Tag Archives: tidying up

Monday 24th August 2015 – I WAS ON MY TRAVELS …

… during the night. Although I wasn’t really.

In fact I was back home again watching this huge crocodile of children stream down the track at the back of my house, all singing and being happy. meantime there was someone who had come to visit me, someone official, and I’d sent him away with a flea in his ear. However he was loitering around on the public pathway between my barn and my house and was urinating up the wall of my well so I dashed out there and gave him a piece of my mind (not that I have much to spare). Meantime, all the kids were streaming back up the other side, on the pathway in front of my house.

From here, I was invited to take part in a very low budget horror film, about being the brother of a young girl who, at full moon, turned into a terrifying flesh-tearing zombie with huge claws. We had to build a rocket and time machine so that we could take her to the future before she transformed again, where treatment would be available Anyway we built it and set off – and there were quite a few others like us in there. We just made it away on time but we were held up at a railway level crossing in Crewe – a real cliff-hanger. The producer/director said that we would have to finish the film next week but one of the actors couldn’t make it so we needed to write him out of the play. We planned to stage a crash at the level crossing and set him on fire so as to write him out, so I had to go off and look for the petrol which had been left behind in a dump at Edleston Road near where Woottons used to be. And it amazed me – here we were in Crewe and we had little dumps of stores all over the place and no-one had given a single thought about them being looted by the inhabitants.

After breakfast we all went up to the shop and – surprise surprise – I started to tidy up the place there a little. As you know, my adventures with tidying up are legendary, mostly o account of when I do ever do any the place always seems to end up worse than it did before. This time however, you could see a difference.

And it also inspired one or two others to do some too, and that always helps. The place could do with it, I reckon. And I would love to give it a total reorganisation too, although that’s never ever likely to happen.

Later on, I went out and about. First stop was to the insurance to have the details of Strider’s new licence plate recorded. That needs to be up to date. And from there I went off to the Dollar Store to see if I could find some headphones for the Samsung phone, but with no luck there.

At Service New Brunswick I had a chat about the postal code for my property. It seems that although Service New Brunswick is responsible for the address, it’s Canada Post that is responsible for the postal codes – a typical Government-organised confusion. And so that was my next port-of-call, althugh not before finding out where I can take these two big fridges around here. Surprise as it might be, there are no Government-organised recycling centres here in this part of the world, no public rubbish dump service other than the weekly waste collection. The only answer is to hire a skip, and that costs $400:00. No wonder there’s all kinds of stuff all over the place.

From there I went off to the Post Office and chatted to them. It seems that I’m also allowed a public mail box too. However the manager of the Post Office wasn’t there so I couldn’t sort that out on the spot.they will call me back

Darren and Hannah came back from Ohio this afternoon and so we unloaded all of the stuff out of the trailer (they had been gone for 12 days) and spent the rest of the day catching up on things.

And the woman from the Post Office didn’t phone me back, but then, I wasn’t really expecting it.

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Thursday 13 August 2015 – FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE …

…I’m ready well in advance of time to go.

Well, I’m not. I have been looking for three days for the $200 that I drew out of my Canadian Bank before leaving last October, so I’m having to go without it. And now I know why I drew it all out too. My Canadian bank card expired back in May!

So I hope that my European cards work, otherwise I’m going to have a couple of problems.

Mind you, it was touch and go that I got here in time this morning. I’d been out in Eastern Europe in a city that straddled the border between the East and the West. I was in the east with a party of people (as it happened, people with whom I worked in Stoke on Trent) and we were in a coach or a train that wasn’t moving but the seats were comfortable. Anyway, who should turn up but Nerina, with her Afro haircut of the early 90s. She sat next to me and ended up sharing my bunk, and I could see all of the people looking around and quizzing each other as to who she was.

I asked her how she had made it over to here – did she come by rail through the East, because I was interested in the trains that she might have seen, but she had come to the railway station in the West and walked across the border, which disappointed me.

So first job was the washing up. And that was when I made a startling discovery – that I had brought some water up last night to do the washing-up, and then left it on the side and went to bed. I’m definitely getting old, aren’t I?

And then there was the beichstuhl that needed emptying, cleaning and refilling, such delightful jobs that I have.

