Tag Archives: eric hall

Saturday 11th December 2010 – I SPENT A FORTUNE TODAY …

… in the shops in Montlucon. Easily €600 reckon. And poor Caliburn creaked and groaned on the way home under the weight of 50 breeze blocks, loads of pine boards to do my wardrobe (and why is it that a 300mm pine board costs €5.75 yet a 600mm pine board costs … errrr … €12.15?), tons more insulation, a load of wire and trunking and (says he, hoping it does the job) a new wheel for his wheelbarrow.

Yes, forget your €15:00 in some shops and your €17.95 on the tool vans that come by, how about a Brico Depot special at €8:75? Much more like my kind of price.

But I had lots of time to spend all of this money as I was up and about at some ridiculous hour and was actually camped outside the door of the new Aldi in Montlucon before its 09:00 opening time. And that’s a change isn’t it? Normally I struggle to make my kitchen by 09:00!

>And it was a gorgeous day to be out as well. Not quite your Alpine winter day but as close as we can get and the solar panels here on the house racked up about 180 amp-hours of charge. That was quite welcome too. We’ve been struggling for a decent charge for the last few weeks and I’ve been on something of an economy drive as far as the electrical energy goes.

On the way home I managed to fit in a visit to the swimming pool at Neris-les-Bains. I didn’t stay long as it was perishing in there but I managed a decent soak and a good warm (not hot, unfortunately) shower so I feel all clean for a change – at least on the outside.

Tomorrow I’m told (for at Auchan I bumped into Michel from the footy club) that there might be some footy – Pionsat’s 2nd XI have a match at St Maurice and it might even be on – so I might even have an afternoon out.

I’m missing the footy. What with this weather there has been none for ages.

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Friday 10th December 2010 – I ALWAYS SEEM TO BE …

… talking about the weather just now.

And that’s because there’s such a lot of it. This morning when I woke up I noticed the beautiful clear blue skies. “Ahhh – a nice Alpine winter day” I mused, and hauled myself out of bed to see the ammeter run off the clock.

But no sooner had I arisen then the clouds blew themselves back in again and that was that. I lose count of how many days we’ve had like that now.

So as it wasn’t as cold as yesterday I spent the morning clearing out a pile of rubbish from Caliburn. If I wake up at anything like early I’ll be off to Montlucon for a pile of shopping including a load of stuff from Brico Depot. There’s tons of stuff that I need.

Once that was done (and still no satnav) I carried on emptying out the old roofing tiles from the bedroom. I’ve been up and down those steps like a yo-yo with probably 50 buckets or so and I reckon that another hour or so on Monday will see the job done. Once all of that is gone I can finish off the insulation and the plasterboarding instead of doing it bit by bit.

But that won’t be tomorrow – I’m shopping!

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Thursday 9th December 2010 – I WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE WEATHER.

I woke up this morning … "DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH " – ed …to -2°C and a covering of snow everywhere.

And perishing cold it was too. It snookered my plans of digging up the chicory and blanching it – I needed a hammer and chisel to get into the soil.

So instead, after cutting a pile of wood, I started to wire up the wind turbine on the barn to some batteries I had lying around. I may as well try to make use of some of the wind that we might have.

But that was a perishing cold job too and by the time that lunch came around and I still hadn’t finished and I was frozen to the marrow I abandoned that idea too.

After lunch I made a start on moving some of the old slate that is in the bedroom. And after about 50 bucketfuls up and down stairs you can just about notice the difference. I had no idea how much there is in that room. I’ll be here until next Christmas trying to shift it all.

But at least I’ve shifted enough so that I can get the next load of insulation onto the wall. I can do that tomorrow if we still have sub-arctic temperatures.

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Wednesday 8th December 2010 – AND IN A MOST AMAZING PIECE OF NEWS …

… It’s just after 01:00, I’m about to go to bed, and I haven’t had the heating on all day.

