Tag Archives: tidying up

Monday 14th December 2015 – WELL …

… that didn’t work out quite as planned, did it?

I told you that I was going back home this afternoon to have a tidy-up, but it didn’t really work out quite like that. I did make it home with no problems but the first job was to unload Caliburn. There was all of the tiles in the back, as well as three big sacks of tile cement and grouting, a pane of glass, some floorboarding and a pile of other stuff too.

But although I moved all of the heavy stuff out of Caliburn, and one or two other bits too, but that was my lot, I’m afraid. It rather finished me off. I did manage a little later to make a door handle of sorts for the front door though, so my afternoon wasn’t completely wasted.

I blame a lot of it myself on what was going on through the night. I’d had an early night and started to watch a film, and that’s almost always guaranteed to send me off to sleep, just like it did last night.

And then I was on my travels again. With a fitful night, I don’t remember too much about it. But what I do remember was exciting enough. It concerns something like a vampire on the prowl over London and some kind of surgeon being implicated as the perpetrator. Doctor Watson was leaning out of the living room window at 221B Baker Street whilst musing to Holmes and recounting the 31 departments (are there 31? There were last night anyway!) in a modern Victorian hospital to which a surgeon might be attached. But I was exploring another avenue, a thread that led past a group of teenagers. I somehow managed to filter a message down to them with just enough information to provoke them, so as to see if it might smoke someone out of their cover. And sure enough, some girl rang me to thank me for the information which had helped them greatly. I tried to engage her in conversation, as part of my plan, but the line went dead – either we had been cut off, or (more probably) she had hung up. But I do remember being in my bedroom (wherever this might have been) which was a total tip (as usual) in a bed on wheels so that I could paddle it about the room. And I’d woken up at the usual time despite having had a late night but it was now in mid-afternoon and I was still in bed, not sure how I was going to manage to go back to sleep and also thinking that in five minutes I could have this room looking really tidy, so why wasn’t I doing it?

But that’s enough of that. I crawled myself out of my stinking pit at just before 08:00 and it wasn’t long before the nurse came. I had my injection and also my blood sample (and he burst out laughing when I told them how many goes they had had at the hospital to find my blood) and then I spent the rest of the morning working on the notes for my trip to Canada.

Coming back from home this evening I bumped (well, not literally) into Nicolette. She was taking their new dog Snowy (a younger version of Siroy who is unfortunately no longer with us). We had quite a chat and then I came back here, with Caliburn storming up the Font Nanaud, clearly enjoying being a quarter of a tonne lighter.

So tonight I’m watching Leicester against Chelsea and then I’m off to bed. I have the hospital in Montlucon tomorrow.

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Sunday 13th December 2015 – YES FOLKS, IT’S SUNDAY!

And not only did I have to be up early, I was actually wide awake, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed long before the alarm went off. And on a Sunday too. How often does that happen?

What’s even more surprising is that I was well off on my travels during the night too. And because it was something of a fitful night too, with a couple of trips down the corridor, my memory of my voyages is only scanty. But they were phenomenal enough for a great deal of what happened to survive in order to make it down on paper.

We started off with me waiting somewhere on the south coast to meet a coach that was coming over from the Continent and I was to take over the driving back up north. And so I did, but I missed the entrance to the motorway, which meant that I had to go and find somewhere to do a “U-turn”. Across a staggered junction was a pub with a big car park and that looked just the place, but it turned out that this was the oldest pub in England. It seemed that the logical thing to do to cover up my mistake was to give my passengers 10 minutes to go to explore the pub and have a quick pint if they wanted. When the other driver said “good idea – there’s a cash machine here so I can get some UK cash” the cover-up was complete. I announced to the passengers that because he other driver wanted some cash, we would stop here and that would give them 5 minutes to look around. So I let them off, parked up the bus and then went into the pub – but I couldn’t find any of my passengers! They had disappeared!

