Tag Archives: les guis

Thursday 23rd February 2012 – HAVING FINALLY …

… broken the back of my presentation, I can get on and do other things.

This morning I cut up another pile of wood for in here, and doesn’t the lean-to start to look empty now, especially as I discovered that a major proportion of the heap in the middle is actually bricks and stone from when the wall collapsed all those years ago.

Moving some of that stuff out has made quite a difference, that’s for sure.

It’s going to be a while though before I can finish in there though – a term of years is not unlikely. The more wood I cut up, the more that I seem to find.

I also had a good look at the window in the bedroom. Having given the matter considerable thought, I now reckon that I know how I’m going to do the surround. And the next chance that I have to work in there, I’ll be making a start.

But tomorrow I’ll be printing off my notes because the presentation is at 20:00 tomorrow evening. So just you watch the printer break down or run out of ink

But assuming that we do go ahead, everyone is invited!

20:00 at the village hall in Virlet

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Wednesday 22nd February 2012 – GRRRRR!

This presentation is getting on my wick.

Having been at it all day yesterday and all day today, I am much nearer my goal but it hasn’t half been a struggle.

The issue is that PowerPoint seems to grind out at 1mb of space and everything after that is lost. That means that only 37 of the slides are being displayed, instead of the … gulp … 123

The answer is of course simple. To prepare four different presentations of about 30 slides each and that should keep it under the limit.

Simple, you might think, except that OpenOffice doesn’t seem to offer the possibility to delete multiple selections of slides. It seems to be just one at a time, and it has ben taking me forever to do that.

There must be a solution because my whole theory about computer programs is that I’m not the only one surely who wants that facility, so it must be there somewhere. It’s not the kind of simple software function that a software designer would have missed.

But I’m blowed if I can find it.

So it’s been the laborious one-by-one procedure.

All day.

And I’m fed up

Totally

Tuesday 21st February 2012 – IT’S GETTING CLOSE …

… to my presentation time.

For those of you not clued up to what is happening, a few months ago I was at a meeting of the village committee here in Virlet where they were discussing the programm for this year.

Once a month, they have an “event” when everyone is invited, and they ask someone to animate it. When they were deciding on the events, they had most of the meetings covered, but one date stuck out like a sore thumb – 24th February.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that 24th February is a date of special significance for me, and so it seemed like an opportunity. As you know, I’m all very much in favour of integration and participating in community events. I should be feeding something back into the community of which I am part.

As a result I offered to animate the meeting on that date, and I’m doing a presentation of my 2010 trip around the Trans-Labrador Highway

Much of it was pretty straightforward but I seem to have run aground somewha.

for some reason that I haven’t quite grasped, a presentation done in OpenOffice and exported as a Powerpoint presentation only displays the first 37 slides (which coincidentally runs to about 1mb) instead of the entire load of … gulp … 123 slides.

I’ve not yet found a workaround for it either.

And this is where I am at the moment

And I only have until Friday to do it too.

Monday 20th February 2012 – I’VE HAD SOMETHING …

… of a busy day today.

And it started, believe it or not, with me being up and about before the alarm clock went off – something that doesn’t happen every day.

So after an early breakfast I stayed in and spent much of the time on the computer working on another project for the radio, more of which anon.

But this involved making a few downloads from the internet. And as I watched these downloads unfold I noticed the internet speed dropping slowly but surely. Clearly something is up, and it’s high time I fixed it.

That meant disabling and then deleting the MacAfee anti-virus suite, which is something pretty appalling and I can’t think whyever it is that computer manufacturers bundle it in.

Once that was out of the way I went back to prehistoric computer protection, and installed the latest free AVG anti-virus software, and then Ad-Aware, Spybot and C-Cleaner, the same as I have been using for years.

Sure enough, 2 viruses, 140-odd adware links and the odd bit of spyware, and half a gb of bunged-up old temporary files all littering the computer and after quite a bit of patience and persuasion, they have all gone.

Now I seem to have a leaner, fitter computer.

Mind you, trying to download AVG at 9.3kbs took absolutely hours, but it was worth it and I’m hoping that I can win back the time in due course.

It’s all very well having virus protection, but not just any old virus protection though. You need one that works quietly, quickly and effectively without pinching all of your resources.

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Sunday 19th February 2012 – AFTER THE EXERTIONS …

…or lack thereof yesterday and having crashe dout without any tea, I was out like a light until all of about 07:00 on Sunday morning.

Of course, that time of the morning is far too early for a weekday, never mind a Sunday, and so I rolled over and went back to sleep. When I did wake up I noticed that it had been raining.

Liz even mentioned that at about 09:00 round by hers it had been snowing, but what do I know about 09:00 on a Sunday?

I did almost nothing at all today except deal with some payments I had to make on eBay – although I did make myself two pots of coffee with the 12-volt coffee machine.

The height of decadence.

Later on I went round to Liz and Terry’s at Sauret-Besserve to rehearse our radio programmes. Liz must have known that I hadn’t had my usual Saturday night curry, because she had made a gorgeous chickpea curry.

And not only that, she made me up a doggy bag for tomorrow and that has made my day as well.

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Saturday 18th February 2012 – WASN’T SATURDAY A WEIRD DAY?

The temperature in here was 15.4°C when I woke up this morning. And during the course of the day it actually increased without any heat input at all. So much so that at one stage we had 20°C in here.