When I came upstairs after knocking off work at 18:00 it was 13.8°C up here. What with me being in the room and the laptop on, it quickly rose to 14.4°C, reached a high of 15.5°C and now is down to 13.7°C.

I could have put the heating on, I suppose, but I was determined to stick a day in December without it because there probably won’t be another one. The weather has broken again – the south-westerly gales that have been keeping us warm these last few days collided with a north-easterly weather front this afternoon, we had a thunderstorm and it’s been a torrential downpour ever since.

It’s snowing in Paris and the temperature has dropped considerably outside and I reckon that winter might be coming back. That’s my forecast anyway.

So as it was so nice today, at least earlier on, I hung out my washing to dry it (and had to take it in at about 15:00) and dug up my potatoes. Not as many today as there were the other day. These beds that I have been digging up are the lowest in the run, they are fairly waterlogged and many of the potatoes have rotted with the damp.

I’m going to have to get some compost from St Eloy to raise up the level of the bed and I’ll also need to mix some sand in. That’ll help the drainage.

I’ve also made a start (well, sort-of) on pulling up the brambles and weeds and ground alder with the idea of letting more light into the bottom of the vegetable patch in the hope that any sun that we might have will dry things out a little.

I stopped the beds where they were because that was where the fruit trees began, but they gave me nothing at all this year and haven’t done for a while so I reckon I’ll pull them up too and put another row of raised beds in. Not that I want particularly to grow more crops – I just think that they can be spaced out a little more.

Tomorrow I’m going to have a go at getting my chicory to blanch. I’ll dig up a couple and crop the leaves, and then bury them in a large flower pot to see if they will push up some shoots. That’s something else I have never done before.

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Tuesday 7th December 2010 – I HAD A DAY OUT TODAY.

I was quietly drinking a coffee ready to go out and cut wood for this evening when Liz rang me. “Terry and I are on our way to Montlucon. Anything you want?”

Well, as it happens, this very morning I had been making a list of things that I want from Montlucon so I enquired “will you be going to Brico Depot?”
“Of course”
“Well, do you want an extra passenger?”
And so instead of working on my bedroom, I went to Montlucon instead.

I tried a couple of places but no wheel for Caliburn and I also bought a few useful things, including a small coffee pot thingy to fit on my little stove (€25 in the Auchan but only €6 in Gifi) but what was so depressing about the journey was that blasted flaming perishing Brico Depot was blasted flaming well closed for perishing stock taking.

So 30 kms there and 30 kms back for me (and add on another 20 kms each way for Liz and Terry) and the place was closed. So no extra insulation, no bits to finish off the wardrobe.

GRRRRRRRRR at Brico Depot!

But the temperature is crazy right now. It was a grey hazy day with just the odd burst of sun through the clouds but the temperature reached 15°C today. In the heat exchanger it reached 22.3°C. In a space of just about 36 hours the temperature has increased 20°C.

There’s clearly something wrong with this weather right now. But I’m not worrying about it. I didn’t get much sleep last night so I’m having an early night.

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Monday 6th December 2010 – WHAT A DRAMATIC …

… change in the weather!

The temperature in my room this morning when I woke up was a balmy 11.2°C this morning – a long time since it’s been this high. And outside it was positively pouring with rain – no surprise there.

But in the verandah we had a pleasant 8°C, and there was an even-better 9°C outside. These figures aren’t bad for a December, especially after the winter we have just had. And the change is dramatic – just a day and a half for the temperature to shoot up.

So after the usual firewood-chopping session (which is diminishing the pile of wood in the lean-to and it won’t be long before I can get to where the stairs will be going) and a long chat with Liz and Terry on the phone I came back up here and restarted on the bedroom

I’ve put another length of insulation on the wall and then I fastened the two conduits to the battens – one conduit taking the 230 volt power and the other one taking the 12 volt power.

Once the cable was in the conduits I made a start on putting the polystyrene insulation on the walls but I ran out of light. With this appalling weather it was dark at 16:26 this afternoon.