I then drifted off again on my travels, into a hospital where it seemed that isolation and disinfection was the theme, and back out of the other side, and so on until I ended up back at home (wherever that might have been), packing with Nerina to go on holiday together. We had a pile of dolls to pack but one was far too big to go in Nerina’s suitcase so I said that I would put it in mine. We ended up on a plateau at the back of Lyon. Before we had left, we’d been given a few enigmatic and cryptic postcards of small bourgs – there was obviously a mystery involved in all of this but we didn’t know what it was and these postcards were the clues. We’d managed to work out where these villages might be (the plateau at the back of Lyon) but we couldn’t identify them, so the next step was to ask. The first person whom we asked knew the villages depicted on the postcards. We asked if there were any houses for sale there, with the idea that we’d have an estate agent take us there, but he said that he would take us up there if we would meet him at his office at the back of the church. And so we did, and it turned out that he was the local gendarme. He had to prepare his car, so he said, and so we went to give him a hand, and it was an old, rotten white Renault 19 with no glass and no wheels, and tied onto a trailer with ratchet straps. While we were preparing it to leave, the phone rang. It was the woman who was looking after George, my old taxi driver, while we weren’t there. She said that his catheter had come out and what was she to do. I told her to telephone the District Nurse but she refused flat – there had clearly been some kind of issue between them. “Well okay” I replied. “I’ll be home in a bit” which can’t have been much comfort because normally she finished at 18:00, it was now 20:00 and we were a world away, in the mountains at the back of Lyon in southern France.

So lying here for a while vegetating, and when the alarm went off at 07:45 I was ready to leap into action. Well, the spirit was – the flesh was a little weaker than that. Nevertheless, when the nurse came round for the injection, I was up and about, ready and waiting.

But apart from that, nothing much else has happened. I’ve torn myself just four times off the sofa where I usually sit – twice to go for a ride on the porcelain horse and twice for meals, and that’s my lot.

What I have done though was to find another course about the development of aviation in World War I and so I had a play with that this morning. And the verdict was that it was rubbish. It just glossed over the subject, spending a lot of its time on “token-womanism” which has nothing to do with World-War I aviation, a lot of time discussing the Wright Brothers (and not a single word about Richard Pearse and his ground-breaking work on ailerons), and being full of inaccuracies – the classic howler being the lecturer talking about the “Me-109” and not the “Bf-109”, which is its correct designation.

Yes, an awful course.

But as for me, I’ve decided that if the weather is as nice tomorrow as it was today, I’m going to go back home after lunch and tidy up my attic – try to bring a little order into chaos. We all know that Nietzsche said “out of chaos comes order”, but Nietzsche had never visited my attic.

But I think that I ought to make some kind of preparations about putting my house in order. I have no idea what the future might hold for me but it’s very likely that I’ll be back there sometime. At the moment I’m feeling reasonably healthy so if I can move another big pile of wood upstairs there will be enough for a week or two and that should help me out considerably. And then if the place is clean and tidy (or as clean and tidy as I can reasonably make it) then it will be fairly welcoming for when I have to go back.

I can’t keep on being a house-guest here for ever.

-1

Tuesday 10th November 2015 – WE ALMOST HAD …

… two wheelbarrows up and running today.

I started off with the yellow wheelbarrow. That involved removing the old wheel, cutting down the axle of the wheel that I bought on Saturday so that the axle was the correct width, sleeving it internally with a length of copper tube, pumping a pile of grease up the inside, cutting down some threaded rod to the correct length to make a spindle, putting washers on the inside of the mounting brackets to keep in the grease on the spindle, and then passing the threaded rod through and bolting it onto the wheelbarrow through the holes in the mounting brackets.

All that then remained was to pump up the tyre with the portable compressor, and that was one wheelbarrow finished.

Then I turned my attention to the old B&Q wheelbarrow. The inner tube kept on going flat with that, and having dragged it through the wet concrete when we were concreting the parking, concrete worked its way inside the flat tyre and it’s ruined the tyre and tube.

And so I dismantled the wheel, took the tyre and tube off and filed them under CS, and then went in search of the wheel that I bought about 3 years ago. It took about an hour to find it, and when I measured it up for the wheelbarrow, I found much to my surprise that I’d already cut it down to size before.

So why hadn’t I fitted it?

Anyway, that needed sleeving on the inside and once more an off-cut of copper tubing came to the rescue. The spindle was made of threaded rod (I’d made this some time previously) and having packed the sleeving with grease, I then went to assemble it.

And then I found out why I hadn’t fitted it previously.