I’ve also cleaned the waste bins and isn’t that a first?

Liz came for me and we went to the mairie to pick up a Certificat de Domicile but as I expected, it’s closed for the holidays. I must remember to ring up on Tuesday! I did meet Valentin there though, loading up the Commune’s little van. We had a good chat and it seems that he’s re-signed for Pionsat this year, and that’s good news! I’ve no idea why he went to play at Terjat.

piaggio APE brasserie de la gare montlucon allier franceLiz and I went for coffee in the brasserie opposite the station.And while we were there, this interesting Piaggio APE pulled up just opposite.

I had a brief chat with the owner but he didn’t say very much. But he didn’t mind me taking a few photos of it (it’s always polite to ask).

It brought back a few memories of the Piaggio APE50 that we discovered on waste land in Brussels and which now resides – or it did, the last time that I heard anything about it – in Stoke on Trent

SNCF single unit diesel passenger train franceHere’s my train – a little single-unit diesel. I’ve not been on one of these before. But it’s nice, clean and comfortable – a far cry from anything that you find on the rails in the UK.

And we set off bang on time too, which is another far cry from life on the rails in the UK. And one thing that I like about France – “we regret that the toilet on board the train isn’t functioning. If you need this service, please make yourself known to the guard who will arrange for a longer stop at one of the stations that we visit”.

Mind you – I was half-expecting that we would be offered the possibility to pull up on the main line at a suitable hedge.

I didn’t realise that there were two railway stations in Montlucon – but I do now!

The line to Riom is what can best be described as “bucolic” – what one writer once wrote as a “merry, mazy ramble” across the Auvergnat countryside. I’ve advanced about 25 kms but it’s taken me an hour and a half and about 90kms to do it.

diesel multiple unit riom puy de dome lyon franceAt Riom it’s pouring down – a real torrential downpour – and my train is bang on time. And then this is where I realise that it’s lunchtime and for once in my life I’m caught without a supply of food about my person.

By the time I reached Vichy it had stopped raining, but it had started again at Tarare.

place part dieu lyon franceFirst stop at Lyon was at the Subway for a very late lunch. And it was at here that we had the usual Subway dialogue-
Our Hero – could I have a 12-inch with nothing but crudités?
Serving Wench – do you want cheese with that?

trolley bus lyon franceThere are trolley buses in Lyon these days – I hadn’t noticed that before. It seems that all of this “obsolete” transport of the 1950s – trams, trolley buses – was not obsolete at all. In fact, it was a hundred years ahead of its time. And it seems to be doing its work here in Lyon too because the streets are much less crowded than any other European city that I’ve visited recently.

As for my hotel, it’s 5 or 10 minutes away from the station. It’s modern and clean and tidy, with all of the services to hand. I had a lovely vegetarian pizza (I always bring my own cheese) for tea. It seems that this idea of flying out of Lyon, at least to here, is paying off in spades.

And as good an idea as it might have been, it could be even better too, believe it or not, because there’s a cheap budget hotel – the Athena – with rooms at €58:00, actually built into the station block. A walk of about 50 yards.

I shall have to look closely into this, but not tonight because although it’s only about 22:00, I’m crashing out.

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Wednesday 12th August 2015 – AT LAST!

This Hyundai has finally gone.

But it’s not gone far – about 400 metres to the wide grass verge.

Terry turned up tonight with his Jeep Cherokee 4×4 and that made short work of moving it. Unfortunately, Terry’s trailer is just too small for the Hyundai so there’s no possibility of putting it on there. And with me closed down for my holidays, I’m going nowhere tonight with my Brian James car transporter.

Consequently the Hyundai sits on the grass verge and there it will stay until the owner has come up with a Plan B. What this will be will be a depanneuse – a breakdown truck. And had a breakdown truck been summoned on Friday, this Hyundai would have been gone long ago with no stress and no bad feeling and no nothing.

And of course, the question of the degreaser for this oil slick. The car’s owner “didn’t have time” to pick any up. Why am I not surprised? But at least, Caliburn is back home where he belongs.

All of this is an object lesson in how doing things “on the cheap” rebounds with a vengeance because I’m never ever going to be doing anything coming from over there ever again. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!”

