Tag Archives: shower

Monday 18th April 2011 – I’ve been gardening today.

Well, after all it is the full moon. Before lunch I planted all of the main crop potatoes – I put 64 into two of the raised beds – the last two that I installed the other week. I’ve had to be careful how I planted them because the baby lettuce that I bought the other week – they are in one of those beds and I’ve had to fit the spuds all around them.

After lunch I planted this week’s seeds – things like cauliflowers, broccoli, carrots, courgettes, beans, peas and so on – they all went outside and into place. In the smaller cloche I planted into small pots some more peppers, chilis, cucumber and gherkins. And there are already some of those sprouting up from a fortnight ago. I’ve also weeded out the strawberry patch in the mega-cloche. That’s doing really well in there and it’s a mass of flowers, looking like there might be a bumper crop, and quite early too. But then again, this magnificent spring has a lot to do with that.

But there is a down-side to this magnificent spring. When I finished weeding and planting, I gave everything a thorough watering. And with no rain for 14 days, all of the casual water, that in buckets and bins and tubs about the place, that’s all gone. All that’s left is my rainwater for household use and there’s just about 150 litres or so of that remaining. I’m drying up and this could make things difficult here. I shall have to start a rain dance if it carries on like this.

But there’s still some water for a shower and at 36.5°C I had one as well. And then off to St Eloy and the Anglo-French Group where I set everyone an exercise – I’d found some old notes that I had made, with useful French phrases that are used in everyday life. And so I set everyone to translate them from French to English, to keep them out of mischief.

And so apart from working on the Newfoundland web pages this morning, that was my lot. Tomorrow we are in the studio at Radio Tartasse again. Don’t the months come round quickly?

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Friday 8th April 2011 – This hot weather …

is still going on relentlessly and I’m now a deep shade of red. Working outside is clearly good for me. But it didn’t reach the 42°C that it said it did on the temperature sender outside. And after a few minutes pondering this, I suddenly realised the answer to that.

Yes, I’ve had a great big bonfire (rather too close to the exterior temperature sender) and burned tons of stuff that was lying around doing no good. Including all of the foam-rubber seat cushions out of the old caravan that the rats trashed while I was ill.

And I’ll tell you what – I’ve never seen anything catch fire so quickly and easily and burn so fiercely. It’s put me right off caravans. If someone were to drop a fag-end down the bed there would be no survivors.

As you can guess, the tidying-up has started and I’ve been clearing things up. Not much because I’m no good at tidying up and I don’t know how to do it anyway. But at least there’s a little more space now that a lot of stuff has gone up in smoke. And there will be more to follow it as I slowly work my way round, although this isn’t the solution to my storage issues of course. The aim quite simply is to try to make the place a little more presentable in case I have visitors this year.

As well as that, I’ve been in the garden again and I’ve planted the pea and courgette seeds that I had set to soak a couple of days ago.As well as that, I stuck in half a dozen sweetcorn seeds. They are out of date and did nothing last year, but I’m intrigued to see if anything might happen.

In other news, I had a nice hot shower this evening and I did the washing-up with water from the home-made immersion heater, with a temperature of 68°C. It’s quite impressive, this immersion heater and the insulation.

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Thursday 7th April 2011 – I’m burnt!

Firstly by the sun. We had a magnificent day today, easily the best of the year. And I spent it in unloading Caliburn, stacking stuff wherever I could find some room (and that wasn’t easy – I’m beginning to feel the pinch here now) and then I washed out the inside of Caliburn where things had been leaking.

All the time of doing that, the sun was beating down upon me and I’m now a delicate shade of lobster. And cutting my hair (it had gone a bit wild just recently) didn’t help either as I’m now likely to get a suntan on there. I had to clean and overhaul my hair clippers as they were all clogged up, and now they cut as well as they ever did.

And when I knocked off, the water temperature in the solar shower was 40°C and I had a gorgeous shower. That really was nice.

But the best bit of news comes from the second way that I burnt myself – and that was with the washing-up water. And no, I didn’t leave the kettle on too long.