So despite the rain (we had 17mm today) it was quite warm outside so I moved one of the two huge piles of recycled bricks out of the way of the pathway down to the garden. They are all stacked up neatly against the barn wall now.

But I have noticed that with the dramatically severe weather followed by the equally-dramatically severe thaw, all of the brush has dramatically died down and I’m starting to find things that I mislaid around the garden. It won’t be long before it will be time to start on the landscaping, version 2011.

In this version I’ll be building the greenhouse, moving the two halves of the old Ford Transit, moving a pile of unwanted trees and digging a couple more beds.

It seems that work never stops around here.

Except on a Sunday of course.

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Sunday 5th December 2010 – I WOKE UP THIS MORNING …

… (and doesn’t that sound like the opening line of a really good blues song, but what with the Prozac and so on, I haven’t had the blues for ages) at about 07:00 to the sound of a fast car coming down the track at the side here and slamming to a halt.

A quick peek out of the window revealed no car at all so, somewhat puzzled, I went back to bed.

A couple of minutes later I heard another car do the same thing. And so another quick peek, and once again no car.

But one thing that I did notice, and which was probably the noise that I had heard, and that was that all of the snow had disappeared off the barn roof and fallen to the floor.

That’s the thing with tin roofs as I am finding out – snow doesn’t stick to them and the slightest raise in temperature is enough to melt the adhesion.

And the temperature did rise too, but brought with it the rain. In fact, it’s rained non-stop all day. A grey miserable depressing day indeed, but at least it was warmer than the last few days. Temperature reached 5°C today.

I finally woke up at about … errr … 12:00 and heaved myself out of bed. For most of the day I’ve been doing a little tidying up and reading a book while warming myself up with this little woodstove. It’s Sunday and it’s my day of rest.

And in other news, I see that one of the wikileaks documents states that Saudi Arabia is the major source of funds for Al-Qaida. This will come as quite a surprise to anyone except the regular readers of my pages, as I have been saying this for years. Bin Laden’s family is the fourth-richest in the whole country and the family-controlled companies have their fingers in so many multi-national projects of all types.

In fact, a brief scan of these pages over the last few years has produced about a dozen things that I have been saying for years that have been subsequently been confirmed by either the USA or the UK. The world ought to be taking much more notice of me than it does, I reckon.

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Saturday 4th December 2010 – IT TOOK ME WELL OVER AN HOUR …

… to dig Caliburn out of a snowdrift this morning. The weather broke and we had a glorious Alpine winter’s day for a change (at least until early afternoon) and seeing as supplies are getting low I decided to go into St Eloy and do some shopping.

But that useless whatever in the snowplough – he’s been down the lane and instead of coming down to me and clearing out, he drove past down the other lane to where there is absolutely no-one at all and left me with a big snowbank across the top of the hill.

So after chopping more wood and so on, clearing snow from the cloches, the heat exchanger, the solar water, the solar lights and the compost heater, I dug Caliburn out and he’s now mobile.

After a wash I limped gingerly into St Eloy (you have no idea how bad the roads are) and not only did I do my shopping I did a pile of washing too in the laundry. Quite a big stack had built up around here and there’s no possibility of doing it myself here in these conditions.

What with one thing and another, though, I was late getting to the shops and so I didn’t have much time to use the dryer there as I wanted to be back before dark and it starting to freeze again. So I have a huge pile of damp washing hanging up in the verandah and I don’t know when it will ever dry.

But back to this Alpine morning. I’ve noticed quite often that once a cloudy day ends and night falls, the weather front shifts by about 50 miles and we have a marvellous Alpine night with millions of stars. And as soon as it dawns the weather front shifts back down again and we are plunged back into doom and gloom.

This morning though the sky stayed clear enough for me to have a decent charge on the batteries for the first time since I don’t know when and tonight is clear again so who knows? We may even have a decent day tomorrow but I am not holding my breath.

In other news, I’ve had another letter from the car hire people. Having given up on the idea of trying to stick me for excess mileage they are now trying to charge me $110 for cleaning Casey, saying that I returned it in a dirty conditions.