But last night, I had a bad night. I was still awake at 05:00 and I woke up again at 06:30. Clearly the stress was getting to me and I really didn’t need that with what I had to do today.Nevertheless in between the bouts of sleep this afternoon I’ve managed to do such a lot of what I had to do and I’ll be finishing the rest in a moment when I’ve eaten my pasta.

And I had a stroke of luck too. I’ve been hunting high and low for my Vox Bass amPlug – the one that you plug into the jack socket of the guitar and plug earphones into it so that you can hear what you are playing. It’s never come to light.

And then there I was, I suddenly had a brainwave, remembering what bag I had taken with me to Belgium and Germany a few months ago. And sure enough, there scrunched up in the bottom of the bag, was my amplug. That cheered me up. On the downside, with sorting out this Hyundai, I missed my shower window. I was looking forward to that, with new bedding and new clothes waiting for me. I’ll have to wait now for Lyon tomorrow night. I hope that no-one on the train complains.

So now I have something like a tidy attic, some bags all packed (and I bet that I have forgotten hordes of stuff) and just a few more jobs to do before I go. I’ll try to have an early night – I need it after last night to be sure, and I’ll be fighting-fit for tomorrow.

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Friday 7th August 2015 – I’M NOT QUITE SURE …

… what happened this evening.

I came back up here at 18:00 and I don’t remember anything until about 19:00 when the evening buzzer went off. The best that I could do then was to haul myself off into bed – at 19:00!! – and I didn’t move until 23:30 when I crawled off to do the stats.

It’s not as if I’d done very much either. Up at the usual time and then a few hours on the website.

After lunch, I went out and tidied up the drive, collecting all of my tools because, as you might have expected from yesterday, the owner of this Hyundai never turned up at all.

Lieneke came past though, and we had quite a chat for a while.

But now all of my tools (except my trolley jack, which is holding up this Hyundai) are now put away. I’ve officially finished work until I return from Canada towards the end of October. Just some tidying up, cleaning up and doing a pile of paperwork.

And that was when I came up here to sit down for five minutes.

What a waste of an evening.

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Wednesday 22nd July 2015 – I DIDN’T MANAGE …

… to beat the alarm clock this morning. It was a little more difficult to crawl out of my stinking pit this morning.

Still, I had breakfast and had the usual several hours on the computer sorting out a few things that have been hanging around for a few years. I also had one of these telesales people on the phone trying to sell me window shutters and I kept him on the telephone for 30 minutes.

After lunch, I attacked the bathroom ceiling and I can now say with complete assurance that it’s all finished. It didn’t seen too much trimming either, much to my surprise. Just a case of nipping off a couple of edges with a mallet and chisel.

I was half-expecting to have to trim down a full length of board, so no-one was more surprised than I was about how good the fit was. I couldn’t have done it better had I measured it up purposely.

The bathroom ceiling is lower than the ceiling on the landing so it needed an end-piece. A rummage around in the barn produced an offcut length of floorboarding that was soon cut down to size (I’m as impressed with this new circular saw as I was with my galvanised steel dustbin) and trimmed to fit, and then sanded off with the belt sander. And it’s come up a treat, that’s for sure, fits quite nicely and looks quite good as well.

I finished off the afternoon by tidying up in the bathroom and that’s almost completed. If I can finish that off tomorrow and do the masking off, I can start to varnish the ceiling. 3 coats of that and I’ll be ready to do the tiling.

For tea tonight I made a mega-red-pepper-and-lentil curry to keep me going for the next four days, and I’ve noticed that I seem to be overrun with ants in the verandah and the downhill lean-to. Where have all of these come from? Is it a coincidence that we had another brief shower of rain earlier in the evening?

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Tuesday 21st July 2015 – I PASSED …

… the inspection today. Rosemary came by and gave the place her seal of approval.

And so she should have, too. I was awake long before the alarm went off, having my breakfast by the time it finally did, and then, fortified by a pot of strong coffee, I attacked the house.

The attic is tidier now then it has ever been since I have been living in it and there is no doubt about that. The rubbish has been taken out and the composting bin emptied and cleaned.