At 22:00 when I came to do the washing up, the water in the home-made immersion heater was an astonishing, incredible 64°C. It had gone off the scale (over 70°C) during the course of the day and that is down completely to the insulation.

This morning, the water was still 34°C after yesterday’s exertions – I could have had a shower ( and we aren’t talking the OUSA Executive Committee here either) in that. It’s proof positive that good insulation is definitely the way forward.

Electrically-heated washing water is a major milestone for me in my search for autonomy and I am glad that I’ve managed it. But this insulation is giving me another headache – with temperature over 70°C with 2 hours of sunlight left and a few more hours to come later in the summer, I’m going to be perilously near boiling up and I don’t need that at all. I’m going to have to rig up a proper immersion heater with thermostat and all of that – and then what will I do with the surplus electricity? But at least it is the right kind of headache.

And in other news, I now have a car transporter trailer. The company who makes them can’t build mine until July but they are building one for a dealer – exactly the one that I want – and he’ll sell it to me at the factory price if I go and collect it. The factory will keep it until the end of May when I’m in the UK and this is really good news

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Wednesday 6th April 2011 – What an exciting day.

Breakfast outside in 19°C on the pallets that I’m using as an impromptu terrace for the moment, interrupted by the postie bringing me a huge (and I mean huge) box of goodies from Amazon – my birthday present in fact.

And then the rest of the morning gardening. I’ve dragged the herb beds out of the smaller cloche (they are in large plastic troughs) and put them by the verandah so I can get at them for cooking, and then spend the rest of the morning clearing up some more raised beds and sowing seeds – putting tons of stuff out in fact. And it was beautiful weather to be out in, that’s for sure. Summer is well and truly back.

Lunch on the terrace of course, and by the time I was ready to resume, the water in the home-made immersion heater (that takes its energy from the excess solar power) had reached the magical 50°C (did I mention that I’d insulated it this morning with a load of the left-over offcuts of the bubble-wrap insulation?) and so that called for a washday, and now I’ve a load of clean clothes drying outside.

But isn’t it nice to have piping hot water for washing clothes without having to boil an array of kettles?

While I was in the washroom I made a start on tidying it up too – years of rubbish accumulated in there. Only a start, mind you. There’s a lot of stuff in there that needs to be sorted and a lot of it can be binned or burned as well. In fact it might be an idea to have a fire around here and dispose of a pile of stuff.

Once the washing was done it was back into the garden and planting herbs in the herb bed and delicate stuff into pots to warm up in the smaller cloche (which is why I moved the herb beds out). I’m now curious to see what my crops will do this year. Last year was rather disappointing as you may well remember, with snow in May that killed everything stone-dead.

18:10 when I knocked off too, and the water in the solar shower was at 38°C. That called for a shower (and we aren’t talking about the Executive Committee of the Open Unversity Students’ Association either) and so never mind the clothes – I’m clean too (well, at least on the outside anyway).

Back up here I had my coffee, watched the first one of the 41 episodes of Sherlock Holmes – Complete Collection [DVD] while I sorted through all of my purchases. I must admit I can’t wait to watch Bring Me The Head of Turdi de Hatred [DVD] [1974] sometime in the near future.

Switching on the computer, I found myself the recipient of some astonishing news and it’s the best news that I’ve had since Monday. I’m not going to sat anything about it as yet because it is too good to be true and I’m not going to believe a word of anything until I have a piece of paper in my sweaty little mitt. I’ve no idea why it is that my luck has suddenly changed for the better this last 9 months – it’s not like me at all. But things have certainly been turned upside-down just recently. So much so in fact that I’m convinced that there’s a huge banana skin waiting for me somewhere to compensate. But then again, if this news is as good as it seems to be then it won’t matter at all.

So now I’m listening to Made In Japan, and in particular “Highway Star” – the theme song for my trip to the Rockies and the Utah Desert in 2002 – at full volume before I go to bed. But no point in going to bed right now – I won’t be going off to sleep.