I think that this is outrageous and I have a good mind to write and tell them so. Of course I would never ever hire a car and get in into an appalling state of (lack of) cleanliness. regular readers of these pages will of course be well aware that in matters of tidiness and cleanliness I am second to none.

Of course I’m several thousand miles away from being in a position to dispute the charge so I don’t know what I can do about it. It’s certainly not fair – as if I would ever get a hire car into such a condition.

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Friday 3rd December 2014 – IT’S STILL SNOWING.

We had a pasting through the night again so the first job this morning was to stick my head out of the skylights and brush it off the solar panels.

Mind you, I needn’t have bothered – I had just over 1 amp-hour of solar energy today. Thick grey clouds and the odd heavy snowfall was the order of the day, and I’m still snowed in.

Freezing cold as well – it stayed negative all day, even in the verandah and that’s no surprise – the huge layer of snow on the roof is keeping any kind of heat away from the inside.

So I’ve tidied up a little more in the bedroom and fitted some temporary shelves in the wardrobe for putting the tools and so on. And then I fitted some more studding to one of the walls ready for some more insulation. I need to get a move on.

I’ve also started to take out the old slate. It’s going to take ages but it will take even longer if I don’t do it. I’ve decided to take two bucket loads with me each time I go downstairs – that’ll be a good plan.

When it was dark I went into the barn and did some more stuff in there until 18:00 and then I came in. I wasn’t going to hang around in that cold weather. 5.1°C it was up here but an hour of the little stove going full pelt soon put that right.

But when will it ever end?

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Thursday 2nd December 2010 – WELL THERE’S COLD …

… and there’s very cold, and then there’s .. errrr … -8.9°C. That’s what the temperature dropped to last night. No wonder it went cold in here all of a sudden at about 00:30, and why it was only 9.1°C in here this morning when I woke up.

First job this morning before I could cut my wood was to look at the batteries. Last night I noticed that the charge had suddenly dropped to about 11.8 volts and there was a smell of gas lingering around.

So this morning a quick touch test showed that one of them was overheating and on a closer examination you can see that this battery has burst. I don’t know why either. Since I’ve had my water heater wired in as a dump load, there shouldn’t be any possibility of any overcharge, and this battery isn’t one of those that handle the input.

But changing the battery for another restored the current and then I went and chopped another huge load of wood – I had a feeling that I’ll be going to need it.

The postie came by this morning with a registered letter. Not very unusual, you might think, but she walked down from the end of the lane as I’m snowed in right now. I was impressed with her devotion to duty anyway.

Later I carried on with the wardrobe and it’s finished as far as I can do it. I’ve none of the wood for the sides and the shelves and so on. That’ll have to wait until I can get in to Montlucon, whenever that might be. But I also did a little clearing up in the bedroom too, so that I can make some more space for working.

I also managed to do some more in the barn as well.

Up here after knocking off work it was a mere 5.6°C. Not surprising because with all of the snow on the windows in the roof, no heat is getting in from outside. But this little heater is doing a very valiant job and I’m impressed that it can cope with these temperatures with just burning old scrap offcuts of wood.

Tea though is difficult right now. I cook in the verandah right now and the temperatures are impossible. I can’t cook myself a decent meal when I’m having to work in temperatures like -3°C. So it’s a handful or two of pasta, a tin of beans and some veg out of a tin. That’s the best I can do.

I just can’t believe this weather.

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Wednesday 1st December 2010 – THIS WEATHER DIDN’T IMPROVE ANY TODAY.

I woke up to find snow everywhere – a good 6 inches must have fallen through the night and the temperature stayed below zero all day.

I was getting low on water in the verandah so I had to hammer my way through the ice in the water butts – the tap was frozen solid. Definitely a good idea it was to fasten the top onto the butts with wing nuts rather than screws.

After the customary chopping of a bucket load of wood to replenish the stocks up here I carried on with the wardrobe.