The bedroom had a good clean-around too and I even managed to bring a little order into the chaos that is the ground floor where I’ve been working. All the tools have been put away, the floor has been swept with all of the sawdust now in a tidy pile, and there are pathways through the tulips where one can tiptoe without breaking one’s neck falling over something.

I even managed to give some attention to the shower room, and I emptied and cleaned out the beichstuhl, even though it didn’t need it, but one can never be too considerate to one’s guests.

All in all, Rosemary was impressed and awarded me half a melon, which went down a treat for pudding this evening. She arrived at 14:00 and was here until 18:25 – some flying visit! I treated myself to a shower too, although I had to wait until 19:45 and the water had cooled down to a delightful 38.5°C – the temperature at 18:26 was a mere 42.0°C – not far off the highest that it has ever been.

I don’t mind visitors as long as I know that they are coming. It’s a good opportunity and incentive for me to tidy up and clean the place. And it does need it sometimes. I ought to pay much more attention to my accommodation.

But I’m surprised that I had the energy to do all of that this morning, seeing as I had been on my travels again. I was in a Ford Cortina estate (they aren’t half featuring quite regularly in my nocturnal ramblings these days) and testing the handbrake by the simple expedient of rolling backwards down a hill on this new housing estate and pulling on the lever. Of course, in this case the handbrake didn’t work and the car gathered speed. The houses at the bottom loomed up rather too rapidly for my liking and so I did a handbrake turn (with no handbrake, of course!) to pull up parallel to the kerb. A tabby kitten came out of the house right by where I was stopped and so I started to stroke it. Then the cat’s owner came out to see what was happening, and it was none other than a girl who has been previously described in these pages as “the one that got away”. Anyway, she invited me in for a coffee and we had a really good nostalgic chat about old times.

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Saturday 18 July 2015 – THIS IS NOT SMOKE FROM A FIRE

hanging cloud forest valley les guis virlet puy de dome franceOf course it isn’t. This is one of the typical Auvergnat weather phenomena that one encounters around here – a hanging cloud. And it’s blowing up the valley through the trees in my forest.

That’s right. We’ve had a storm here today. And much to my (and everyone else’s) surprise, the weathermen had it right too because they forecast it for today. The first time since I don’t know how long – at least 25 days – that we have had rain apart from two small showers. 12.5mm of rain fell during the hour that the storm raged late ths afternoon.

This morning, I crawled out of bed with some difficulty and hit the road straight away. I Was at Brico Depot by 08:45, in time to have a couple of mugs of coffee. And buying the tongue-and-grooving (and a bag of 8mm nuts bolts and washers that I can’t find around here) didn’t take long.

So why did it take until 10:00 am to leave the car park?

There was a white Ford Ranger, just like Strider, on the car park. British plates too, and while I was admiring it, the owner and his wife appeared. He’s from Devon, a new arrival and a footballer. His wife is from Belarus and knows Minsk, which was one of my old stamping grounds behind the Iron Curtain in my Salopia Saloon Coaches days. Consequently, we had an enormous amount to talk about.

Off then to LeClerc and shopping. And that was supposed to be a quick visit where I was going to buy everything regardless of price in the interests of speed. But as it happened, while I was being dealt with by the cashier, I realised that I had forgotten to weigh my fresh veg. Dashing back to the scales, there was only one working and the queue was a mile long. I was obliged to abandon it all and ended up going to LIDL which was disappointing, because I could have saved a pile had I bought half of the rest of the stuff in LIDL anyway.

Back home here for midday and bumped straight into Lieneke who is now here. And then I came back and watched the weather change, doing a pile of tidying up in the attic too.

And today was the first day in I don’t know how many weeks that I had to heat up the water in order to do the washing up. That tells you how bad the weather was today

So tomorrow, I’m having a lie in and a day off. Recharge the batteries before I start back to work on Monday. It’s going to be a hectic week.

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Tuesday 14th July 2015 – HAPPY BASTILLE DAY

That’s right – the story goes that the reason why the French stormed the Bastille on 14th July was because it was a Bank Holiday, all the shops were closed and they had nothing better to do.

But I had plenty to do, such as trying to find this insurance sticker. I’ve waded through all of these papers and some have been filed, some have been put tidily in a box and the rest have been filed under CS. But as for the insurance sticker, well, not a glimmer of it, I’m afraid. I’ve no idea where I might have put it.