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Friday 25th March 2011 – This glorious weather is continuing.

We had over 25°C today outside, and for quite a lengthy period too. Not a cloud in the sky in fact. I carried on down in the potager –

I cut down a couple of huge trees that had grown there (although I haven’t uprooted the stumps yet), dug out where the third bed will be, uprooted god knows how many smaller stumps from out of there, dug it all over a few more times, and then made the raised bed framework that will enclose it all.

That’s in place now and so to finish off I tidied up in the barn so that I can now get in and out without falling over things.

The water in the solar shower was still at 36°C (it reached 37°C at one point in the afternoon) when I knocked off at 18:00 and so I took advantage by having yet another shower. I’ll be washing myself away at this rate – it’s only the dirt that holds me together.

And up here in my room the temperature was at 20.1°C – by far the highest of the year in here.

What more could any man require?

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Wednesday 23rd March 2011 – And if you thought …

… that yesterday’s events were spectacular, well you ain’t see nuffink yet.

I woke up at the silghtly earlier time of … errr … 09:44 and I’ve worked out that for the last two days I’ve managed to sleep through 4 alarm calls each day. That’s some going even for me. I must be tired.

Anyway after breakfast I carried on with the new plots. with the first one that I’m currently working on I’m having difficulties in that there are huge tree roots running right through it. After ages of digging, I gave up and went and sharpened the hatchet that I use for cutting firewood. That did the business – you can swing it in confined spaces like trenches – and now I have the one bed finished.

Tomorrow I might well make the framework for that and then carry on with the second bed.

After lunch, the water in the home-made immersion heater (powered by surplus energy from the solar panels) had reached the heady heights of 50°C and so that was my cue to get 20 litres of water out of it and do a load of washing. It’s rusting a little inside the drum that I’m using. Clearly I’m going to have to rig up one of the copper immersion heaters that I’ve scavenged

But never mind that – I’m impressed that it works at all – it’s nice to have done a load of washing that cost me nothing at all to do. Apart from the soap of course – the €12 that I paid for the machine has been reimbursed many times over.

Drying too is free – just hang the clothes outside in the sun and slight wind. what more do you want?

But that’s not all. The water in the solar heat exchanger was showing 34°C all on its own without the aid of any hot water added from a kettle. And so that was the cue for yet another shower. And you’ve no idea how pleasant it is to be all nice and clean and in clean clothes, and ready for bed in clean sheets.

And it won’t be long before I’m in those sheets either. I can’t last the pace these days.

After my shower I went round to Marianne’s for a chat. She wants me to do some research for her at Cambridge next time I’m in the UK. But she also needs a bit of burglarising and breaking and entering doing. My name came to the top of the list in that respect so it seems and it’s for that reason that she invited me round.

The things I get to do!

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Tuesday 22nd March 2011 – I knocked off early today …

… which might come as a surprise to many, seeing as it was probably the nicest day of the year and that I didn’t wake up this morning until … errr …. 10:20 and so I owe myself a couple of hours.

But once I was up and about I started on the vegetable plots, and not before time either. I cleared away some more of the jungle and that will be where I’ll be putting in another line of raised beds – the spuds will be going in there this year to start them off. You’ll remember that I have about 10 raised beds, in 5 rows of 2. I’ll be putting in a sixth row and also a third bed in that row – the extra bed going behind the compost bins. Ultimately there will be three beds in each row, but that won’t be this year.

I needed the pickaxe to pull up a few tree stumps too – there were in somewhat deep. It’s harder work the further down the slope I go because the further down, the longer the ground has remained undisturbed and the ground alder has got a severe hold down there.

Mark, who comes to the Anglo-French Group, gave me an idea too. He doesn’t use a chainsaw for chopping wood (neither do I) and while I’ve been struggling with all kinds of methods to cut wood, he says he uses an ordinary saw but one with huge teeth. A while ago I was in Brico Depot and saw exactly what he meant – a scie de coffreur – or joiner’s rough-cut saw. I bought one back then, and today I tried it out and I’ll tell you that there’s some mileage in this. It did an excellent job of cutting down overhanging branches.