And I’m definitely sick of Brico Depot wood. The horizontals I made out of the left-over demi-chevrons from the roof – those that I bought from the sawmill – but the Brico Depot demi-chevrons I was using for the uprights – they just split and collapsed. It’s the sawmill in future for me for my wood.

Much of the wardrobe is done but I ran out of light and so I went into the barn and carried on tidying up the wood that used to be the laths off the barn roof. The long bits or those with decent ends I’m saving at the moment but there are also tons of short bits or broken-off bits. I moved a few bucket-loads of those down to the lean-to where I’m keeping the wood that I’m burning. I’ll cut those up tomorrow morning and add them to the pile.

Yes, tomorrow. I can’t see me going anywhere tomorrow. I’m properly snowed in here and there’s no sign of a snow plough.

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Tuesday 30th November 2010 – WELL, I WAS RIGHT …

… about the weather last night. We touched rock bottom at -6.2°C – the lowest November temperature that I have ever recorded, and that by a country mile as well.

And as if to rub salt into the wounds, the temperature struggled up today to the dizzy heights of an astonishing November temperature of -1.2°C, the first negative maximum temperature that I have ever recorded in November.

And that wasn’t all either – at about 12:00 or thereabouts the heavens opened and cascaded down a ton of snow and that stuff kept on coming for the whole afternoon.

The high winds that came with it, blowing in from the east, whipped the stuff about in a mini-blizzard and as a by-product had both of the wind turbines going round.

As for me, I spent the day working in the bedroom downstairs building my fitted wardrobe. It was impossible to work outside. I’ve done the three main cross bars for the front and the two central uprights. All the joints are cut and shaped.

Tomorrow, if the weather is still nasty I’ll be screwing it all into position. I need then to run some electric cable for a light over where the drawers and the mirror will be and then I can fit the last side wall inside the wardrobe. Once that’s all done I can carry on with the plasterboarding around the walls.

I knocked off at 18:00 as usual and made a coffee for bringing up here. And up here we had a balmy 6.7°C. But despite its faults, such as needing filling every 15 minutes, this little pot-bellied stove is doing the business up here. It’s really tiny as you might remember but it burns the offcuts of wood from joinery projects, old flooring, scrap wood that I scavenged, the old broken laths off the roofs that we did, old paper, cardboard and everything and brought the room up to a pleasant 18°C at a total cost of nothing for the fuel.

The stove itself of course cost just £85 new so that’s probably one of the best investments that I’ve made around the farm and I certainly appreciate it in this weather.

The long-term aim for the stove is to buy one of those Gobain stoves – wood-burners that also have a built-in oven and a back-boiler that heats the water. With the back-boiler I can heat an indirect hot water tank and run a little central-heating system with a radiator in the bedroom, another small one in the bathroom and a small one in the lean-to where I used to live.

With there being an indirect cylinder I can also use solar heat to heat the indirect water circuit in the summer so that’s the best of both worlds, and the surplus electrical energy can be used to power a small electric oven for cooking.

But summer is a long way off and the way things are around here just now I don’t think that we are ever going to have another summer. It’s permanent winter from now on.

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Monday 29th November 2010 – I’VE BEEN GARDENING THIS AFTERNOON

With the weather having warmed up today, I’ve covered over the beds of spuds and carrots with some of the black plastic sheeting that I used to cover them just after I dug the beds out. This will hopefully trap the “heat” (after all, 6 degrees is “heat” after what we have been having just now and help them to thaw out, as well as protecting them from the frost until I can get to dig them up.

I also wanted to put my herb beds under cover too so firstly I grubbed out everything in the mega-cloche and then moved the strawberry plants from the smaller cloche and planted them into the mega-cloche.

6 plants went into that cloche last spring, and 21 came out. I was impressed with that. They should do well in the mega-cloche and I might even have a decent crop this coming year.