The only thing now is to contact the insurance company and ask for a duplicate. And then that will guarantee that the original one will come to light immediately.

I’ve also done the notes for four days’ travel around Labrador and I’ve now arrived back in Newfoundland. I’ve also done some research as well and found a few really good e-books about the region that I have saved to read at my leisure.

Not only that, I’ve collected the details for a couple more months of radio rock shows and made up the icons for the albums so that I can build playlists.

But all of that was later first job, before I’d even had breakfast, was to make some muesli, seeing as how I’d run out.

All in all, I’ve had a busy day, despite it being a Bank Holiday.

Finally, I’ve made a huge aubergine-and-kidney-bean whatsit and that will keep me going for four days. It won’t take much to warm up, the food for the next few days, and it won’t make much washing-up.

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Sunday 21st June 2015 – HAPPY SOLSTICE

Yes, the longest day of the year today. It’s all downhill from here. Where did the first 6 months of the year go?

And so I celebrated the Solstice by having a lie-in, seeing as it was Sunday today. And in view of the late night that I had had (02:30 when I finally crawled in), it was a good 10:15 when I eventually crawled out and gone 11:00 by the time that I had finished breakfast.

As for the laptop, it had indeed run out of battery so while I was breakfasting, I put it on charge in the barn using the 12-volt power lead that I have.

After breakfast, I spend a pleasant couple of hours going through the hard drive on the 1st Aspire, deleting loads of things that I no longer needed, deleting all kinds of programs and editing the start-up memory. Now, it fires up in seconds rather than the 10 minutes that it used to take and all in all, it’s now quite a stable platform.

But here’s a thing. I remember when I bought it that it had just 2GB of RAM on board, and that’s what it says on the sticker. But when I checked the system, it clearly shows that there is 4GB there. I don’t remember upgrading it, but I suppose that I must have done at some point when I was in the UK. And that might account for how much better it performs when compared to any of its later brothers. Upgrading this one to 8GB might just work because if i can make this perform as well as the 1st Aspire, then I’ll be reasonably satisfied.

This afternoon, I’ve been tidying up in here and for a change just recently, it’s now fit to receive visitors. I’ve even scrubbed the oilcloth that I use as a tablecloth on the table which I use for preparing the food.

I did set out to have a shower too, but the weather was deceiving. Although it looked quite a nice day outside, it wasn’t that warm – and the water in the solar shower was a mere 30°C. The water in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load was only 54°C so I couldn’t put enough of that into the solar shower to raise the temperature sufficiently.

Mind you, that was my own fault. Feeling like having a coffee this afternoon, I had the electric coffee percolator going for half an hour. Coffee made in there tastes so much better than instant coffee, but it isn’t half energy-consuming.

So back to work tomorrow – fitting the worktop in the shower room and then starting on the door frame. I really will have a shower tomorrow if it’s warm, and if I can’t have it in the solar shower, I’ll use the corner of the verandah and a bucket of hot water from the home-made 12-volt immersion heater.

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Friday 19th JUne 2015 – I’VE HAD AN INTERESTING DAY

I was actually working this morning when the alarm went off at 08:00. That’s not something that happens every day, so you need to make a note of it. I did!

I was putting the coat of varnish on the underside of the shower-room worktop. The top coat was dry from yesterday evening so I could run it over and begin. I wanted to do that as early as possible so that it would be dry by the end of the afternoon.

Back up here after breakfast, and seeing as I was on a roll, I did another live concert for Radio Anglais, editing and engineering it to make a continuous stream. Now I don’t know why it is but sometimes I’m there for days and I can’t ever set the joins correctly. At other times, it’s as if the joints go together automatically with only the most minimal effort, and today was one of those days.

The only real problem that I did have was with the original engineering and I found myself at times editing out the faults in the original mixing. One was particularly troublesome but I managed to overdub the following track and fade out the previous track where I’d overdubbed it, so that the annoying click is inaudible. Studying the waveforms of the two tracks, you can usually find a length in each tracks that is pretty much identical, and you can superimpose them at that position.