And so why did I knock off early? Well with it being so nice just now (3 days that I’ve had the fridge running and 2 days that I’ve had no heating) I happened to look at the water in the solar shower tank at 17:00. 28°C. And seeing as there was no wind, it was 15°C outside and bright sunlight, I filled a kettle, boiled it up, made myself a coffee and tipped the rest of the hot water into the solar tank. That brought the temperature up to 42°C and I had an impromptu, unexpected but most welcome solar shower. In March as well. That’s a new all-time record.

And with the water temperature in the home-made immersion heater reaching 59.5°C today, I’m going to keep my eye on it. And if it gets up to that tomorrow, I’m going to do a load of washing using the home-made immersion heater to fill the machine.

That will be exciting.

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Friday 31st December 2010 – Happy New Year everyone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sunday 14th November 2010 – IT’S SUNDAY …

… today, and Sunday is a day of rest.

And after all of my exertions of the past couple of days here and there I needed a rest too.

So much so that it wasn’t until about 12:30 that I arose from my (or rather, Liz and Terry’s spare) stinking pit.

It’s hardly surprising that I wasn’t in the mood for all that much. I just loitered around and let the day fritter away aimlessly.

What went a long way towards it all was that

Liz was cooking, and I’ll walk a million miles for that
Liz and Terry said that if I wasn’t in any rush to go home, why didn’t I stay an extra night?

Well, do bears go for picnics in the woods?

So here I am, well-fed, well-watered, well-showered and well-clean-clothed, all nicely tucked up under the covers.

And here I shall stay until my name changes to Rip van Eric.

Tuesday 24th August 2010 – Just look at the size of this!

Never mind the Winter of our Discount Tents, this is the Summer of the Monster Courgettes. This one has burst into life from being a cigar-shaped nonentity, is just a few days. Now it’s 44cms. I’ve got a luvverly bunch of coconuts indeed.

It’s so big that I only cooked half of it tonight, and with the spinach (out of the garden), carrots (ditto), beans (ditto) and chili (ditto) together with sone onions, lentils and garlic I made a huge mega-curry and there is enough to last for three days.

As well as the other half-courgette of course, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with that.

The pan was full to overflowing but as most of the courgette is nothing but water it soon simmers down to a reasonably size. And it was absolutely delicious.

Mind you, I’ll be eating courgettes until they come out of my ears. It’s the one thing that seems to do well here.

It was raining when I woke up and so after I let Terry and Simon into Lieneke’s house I carried on here – but not outside. The composting toilet will have to wait.

What I did instead was to carry on working in the bedroom – the first time for about three months I reckon. And I now have the back wall finished as well as one of the sides of the fitted wardrobe that I’m building. That’s what is going down the far side just there.

I can’t do the other side of the wardrobe as it’s out of there that the electric wiring is coming and I need to work out how I’m going to fit it. But it’s nice to see progress all the same.

The weather brightened up this afternoon and so I reckoned on a shower, but the temperature has plummeted. 19°C it was outside, and the water temp was only 31°C. But not to worry – I tipped a kettle-full of boiling water into the solar tank. That took the temperature up to … errr ….45°C so a half-kettle of cold water took it back down to 42°C and that was my shower sorted. Delicious! Mind you, won’t have to boil up water much longer as Simon gave me the boiler out of his van. It’s only 2.5 litres by the way but it will go nicely in the garage running off the excess charge over there. I’ve made a note of the maker and I’m going to see if they can do me a 50-litre one. That would be progress.

But the temperature is still falling, and with a clear sky, full moon and no clouds at all, it seems that the weather has turned (already!) and autumn is just around the corner. That’s depressing.

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Saturday 21st August 2010 – Here’s an interesting photo.

The time is 17:47, the air temperature outside underneath the solar shower is 31°C, and the water in the solar heating tank, all 20 or so litres of it, is 44°C.