The fact is that the profile of the wheel and tyre is too high, so that there’s not enough clearance between the chassis and the bucket of the barrow. And so I’ll have to order a new tyre and tube, and I needn’t have bought the wheel that I did on Saturday.

Still, you live and learn.

I was on my travels during the night. I had enrolled on a computer repairing course with Terry, and we had started to learn a few basics. On one particular section, Terry remarked that he had once actually thrown away a computer that had suffered from the problem that we were resolving, because he thought that it was irrepairable. At the end of the day we all went outside and I went for a wander along the road between the cornfields and ended up at the border with the USA. Here I met up with pf all people, Zero (who accompanies me quite regularly on my nocturnal rambles) and we walked around chatting for a while. We then needed to go back into town but she said that she was tired and asked if we could take the bus. There was a bus – a school bus – waiting and so we climbed aboard but the conductor told us that this bus was going over across to the USA and so we needed to alight and wait for another.

After breakfast I carried on with my studies and I seem to be doing okay according to a test that I took this morning.

But here’s a thing. For about half an hour or so, we had about 21 amps of electricity going into the dump load. And while that’s not particularly exciting, the fact is that the cables were stone-cold as far as I could tell, and the temperature had risen by just over 5°C. Usually, for about 20 litres of water, a rise in temperature of 1°C in the water needs about 8 amps of current, and so it looks as if I’m getting twice as much current going into the water compared to previously. That’s how much must have been dissipated in heat down the cables.

Of course, it’s early days yet and I need much more current than this to prove the point, but at least it’s progress of some sort that there was no energy loss to heat down the cables.

I’ve tidied up a pile more downstairs and the table is looking clearer and clearer. I’m finding tons of stuff that I’d “lost”. But tomorrow is a Bank Holiday and that means a day off. When I start work on Thursday, now that I have a wheelbarrow I can start to move the stuff from out of the way at the front of the house and if the weather is good, I can cut up a pile more wood and move it much more easily.

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Monday 9th November 2015 – NOW, HERE’S A THING.

This morning while I was working on the computer, the temperature was such that I ended up opening the roof lights here in the attic. And I don’t recall ever having done that before in November (except when I had the fire burning – and just a reminder – I’ve yet to light the fire up here this autumn).

Yes, this weather is totally crazy and I’ve no idea what is going on with it.

I had a lovely night’s sleep and then came up here for breakfast and carrying on with my work. Studies first, and I’m a module or two behind. So I had to catch up with all of that before I could even start on this week’s sessions. But I am enjoying this course very much.

I had some other computing work to do, and I also made yet another exciting discovery with this 3D program that I mess around with some times.

I didn’t feel like any lunch and so I went straight outside (eventually) to work. I’ve repaired two flat tyres on the power barrow and pumped them all up to pressure – that Black and Decker portable compressor that I bought last summer is certainly doing the business. I started to dismantle the yellow wheelbarrow to fit the new wheel that I bought on Saturday, but the nuts were seized on and they took ages to free off. And I ran out of light while I was doing it, so that will have to wait until tomorrow.

I stayed working to 19:00 tonight, finishing by tidying up some more on the ground floor. And I can definitely see the table top in there now. It won’t be long before I end up with a place to work.

Up here I watched a film and crashed out, and finished off by having my lunchtime butties. I don’t seem to have the same appetite as before. And now I’ll take the stats, do the washing up and then go to bed. That’s me done for today.

-2

Friday 6th November 2015 – THIS WEATHER IS WEIRD

Here I am, it’s the 6th November and I still have the fridge running 24 hours per day and not only that, at 19:00 this evening I was outside in the verandah with a bucket of really warm water having a gorgeous shower.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t with warm water out of the heat exchanger because the weather didn’t permit it. It started off quite well but round about midday we had a rainstorm and then it was clouded over for the rest of the day. The batteries didn’t charge right up and so we didn’t have anything going into the dump load. I ended up boiling 2 litres of water on the gas stove.

And that reminds me – I’m planning to go into Montlucon tomorrow so I ought to disconnect the dump load before I go. I want to see it in operation and make sure that it’s safe before I go off and leave it alone.

But with the rainfall and the lack of excess power I wasn’t able to cut any wood – once more. Instead, I started to tidy up outside somewhat (although it doesn’t look as if there is any difference). Once I’d sorted some of that out, I started on tidying up the ground floor in the house and I’ve made some progress in there. In fact, you can even see the top of the table now in places and you’ll be surprised at the things that I found. I know that I was!