I’ve also restarted a radio project that I had begun in 2013 but with all of the issues that I was having in that year, I had set aside. I’ll tell you more about it at a later date when it’s complete (whenever that might be) but I need some info from Radio Tartasse that won’t be available until the end of the month.

After lunch, I found to my delight that the worktop was dry. So I could turn it back over and put the second coat on the top. This is bang on plan as the second coat always takes ages to dry and it can stay like that until Monday now.

I tidied up the shower room, brushed everything up and removed the debris. It’s looking quite tidy in there now, for a change. I’ve also fitted the missing mounting rail for the worktop (I should have done that yesterday but I forgot) and then I measured up the doorway so that I can make a start in making the door frame on Monday.

This evening it was shopping in St Eloy-les-Mines and if there was a big queue at the checkouts, I was in it. One of those days.

I didn’t buy anything extra, except for the strawberries. A huge punnet for €1:99 and the ones that I ate tonight (there’s enough for three or four days) were delicious. Well, i did have some soya cream that needed using up.

And seeing as how there were no yellow paper collecting bags out on the streets in Montaigut last week, I imagined that tonight would be collection night so I took all of mine down there. But there were none about so it can’t be every fortnight like it is in most places. But the two slugs and a snail enjoyed the run out anyway.

And now, just for a change, I’m going to have a very early night. My efforts this morning have caught me up.

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Sunday 14th June 2015 – THAT WAS AN EXCITING DAY …

… today, wasn’t it?

I’ve set foot out of the house twice, I think. And that’s no surprise because it’s been another thoroughly wet and miserable day today. In fact, had I not had to leave my bed to go for a ride on the porcelain horse at 09:15 I would probably still be in bed now, and I wouldn’t have lost one minute’s sleep worrying about it.

The day started as it meant to go on, with the gas in the little stove up here running out while I was making my coffee. What a way to start the day! And then I caught up a little with some work on the laptop.

From here I went on with the tidying up that I started yesterday and you’ll certainly notice a difference here today. There’s a huge area of empty nothingness now between the door and the back of the bed-settee. everything that was hanging around there has been moved into the bedroom or downstairs to be turned into rubbish.

This led on to another project too. I’ve always had printer issues here as you know, and I inherited an HP 2100-series all-in-one printer. No installation disk so I’ve had to configure it manually but that didn’t enable most of its functions.

Searching for something else on the internet (as you do) I came across a FAQ “I can’t find the installation disk for my HP 2180”. And underneath was the answer – “you can download it from ‘this link’ “. So off I went and sure enough, there it was. And I set to and downloaded it.

218mb, the drivers, which makes a mockery of the old days when I had a 40mb hard drive on my 386, or when I ran my taxi business in the mid-80s with an Apple II that ran everything off a floppy disk of 128kb.

8 hours it took to download, but it seems to work and who knows? I might even have a printer here for a while.

And so with that and the tidying up, you can’t say that the day was wasted.

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Saturday 13th June 2015 – I KNOW THAT I SAID …

… something about all of the things that I was going to do today. Well, none of that happened at all. I was sidetracked quite severely today.

A short while ago, while moving some stuff around downstairs, I came across a box marked “LPs”. And having you told you all a while ago about the little program that I have discovered that enables me to download tracks off the internet, I brought the box up here to go though it, see what LPs are in it, see what I already replaced with a CD and then see what is available on the internet for the LPs that I already own and which I dn’t have on CD.

Anyway, to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … I lifted out the first dozen or so LPs, and that was all that there were. Underneath was a huge pile of paperwork. probably about half a tonne, I reckon.

It’s all stuff that I brought back from Brussels when I sold the apartment, and another pile of stuff that I had accumulated while I was living downstairs in the lean-to between 2007 and 2009. All of which I had completely forgotten.

So this morning, with a nice stiff mug of coffee I sat down and attacked version 2 of the European Paper Mountain.

By the time that I had finished, I reckon that about three quarters of it will be on its way to the great paper mill in the sky, and probably a lot more will follow it once I’ve closely examined it all. But I have found tons of stuff that is important, including all of the registration details for the Brian James car transporter that I bought a couple of years ago. As well as that, I’ve found a letter that I’ve been looking for for 3 years, a couple of instruction books that I need, and all of the Canada papers for my visit of 2012 and for my land at Mars Hill Road.