Today has been a right scorcher right enough and I almost scalded myself when I had a shower. Believe me, 44°C is really hot and I am ever so impressed that I have managed to heat to this extent 20 litres of water in a black plastic container with an old caravan window over the top

But that’s not all either. The automatic water heater ran for several hours and I had 44.5°C in that. And that’s 50 litres of water in an open bucket with a 12-volt heater element floating on top, heated by surplus energy from the solar panels that would otherwise be dumped. Just imagine what the temperature would have been if it had been 30 litres of water in a sealed and insulated container.

That’s going to be my next trick – making an immersion heater, and I have a 30-litre container all lined up for use. All I need now is the time.

I reckon that the water heating, in summer anyway, is making great strides, and I have plans for the winter too. They involve some of that flexible copper tubing would round the chimney of my wood-burning stove. I also have 3 solar panels and a 400-watt wind turbine in the barn and I don’t use the power from there all that much – just the lighting in the barn, the washing machine and charging up the power tools. So if I made a portable immersion heater then in winter I could take it to the barn and rig up an automatic water heating system over there. I reckon that the batteries in the barn were fully-charged on an average of one day in two throughout last winter. Probably not by much, but nevertheless it will be worth seeing what happens over there and what results I would get.

While we are on the subject, I bumped into Simon at LIDL today. He had a 12-volt water tank in his van and he took it out a while ago. He’s offered it to me so I’ll install that in the barn for now and see what happens.

I had an expensive day out shopping today and I blew a mammoth €35. And all on the usual stuff today – nothing exciting or extravagant. I don’t know where my money goes. And while I was in the Carrefour I had to give directions to this Dutch guy who was looking for a public convenience for his little girl. And it wasn’t until we’d been talking for a few minutes and he said “are you English? I think that your Dutch is excellent” that I realised that we had been talking in Dutch. Well – he might have been, and I was replying in Flemish – ik spreek een beetje Vlaams – but I’m really going to have a go at remembering some of the languages I used to be able to speak.

What got me thinking about languages too was that I had a visitor this evening – the guy off this building site who wanted to talk about solar panels. He studied in the Soviet Union round about the same time that I was driving buses there and I reckon that I can’t remember anything at all of all the Russian I used to speak.

I’ve also been tidying up here. I have some tie-wraps with screw-holes that will be ideal for a job that we are doing on Lieneke’s house. But can I hell find them and my place is just a total tip. It’s high time I exerted myself to make an effort – yet another job for when this perishing job on Lieneke’s house is finished

Tuesday 17th August 2010 – Tomorrow the World!

Do you remember that plant that I showed you a photograph of the other day – the one that had taken over the greenhouse? It’s actually a gherkin plant and here you can see it leaving the greenhouse and setting out for Montlucon.

At the rate that it’s going, it’ll get there before any UK Council Worker or British Rail porter will, that’s for sure, and who knows where it will head for next?

I’ve been gardening again today. Or at least, this afternoon.

We had done as much as we could on the roof today. The cement on the stone cladding on the side of the house hadn’t quite set and you can’t put too many stones on a cladded wall like this in one go, and the tiles that we had ordered for the roof hadn’t arrived.

We hadn’t had instructions from Lieneke about the inside of the lean-to either, and with Terry and Simon needing to price up some more material, we decided on a half-day on the roof.

I dug up the garlic and weeded the onion bed – that was the first thing. Strangely, only half the garlic had taken and the other half was in its single clove. The latter I replanted in one of the herb troughs to see what happens. But there’s nothing like enough garlic – I’ll need to bear that in mind.

And while weeding, I noticed the onions. Nothing like enough of them either but they are there all right.

I also tidied up all of the wood at the front of the barn – the left-over new stuff at least. I need a rainy day so that I can have the time to stack it correctly inside without having to worry about working on Lieneke’s roof. In fact I have tons of jobs to do really – let’s hope that this week will see us finish the roof.

You’ll notice a couple of little changes in the lean-to too. I’ve moved a couple of sheets of iron and now the end wall is totally exposed. I’ve fitted (at the top, at least) two demi-chevrons that will guide me in forming the top of the long wall.