I took the opportunity to empty some stuff out of Caliburn. In fact there’s some food in there still that I bought in August and seeing as it’s mostly tinned stuff, it can stay there for now. But taking some stuff into the barn I found quite by accident the big drill for which I was looking the other day. Isn’t it always like that?

And so I now smell nicely of coconut and my nice clean clothes smell nicely of hint of soap. On that note, having crashed out for a short while just now, I’m having an early night. I deserve it.

-1

Friday 30th October 2015 – ALL GOOD THINGS …

… come to an end. And today, the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump-load for the excess solar energy finally ground to a halt.

Mind you, I’m not surprised. What has surprised me is that it lasted as long as it has – about 4 years if I remember correctly. It’s a 500-watt industrial 12-volt water heater element that I can pick up by the dozen in the USA, fitted into the side of a 25-litre plastic storage box and sealed in with rubber gaskets, and a simple tap. The whole lot is stood on a thick sheet of polystyrene insulation, with some of this thick space-blanket insulation wrapped around it, and a plastic lid covered with an off-cut of a sheet of polystyrene-backed plaster-board. Down on the inside of the space-blanket insulation up against the plastic side is the sensor of a maximum-minimum thermometer.

It’s wired in (with a 70-amp fuse) to a 60-amp Solar charge controller that I have reverse-wired so that instead of being “on” and switching off when the batteries are fully-charged, it’s “off” and switches on when the batteries are fully charged – and so when the batteries are fully charged and the charge controllers on the batteries switch off, the current that would otherwise be lost is diverted down into the water heater element and so heats up the water in the immersion heater for washing up, washing, and all that kind of thing.

And so why did it all go wrong?

The answer is that it hasn’t really gone wrong. A year or so ago I noticed that the positive wire to the immersion heater was heating up dramatically, and so I rewired it. But the thread stripped in the connection on the element so I had to find a small nut and bolt. But I couldn’t really fit a spanner into it so that it wasn’t particularly tight.

Today, I went downstairs to the fridge to fetch something to drink, and I could smell the burning plastic. There was something or a record of 37 amps going down the cables and this was simply too much for the bad joint and the wire was so hot that it was melting the insulation.

I hadn’t designed it particularly well – I can do much better than this, and in any case I don’t have any rubber joints for the element which I’ll need to take out and remake the joint, and so that’s a task for next week if I remember to buy the things that I need tomorrow at the shops. However, I have plugged the fridge back in so that something is being done about the excess current.

And so what else have I done today?

Apart from work on the laptop, which you can take as read, I’ve been tracking down some wood. I went to rescue the wooden box that I used to use to keep my fruit and vegetables in, but I pinched it last year to store my potatoes. But that didn’t work as the potatoes all went off and the wooden box is ruined (but I did in passing cast an eye on last year’s compost and it’s brewing beautifully!) and so I need to make another one.

I found a 50cm pine plank and some 40mm aluminium angle and I’ll be using that on Monday to make my new fruit and veg box.

As well as that, I went to check over the Kubota mini-digger. The reason for that is that the battery in the Kubota tractor is finished and I need a new one, so if I’m ordering one it makes sense to order a second for the digger – after all, that hasn’t run since the end of November last year.

But much to my astonishment, the mini-digger fired up straight away with no difficulty. And so I checked it over and left it running for a good hour or so to warm everything up and top up the battery.

I spent some time downstairs tidying up the ground floor too. It’s now looking as if you might be able to see the floor if I keep up like this. But I need to make a great deal of room as pretty soon I’ll be starting work down there and I’ll need the space.

Last but not least, I had a shower. 33°C in the verandah and 59°C in the 12-volt immersion heater, and so I cleared a corner of the verandah, fetched a bucket of hot water with some cold mixed in, found the pouring jug, and hey presto! Now I smell like coconut. I finished it off with a shave too, so now I’m all ready for the weekend.

But I could have done with a shave and a shower last night, as I was on my travels again. It was Marianne who had the pleasure of my company, going to the airport for a flight to Portugal. At the last minute she asked why I didn’t come with her, so with three hours to go before take-off I nipped off to my apartment for some clothes and the like, and to run one or two errands.