So, bingo!

Now, one thing leads to another as you all know, and once you start off, you’ll be surprised at just how many other things there are. Piling the waste paper into an IKEA bag, I decided to add another pile of waste paper – and then another etc etc.

And moving the box away from the wall left a space which was just the right size for the small set of shelves that Hans gave me last month when I was in Eching.

All of the food and cooking gear has now gone onto those shelves and at one swell foop this place looks a lot better than it did before (although there are still a hundred miles to go).

Now, I have a space next to the desk, so I moved my comfortable chair over there. I can now reach the external drives and the external DVD player simply by reaching out my hand. This led to a session of copying to my laptop the CDs that I bought in Canada and subsequently that have been sitting in a nice orderly pile on the desk. I’ve recorded 15 of them, which leaves just a mere 23 to go, but it’s a start.

This was hard work and so I closed my eyes for a little doze. and just as I was dropping gently into the arms of Morpheus, Rosemary rang for a chat. So there I was, for a good half hour.

I’d checked the clock at one moment and it was 17:57. Next time I looked, it was 20:18. Where did that 2 hours go? I must really have been engrossed in what I was doing.

But honestly, it doesn’t look any better in here. But then, I can’t do this tidying-up lark at all. All of this stuff heaved out or tidied up on shelves and the place just looks worse.

But you can see now why I didn’t do what I had intended to do today, and it wasn’t for lack of effort either.

Remember that yesterday I mentioned the rainstorm?

We had 40.5mm that fell in a three-hour period. And today, despite the good start, we ended up with another downpour in the evening and that gave us another 15mm.

That’s good news for me because my water tanks are full to overflowing. And as there are two tanks together – the rainwater falls into the top of the back tank, sinks to the bottom, passes through the connecting piece (which is at the bottom of the tanks) and into the front tank, with the overflow at the top of the front tank, then there’s a continual circulation of water in there and this is good for aeration. This means that it’s not just a stagnant pool of water.

And as I pull water from the bottom of the front tank, this is where the freshest water will be anyway. So a really heavy downpour like this is really good news for me.

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Wednesday 6th May 2015 – DOESN’T CALIBURN LOOK SMART …

caliburn new number plate roady nemours france… with his new front number plate?

Here we were, going up the autoroute to wards Paris yesterday late afternoon in a howling gale and I stopped to make what is called a “comfort break”. Going back to Caliburn afterwards, I noticed that the white refelective part of his number plate was detaching itself from the background.

Cheap number plates, I suppose, and here I was off to Germany for two weeks. If it all comes apart in Germany I’ll be sunk, and the controle technique as soon as I return, I could do with having this fixed instanter.

Back on the autoroute again and we drove around the town of Nemours. And there on the Trading Estate I could just about make out one of these car accessory places. 18:55 it was, 5 minutes to chucking-out time, but nevertheless when I arrived they were still there. The plate cost an arm and a leg as you might expect, but they also had a fitting service for a couple of Euros. Anyway, there wasn’t much option. It’s cheaper than a fine and I’m going to have to have the number plate anyway for the controle technique. May as well do it now as later.

I’m not sure whether you can see it in the photo but I now have my dash cam installed. I had that running for the journey. It’s cheap, as you can tell by the price and by the quality of materials, and the instructions, written in basic Chinglish, are, shall we say, “unhelpful”. However, it does what it says it does, and quite good enough for what I want, although I’m going to have to stop talking to myself when I’m driving.

I was on the road by 15:00, having spent the morning tidying the house and doing a little cleaning, and I arrived here at about 23:45 after several stops. One of which was at Melun, where I discovered a new takeaway where they did me proud.

On the way up, though, I started to make a list of things that I have forgotten, including the cooking stove and the portable beichstuhl.

It’s going to be one of THOSE journeys, isn’t it?

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Monday 13th April 2015 – I SMELL ALL WHEATY TODAY

And the reason for this is that I’ve had another shower.

solar shower unit les guis virlet puy de dome franceI started off today by dismantling the solar water heater and giving it a really good clean out. The solar water heater by the way is a black plastic box with an old caravan window over the top, and the back is insulated with some of this space blanket insulation. It’s stuck on the roof of the outside shower cubicle where it catches the sun quite nicely. The water then descends by gravity through a tap and then to a shower head.