There was a full drum of waste in the mixer when we knocked off and it was a lovely chalky mix and so I did a pile of pointing, including that corner of the other lean-to where I lived for a while and which was getting damp.

I cleaned out the mixer with stones again. built a couple of thin walls and poured the mixture in between. I hadn’t quite sealed the wall as you can see and so some of the stuff leaked out, but it’s progress all the same.

A solar shower (the summer sort-of came back today) and that was my lot.

The automatic water-heater switched on too – and a temperature of 45.5 degrees. This is looking quite optimistic.

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Wednesday 28th July 2010 – I had another day off today …

… because Terry was elsewhere, and I celebrated it with something of a lie-in.

After breakfast I did some more work on my website, which has fallen way behind schedule, and then I finally managed to do a big load of washing, what with the wind and the weather being all right for that sort of thing. It’s amazing how much washing there was but then again I haven’t done any for a while.

After a late lunch I emptied Caliburn out. I’ve lost my SatNav and I’ve no idea where it might be. It’s nowhere in Caliburn as far as I can see and it’s annoying me, this.

Terry suggests that I look elsewhere for it in case I may have taken it out of Caliburn at some time, but around here, where on earth do you start? You can be here for a week and only just scratch the surface. I reckon it’s well and truly gone.

But at least Caliburn is now fully empty, and he needs to be. We have a scaffolding to pick up in a week or so and the other trailer has now apparently gone tits-up. This is annoying me! We are going to have to collect it in the two vans.

When I knocked off I had a shower – the solar shower was showing 36 degrees and that’s warm enough. The automatic heater fired itself up as well today and reached 33 degrees, 11 degrees above the ambient. Add on another 11 degrees for a closed lid and another 11 degrees for insulation and you can see how this is all going to work when I install a tank instead. I noticed by the way that even with the fridge running and the water heater working there was still an excess of solar power. I might have to fit two elements instead of just one.

But talking of the fridge, there’s no thermostat on mine and so it runs 24 hours per day 7 days per week. And at 5 amps that’s a total of 120 amp-hours, or about 1.45Kw. But Conforama where I bought my bed settee from, they are offering a table top fridge – twice as big as mine – that uses just 0.37Kw per day – or about 32 amp-hours. And it’s an A+ so there’s bound to be a ton of insulation stuffed into it, so I’m currently thinking about abandoning my 12-volt fridge, buying a small inverter that will power the fridge and then having the inverter switched into the dump load. When the batteries are fully charged the inverter will fire up and run the fridge as well as the water heater and when the battery charge drops the inverter (and the fridge) switch off.

The big advantage of this is that on a good day it takes until about 12:30 for the batteries to be fully charged. with no fridge running through the night the batteries will be fully-charged in an hour or so and that’ll give me more time for the water heater and the fridge will be running away in the background on its minimal power requirement.

I shall have to look into this.

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Thursday 15th July 2010 – After about almost a year …

… of waiting to fix that downpipe on the side of the house and it being in position for just a couple of weeks, I took it down today.

There were two reasons for that –
firstly – all of the rainwater from the house and the lean-to are just running off down the lane and turning the place into a quagmire
secondly – the water situation is starting to become a little tight- I reckon I have about 150 litres or so left.
And when it rains, the 6.5 sq.m of verandah roof doesn’t catch all that much – 100 litres of water is about 15mm of rain. But add to that the footprint of the lean-to – 5m x 1.8m, or 9 sq.m, then the 100 litres of water becomes 6mm of rain. And then add that to the side of the house roof – with its footprint of 5.3m x 3.5m or just over 18.5 sq m then the 100 litres of water becomes just under 3mm of rain.

Sitting here the other day watching the rain filling up that water butt by the barn with all of the water off the barn roof has given me some new ideas which I put into action.

What I did was to rip off all of the guttering on the lean-to and to replace it so that it slopes to the right rather than the left. The guttering now captures all of the water off the lean-to and now I can replenish my water supply more quickly – always of course assuming that it’s ever going to rain again.

