stuff in the lean-to.

But my little woodpile, covered by the offcuts of plastic sheeting, seems to be doing its job and drying out the stack that has been outside for 18 months. I tried burning a few pieces of that today and it seemed to be okay. So I’ll have a good go at the stuff in the lean-to as well and leave that to dry out under some plastic sheeting. See if that works any better.

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EPIC HALL

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