It needed a really good clean too as it’s not been used in a while and there were all kinds of dead leaves inside the tank busily decomposing, and the window needed a really good clean too.

guttering uphill lean to les guis virlet puy de dome franceNext job was to fix the guttering on the uphill lean-to. The guttering has become detached because it’s too low and the door into the upstairs but where I keep all of the paint keeps knocking it.

But this wasn’t as easy as it might sound as I needed the folding ladder, and that’s all overgrown with brambles that have grown over the wall from Lieneke’s field and which one of the days we’ll have an accident with 5 litres of diesel.

I had to cut the ladder out of the brambles and that led to a general clearing of the patch of ground in front of the woodshed. Now I need a place where I can have a garden fire to dispose of all of the dead brambles.

So once I’d freed the ladder, I could dismantle the guttering, reposition the brackets and then refix the guttering. Now, not only does it slope all of the right way, but it clears the door too.

I’ve run a mains cable through from the house into the downhill lean-to, via the hole that I drilled through the wall ages ago. And with the electricity now in there, at lunchtime I did another load of washing. That’s come up nicely but there’s still a pile to do. It might not be done this week though as the water level in the water butts is quite low. 5mm of rain would do quite nicely right now to fill the water back up again.

I found 3 centimes in the bottom of the washing machine too. I hope that I’m not going to be done for money laundering.

After sitting outside eating lunch (it was really beautiful today again) and supervising the washing, I went and attacked the shower room and that’s almost empty now. Tomorrow I can start on fitting the shelves in there and the composting toilet.

Finally, the water in the solar heater was at 33.5°C. 5 litres of water at 61°C out of the 12-volt immersion heater soon sorted that out, and I had a really nice outdoor shower, followed by a shave and a change of clothes.

2 showers in 2 consecutive days? Whatever next? I’ll be washing myself away at this rate.

And I was on my travels during the night, working on behalf of the occupying forces during the day but directing resistance activities during the night. Nerina was here in this journey and we were somewhere in the UK in one of these areas with small Victorian detached houses with big gardens. The road to where we lived was a tortuous route though this built-up area but all of a sudden someone had put a direct road through the houses that curved around to where we were.

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Friday 10th April 2015 – I HAD AN UNEXPECTED …

… day off work today.

But that was partly because I had an expected visitor, in that Liz came round to inspect the premises at lunchtime. Consequently I had to spend the morning tidying up. It certainly made quite a difference, and you can actually see the top of the table now, as well as the coffee table.

A job well-done.

Liz thought so too – she was quite impressed with what I’ve done so far (and so am I of course) and then we had a coffee and a long chat.

After she had gone, I installed the new Livebox and, as I expected, it didn’t go anything like according to plan (mainly due to the fact that the screenshots in the destruction manual were nothing like what I had on my screen). This meant a phone call to Orange, and that was the end of the early afternoon.

Still, the thing is working now, and it does seem to be faster, which is good news. maybe they weren’t wrong about upgrading the phone lines.

All of this meant that I had a very late lunch – more of an early tea really – and it wasn’t worth starting work after that. I had a play on the internet instead.

At 18:00 I went into St Eloy les Mines and did the shopping, bumping into the Laotian girl whom I know (and whose name I have forgotten) and also Desirée, both of whom were doing their shopping. We had a bit of rain too, but nothing to worry about.

second hand ford ranger 4x4 for sale montaigut en combraille puy de dome franceDriving past the big car sales place in Montaigut, I noticed that they had a Ford Ranger for sale, just like the one that I own in Canada. So I went over for a wander.

And it’s astonishing. It’s 3 years older than mine, with a much lower spec, yet they want almost twice as much money for it than I paid for mine. Still, the more that I see of them, the more that I like tham and I hope that I’m not going to be disappointed with mine.


And here’s something to record. With the temperature up here in my attic yesterday reaching 23°C and looking like it might be just as hot today, I’ve opened the skylights in the roof.

First time this year, too. It’ll be nice sleeping in here with a little breeze sweeping around the room.

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