Once I’d done all of that, I had to return to the airport so there I was, driving through North London (flitting in and out of another nocturnal ramble from ages ago) on my way to Brussels Airport. The road was certainly very familiar to me, but I wasn’t convinced that it was the road that I should have been taking. But I arrived at the airport and reached the security gate with just 15 minutes to take-off and I still had a long way to go, not to mention passing through the “security”. And here I was, panicking in case I missed the flight, which was looking more and more likely as time passed by.

Wednesday 28th October 2015 – THE ANSWER TO YESTERDAY’S QUESTION IS …

… the bathroom. That’s where I ended up last night on my travels.

And that was partly by accident too, because I had a very severe attack of cramp in the middle of the night and it took me ages to shake it off. And that didn’t work all that well either, because I still have a tense muscle in the upper rear of my right thigh.

But anyway, seeing as I was up, I went to the bathroom.

With nothing urgent that needed doing today, I didn’t exactly rocket out of bed, and then after breakfast I had a leisurely morning doing stuff on the laptop and sorting myself out. And then there was some housekeeping to be done about the records that I keep for Radio Anglais.

But here’s a thing. For the rock music programmes that we do, I keep a playlist of what albums are played during the month, like this one, and then a website where all of them might be seen, with an opportunity for interested listeners to purchase them. I spent days during July and the first part of August to set up this A-store, and now I find that Amazon has taken down all of their A-stores with effect from 31st August, just a few weeks after I finished setting it up.

I shall now have to think again, and make up an A-store of my own. That was all a waste of time and effort, wasn’t it? But one thing that I did learn while I was doing it – and that is that my CD collection is worth a fortune. I have a couple of CDs that would sell on Amazon for over €200 each, and several others that would bring in a pile of dosh too.

After lunch I took the bull by the horns and steam-cleaned the fridge. Plenty of bleach and disinfectant went into it and while I wouldn’t like to eat my dinner off it, it’s still a lot cleaner than it ever has been in recent times, and that’s good news. I also spent some time tidying up on the ground floor, although you wouldn’t notice the difference.

After a brief crashing-out, I made tea and, true to form, Rosemary rang up for a chat and we were on the phone for about an hour. So I finished off tea, which was Rice and lentils with mixed veg and gravy. And now I’m going to do the washing up and have an early night again.

I’ll see if I can make it past the bathroom tonight.

Tuesday 27th October 2015 – TIMBER!!!!!!

I’m not going to be short of wood for the next couple of years, that’s for sure. Not after today, anyway.

I own a parcel of land next to Lieneke’s house and about a year or so ago, a branch snapped off and snagged in trees right above the pathway that she uses to go to her barn. She had a few words with me about moving it, which is no surprise as I wouldn’t like a branch like that poised right above my head.

Anyway, with it being so nice this morning, Terry came round to attend to the branch. We had a good look around the tree and we noticed that there were several other branches that were unsafe. Furthermore, the tree itself was swamped with ivy and there were few leaves on it. It really was in poor condition.

And you’ve no idea how much noise a 50-foot tree makes when it comes crashing to the ground. It certainly shook the neighbourhood. And once it was down (which wasn’t easy) we set to work to cut it into 30cm lengths. While Terry was doing that I was carting it all away with the powered barrow and I now have a huge stack of wood, much of which needs splitting.

It won’t be ready for another year or two as it will have to dry out, but when it is ready it will be astonishing. Not only that, we had a walk around on the plot of land and identified three or four other trees, much smaller, but wood nevertheless, that have almost died out and so they will be coming down next.

I bought a chainsaw from the USA years and years ago and so we had it out. It worked fine but after having been stuck in the tree as it fell over, it’s bent the rail and needs to be repaired. Terry is looking into that and when it’s done, there are piles of things that I can be doing with it.

While we were tidying up we had the threatened rainstorm and so Terry came in to measure up for the plumbing and then went home. I’m not as young as I used to be – in fact I was struggling with the power barrow – and so I came up here and crashed out.