The smaller cloche wasn’t big enough to take all of the herb beds so I had to tidy up the greenhouse and put the other herb bed in there. All of the stuff that didn’t grow was consigned to the new compost heap and now for once there is plenty of room in it.

But the plastic covering of the greenhouse has decayed and so I need to turn my attention to building the new greenhouse out of the windows that Simon gave me. Last year I made a space to put that, and the space where the plastic greenhouse is, I’ll build a garden shed there.

I’ve also given the inside of the back of Caliburn a bit of a clean-out too, and then I spent a pleasant hour or so crushing tin cans – I had a load of them lying around and so I’ve flattened some of them ready to take to the recycling. Plenty more to go, too, and I’ll spend some more time on that.

But this evening the temperature has plunged dramatically. When I went downstairs it was -3.3 and there was a really heavy frost. Seems like the temperature is in freefall tonight and we could well be on our way to the coldest night of the winter. And winter hasn’t started yet – it’s still November around here.

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Sunday 28th November 2010 – WE DIDN’T HAVE SUCH AN EARLY START THIS MORNING …

… that is, if you don’t count having to get up for a gipsy’s at 07:00. In fact it was after 10:00 when I emerged definitively.

And that was strange too. I’d had an exciting dream beforehand, but when I went back to bed at 07:05 and back to sleep I started on another one ( and I can’t remember a thing about the first one now even though it was so exciting). But in this second one, I’d been stranded on a pier and had to swim for shore and after giving the girl at the reception desk a piece of my mind about telling me to go on it, and then walking through the town, I suddenly realised that I didn’t have my camera with me. I was panicking about this, thinking that I had left it in my car which had now been submerged, and so I remember urging myself to wake up so that I could get back my camera.

And wake up I did – right on cue – and to a gorgeous blue alpine winter’s day – the type that I like to have for recharging my batteries after about 10 days of badger all. But that didn’t last and by early afternoon we were back snowing again.

GRRRRRRR.

But I’ve sorted out my receipts and paperwork from Canada and done a little more desultory tidying up. And that was that. But then again, it is Sunday and I can have a day off once a week.

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Saturday 27th November 2010 – THIS MORNING, I WAS UP …

… dressed, in St Eloy, done all my shopping and back home before I’ve usually crawled out of bed on a Saturday.

LIDL was having a special offer today – car radio CD players with SD card fittings, similar to the one I bought ages ago and which I fitted to Caliburn, but also with Bluetooth mobile phone connection.

Using a mobile phone in the van is almost impossible so a Bluetooth connection has to be really good. The oyster that I use isn’t up to it, unfortunately, so I’m keen to see how this works. And in any case I’ve been after a 12-volt CD player for the house for ages and I’ve not seen a good one, so ‘ll simply use the one out of Caliburn and fit it in a box.

So that was the reason I was up and out of bed at 07:50. These radios sell out quickly and I wanted to be there at opening time and luckily there were still a couple left. So what with this and the Ryobi stuff I bought in the States that’s my Christmas presents to myself all sorted out.

But the drive down to St Eloy was … errrr … difficult in -4.4 degrees and a heavy snowfall. we are having an impossible November, aren’t we?

And although the day improved a little and we even had a little sun, it’s still flaming cold and not likely to improve. I spent almost all of the day up here with the fire on, watching a couple of films and sorting some papers. And it seems that I spent much less than I thought in North America – what with the Canadian dollar being at about $1:39 to €1. That’s a nice surprise.

And I had the final bill from Avis Car Rentals about the excess mileage – I have to pay them the sum of $0:00 within the next 14 days.

And laugh as you might, I did know someone in Crewe in the UK who received a bill from the Electricity Board for £0:00 in the 1970s. He ignored it, and then 14 days later he had a reminder. He ignored that too, and a couple of weeks later he received one of the famous “red letters” saying that if he didn’t pay the sum of £0:00 within the next 7 days they would disconnect his supply.

He sent them a cheque for £0:00 and heard no more about it.

Perhaps I ought to do the same.

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EPIC HALL

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