This morning though I removed all of the wood from off the old vegetable patch at the side of the barn – all that we ripped off the one side of the roof. 3 of the beams are useless and will have to be cut up for firewood but of the others some of the wood can be salvaged and I might start shortly on the greenhouse, using the old beams as a frame.

While I was at it, and with the old vegetable patch now being clear of wood, I set to work on that with a vengeance.

I spent a pleasant hour or two pulling out all of the weeds that were growing over the stone wall and now you can actually see it, for the first time since I don’t know when. This place is starting to tidy itself up a bit and that’s a pleasant change.

The automatic electric water heater is working too. It ran for almost three hours today and I put a thermometer in to see what the temperature was doing. 37°C the water reached in that time so not much danger of the sytem melting down, although if I make a sealed circuit with a smaller tank I shall either fit a thermal cut-out of have an expansion tank of some description. But it’s still impressive all the same.

Ironically the water in the solar water heater reached a lovely 44°C this evening and so I had a nice steamy shower.

What with one thing and another things are starting to get quite luxurious around here!

Sunday 11th July 2010 – Now how weird is this?

I’ve had one of those days today that just became more and more weird as it drew on.

I went to Espinasse this afternoon for the local fete and as far as I was concerned it was a fete worse than death.

it got off to a bad start in my opinion before the day even started. We had the typical defilé as you might expect, but whoever heard of a village fete here in the Combrailles where there wasn’t even a hint of a brocante? The Combrailles is the brocante capital of the world and the locals will vider their greniers at the drop of a hat. All we had today was a brocan’t, and that’s not on at all.

Highlight was the Irish musicians who came on stage at 18:00.

Now I bet you that you can go into any Irish pub anywhere in the whole wide world, or any folk night anywhere in any English-speaking area of the world, or anywhere wherever any Celtic musicians might be grouped and the first two songs that you will always hear will be “Dirty Old Town” and “The Wild Rover”.

And here in the backwoods, miles from civilisation and 200 years behind the times, what did these Irish musicians play as his first two songs? YEEEEUUUUCCCCCHHHHHHH. I had a word with him about it afterwards, and his response was “ohh well”. Yes – ohh well indeed.

But that was not the most weird part of all of this. They stopped the music mid set …. to draw the lottery numbers and shout out the prizewinners. It was just like being in any Workingmen’s Club anywhere in the United Kingdom where they would stop the … entertainment … (and I use the term loosely) so that they could play bingo.

It was absolutely unbelievable.

Another thing that we had today that was astonishing was a politically-correct May Queen. Normally the May Queen of any village is a young teenage or preteen girl and there are good reasons for this, especially for the pagans amongst us, those of us who are more than 2,000 years old and with long memories and those of us happen to know a little about early medieval village life.

But of course the way the world is these days in the UK and other such cases it’s becoming less and less politically correct to have a real May Queen just in case someone might photograph her – but who would ever have thought that such a taboo (because that’s what it is in the strictest and literal sense of the word) would have reached down here?

Mind you, I know that it’s not a politically-correct thing to say, but it could just maybe be because they couldn’t find a virgin in the village?

Another thing that caught my eye was an American from Colorado Springs wandering around and wearing a T-shirt reading
“Land of the Free
Home of the Brave”.
Anyone who has ever read anything that I have ever written will know all about my opinion about the USA being “The Land of the Free“. Everywhere I’ve ever been in the USA it’s always been “please prepare your admission money”.

As for “Home of the Brave” – well Manifest Destiny, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee as well as hundreds if not thousands of other similar “incidents” saw to it that there are no longer any braves in the USA.

In fact the more I thought about it, the more offended I was about that blasted T-shirt and in the end I went and had an “frank exchange of views” with the wearer.

There was clearly something up with me today – I don’t normally let things like this get to me. It must have been the heat. In the end I came home and had a shower (and we aren’t talking about Open University Students Association’s Executive Committee either). 19:45 and still 43 degrees in the container. I’ve picked a good site for that.

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EPIC HALL

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