No reason why I should be tired though – after all, I’d had a good sleep last night and I’d been on my travels too. I was driving a taxi quite a distance away and when I reached as far as Sheffield, I realised that I could call up my base on the radio from the hills around there, due to the atmospherics in the air. Up and down the hills through some really depressing scenery, and then suddenly I had the idea to go to another taxi office there where I could call back to my base. I immediately appeared in a taxi office in the cellar of a big building, called back home, and then went up to the ground floor and outside. I remembered that I’d been “transported” into this taxi office and this caused a problem in that I couldn’t remember where my taxi might be, and I had a good prowl around the area, even in the local scrapyard, but that didn’t help and I ended up wandering aimlessly around. And at a certain moment I even had Zero accompanying me on my travels, and I’m no idea what she was doing.

Tonight, I finally had my Sunday night pizza that I forgot yesterday, and now I’m off for another early night and see where I end up.

-1

Sunday 18th October 2015 – SECOND NIGHT …

… in my nice comfy bed, and second night that I’ve been on my travels.

This time I was in a submarine (as if that is ever likely to happen) and we were chasing a German submarine, which was painted yellow and shaped more like a car ferry at the rear with a drop-down ramp at the back. We rammed the enemy submarine from underneath and pushed it up and out of the water onto land, where it seemed to develop a set of wheels and so shot off down the road. We transformed ourselves into something like an enormous Hummer, painted white, and shot off after this wheeled submarine. As we overtook it, it swerved to the left and shot off into a wood. We missed the turning and then we couldn’t work out where it had gone. As a consequence we launched a human kite – the kind that was quite often used in the late 19th Century for reconnaissance purposes – so that our spy in the sky could search all around for the submarine. He couldn’t see it, but he descended lower and lower and heard people speaking German. Then he made a gesture to be winched in immediately – it seemed that there was a family living in the woods who had some German origins and the young children were being taught German. In his eagerness to find out what was going on, he had been careless and allowed himself to be seen by the children.

It’s Sunday today and despite it being the day when I can sleep until eternity, I was wide awake at 07:00 and out of my bed before 08:00. When did that ever happen previously on a Sunday?

And after breakfast and doing a bit on the laptop, I started to clean and tidy up the worktop here. It’s ended up in a bit of a mess after whatever went on while I wasn’t here.

At lunchtime I went round to Rosemary’s. She needed some help and her mobility issues right now means that she can’t help herself too much. She had to move some stuff from her cottage into the house and that took us a couple of hours. As a reward, Rosemary made a lovely leek-and-potato soup with fresh bread and I showed her the photos of my voyages just now.

That took me until 21:00 so on the way back I stopped for some chips and found half on Pionsat’s football team, including Florian and blond Frederic in there eating kebabs.

Now I’m back and I’ve remembered to do the stats. So I’m off to bed.

I wonder where I’ll end up tonight.

Monday 12th October 2015 – IT’S THANKSGIVING.

And with Thanksgiving being a public holiday in Canada, everyone had a lie-in this morning and we ended up later having one of the legendary Taylor Breakfast Brunches, with plenty of toast and hot coffee.

I’ve spent all of the afternoon stripping Strider right out and I’ve disposed of enough rubbish that will surely make Strider go 5 mph faster. I’ve certainly filled both of the 40-gallon incinerator drums.

I’ve found a few things that I’d forgotten about, including the tin opener that I had bought at a charity shop in Moncton. No wonder my bed had an uncomfortable spot in it. And I’ve also pulled out everything that needs to go back with me, such as the Ryobi circular saw, the batteries, the CDs and a couple of books.

There’s a load more room in there now, which should be no surprise. All of the tins are now on the shelf above the bed and all of the loose clothes and papers, as well as the food that’s in packets, has gone into the green tote box that is under the bed. You can actually see the floor now.

Rachel did some washing for me too so that everything is now clean, and when it’s dry I’ll put it all away and that will be the lot.

Monday 7th September 2015 – THIS BED …

… has made a world of difference – I’ll tell you that. It’s far too long for the bed, due to the dome-like nature of the latter, so even though I have to sleep curled up I was out light a light and off on my travels.

In fact I was in Shavington last night, wandering aimlessly around between Goodall’s Corner and the Sugar Loaf and I was joined by Zero, a young lady of my acquaintance who comes along to join me every now and again when I’m off on my perambulations. I’ve no idea why she should put in an appearance in the night though. Just one of those things I suppose, or else I’m hankering after my lost youth again.

The phone battery was going flat as I was going off to sleep and I couldn’t be bothered to put it on charge, so when I awoke I had no idea of what time it might have been and so I arose anyway – only to find that it was 04:00. And I couldn’t go back to sleep either.

It’s Labour Day in the USA today – a Bank Holiday – and so I had a day off. In fact I spent all morning reading a book and I don’t regret one minute of it either. And with the campsite office having coffee on tap as well; I was doing even better.

This afternoon though, I did a mammoth sorting out of everything that I had brought down from Canada yesterday and managed to fit most of the things into the storage boxes wit room to spare. And just as well too, because it’s going to be just a little tight for the next couple of days.

I seem to have acquired some duplicate tools too, not knowing what I had and what I didn’t have, and that seems par for the course of course. Still, better too many than too few. One thing though – I don’t have a metric spanner bigger than 18mm and 19mm is one of the most useful sizes on a Ford. Must sort that out too.

As it grew dark, and to celebrate the bank Holiday, I went into Rouses Point firstly for some cash and secondly for a meal. The transport cafe on the corner came up with one of the nicest spaghetti and tomato sauces that I have ever tasted and I thoroughly enjoyed that. Things are definitely looking up in North America.

But Strider now has a headlight out. I’ll have to fix that tomorrow.

-3

Sunday 6th September 2015 – I WENT TO … errr … MONTREAL TODAY

But I nearly didn’t, for I was away with the fairies last night again.

Well, not exactly the fairies, but a bunch of young girls, taking them to an audition as dancers in a film. However we arrived on the wrong day – the day when they were to audition the main cast – and one of the young girls said that she would like to try out for n acting role. Much to my (and everyone else’s) surprise, she had the most wonderful singing voice out, and ended up with the starring role.

Yes, who says my bed is uncomfortable and my camp site is noisy? I was out by about 22:00 and didn’t feel a thing. Totally painless.

But yesterday, just messing about, the Lady Who Lives In The Sat-Nav told me that Montreal was just 1:15 away from here on the motorway and so I decided to go. By 07:30 I was on the road and by 09:00 I was at my storage unit, and that includes having a 15-minute chat at the Canadian border with the Immigration Officer. He was a little peevish and sour at first but soon warmed up when he found out that I came from “somewhere near Liverpool” as that is where his father comes from and he knew the area pretty well. And so we had an interesting chat.

The drive to Montreal was uneventful and I’d sorted out my locker and loaded up Strider by 11:45.and after an exciting moment when I was ruthlessly and deliberately cut up by a bad-tempered Quebecois, I headed for home.

That was more interesting than you might think, because roadworks had closed off the interchange between the two motorways that I needed to take and I forgot which motorway I was on – hence having to go around the lengthy diversion twice before I could find my way out.

Having seen the enormous queue to get into the USA this morning, I turned off the Motorway and came around the back way to the tiny (and as yet un-modernised) crossing just up the road from here. But the queue here was enormous too, with just two officers on duty and seemingly having a work-to-rule.

But they asked me all kinds of questions to which (for once) I knew the answer, and the woman fell in love with Strawberry Moose, although she refused to have her photo taken with him.

But there was a depressing incident here. A foreign tourist in a hire-car had to go into the office to pay her $6:00 entry fee and went in through the wrong door. This was right behind the Immigration woman and she turned round startled when she heard the door opened.

“It’s a good job for her that I didn’t go for my gun” she said to me, and so I had quite a few words with her. As I’ve said before, “going for your gun” when you hear a door open is the limit of just how frightened and paranoid the average American is these days. It would be totally pathetic if it wasn’t so sad – Government employees blasting away tourists just because they go in through the wrong door.

It’s a mentality like this, bred into the various law enforcement officers, that has led to the current wave of violence on the streets of the USA as the law enforcement officers gun down anyone and everyone who scares them, no matter what they might be doing.

It’s a time-bomb that everyone is sitting on here, and it’s waiting to explode.

On that note, I came here. It was 15:00 and I started to sort out my stuff. And at least I now have a proper bed to sleep on, even if it is too big for the tent.

-2

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.

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.

Liz 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

Here’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.

At 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.

First 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?

There 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.

-1

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.

EPIC HALL

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