Mind you, that’s not surprising. Outside we had as much as 16.3°C and in the verandah, over 25°C.

It really was an exceptional day.

So what to do with the surplus electrical energy? After all, no point in heating up here, as it was warm enough on its own.

No point in doing any washing either because although there is a lot to be done, I wasn’t sure if enough water had been melted.

The answer was to resurrect the 12-volt coffee machine. it needed a good clean as it hadn’t been used for a year or so but once it was up and running we managed a good pot of coffee. And why not?

What with electric heating, coffee machines and so on, it does make me wonder what I’m going to be having running next though.

But one of the drawbacks to the warm weather is that the fire, when I finally did light it up, never reached anything like hot enough to cook anything. I was burnt out of the room long before the fire warmed up.

Not that it mattered though because for some unaccountable reason I crashed out at 22:00 and apart from a brief 10 minutes of consciousness to take the readings and to switch off the computer, that was that.

Friday 17th February 2012 – I FINISHED THE CEILING …

… just before lunchtime. And I’m really impressed with how it has turned out, even if it did take ages to do.

And there’s 60mm of insulation underneath that tongue-and-grooving, and that is what is probably helping to keep my little attic warm. I remember just how cold it was in here when I first moved in and there wasn’t any insulation at all.

But it was colder in here this morning too – a mere 14.4°C. Positively arctic, I mused to myself. And that’s a difference too from 9°C from the other day, although the difference between 0.3°C outside last night (first 24-hour period for ages that it didn’t get below freezing) last night and -16°C the other night is even more spectacular.

So after lunch I cleaned the pathways outside now that everywhere is warming up. I can walk about the place without sliding over now.

And then it was back into the bedroom. All the joints in the plasterboard on the wall by the window are now sealed and filled, and I’ve almost finished sealing in the window.

I started off using mastic for that but then I remembered that Terry gave me a load of mastic-type glue that he didn’t think too much of, and so I used a pile of that.

That has gone in from the inside, but I’ll buy some proper stuff tomorrow to do the outside.

Once the window is properly sealed in, I can do the window= framing in the bedroom. The two sides and the top will (of course) be in tongue-and-grooving and I’ve some pine board that will do for the windowsill.

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Thursday 16th February 2012 – WHEN I WOKE UP THIS MORNING …

… der der der der der …

but doesn’t that have all the makings of a really good blues song?

However, to coin a phrase, since I’ve been on the Prozac I haven’t had the blues for years.

Anyway, when I woke up this morning the temperature in here was a massive 15.4°C. And it’s been a long time since it’s been that warm in here without a fire. It just goes to show, firstly, how much things have warmed up outside, and secondly, the benefits of heaping a pile of scrap wood on the fire just as you go to sleep

It was warm outside as well – all of 2°C – and it’s been a long time since it’s been that warm as well. 4mm of rain we had through the night and while it hasn’t washed away the snow, it’s now a messy sticky quagmire outside.

First job was to look at this solar spotlight thing that I bought a few weeks ago and which didn’t want to work. Once I’d worked out how to dismantle … “dispersontle” – ed … it, the rest was easy.

The battery wasn’t fitted correctly. It was only a 600mAh battery though, and so I charged up a spare 2500mAh battery and fitted that.

This evening it lit up at last. It’s not very bright but from where I’ve installed it, it lights up the pathway from where I park Caliburn down to the side of the house. And that was what I wanted it to do.

Next job was to fix the anemometer that didn’t want to record its data. A flat battery (that’s the third it’s had since I bought it in the autumn!) and a badly-seated mounting sorted that out, but each time the battery is relmoved, you need to recalibrate the computer, and I can see that being a pain with three batteries in five months

The rest of the day, in between the phone calls, I spent on the roof of the bedroom. I cracked on as well and I reckon that there’s about 3 hours’ work to do there.

Once that’s done, I need to deal with the sealing of the joints in the plasterboard – and now I have the water to do that. I also have to seal the window so that I can build up around it.

Tonight I had a gorgeous tea. Baked potatoes of course, but I put a baking tray in there, lightly oiled, and cut up an onion and some garlic to fry on it. Then, a small tin of mushrooms and a ladle of tinned vegetables. All finished off by some curry and gravy powder into the resultant liquid. It really was nice.

But a downside of this warm weather is that with having to heat up the oven sufficiently to cook the food, the temperature soared to an astonishing 24°C. It’s now 5 hours since I last put any fuel on the fire, I’m sitting here in shirt sleeves (not even a pullover) and it’s still over 20°C.

And in other news, I was chatting on the phone to this Canadian guy whom I’m working with. We were talking about fires and I was saying that I was looking for a woodstove that has an oven and also a water boiler, to fit in the cabin that I’m going to build on my plot of land in Canada.

“Ohh – I have an old one of those that I took out of here a few years ago. It’s in my shed – I’ll sort it out for you”

Blimey!

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Wednesday 15th February 2012 – THIS WATER ISSUE …

… might have solved itself.

And for several different reasons too.

f you see that icicle in the photo here that I took a week or so ago (the weather was nothing like that today of course) it started to melt today. And so I simply stuck a bucket underneath it.

Meantime, I took one of those plastic drinks bottles, the type with a very long pointed neck, and cut the bottom off. Then I stuffed a load of fine fibreglass mesh up the neck.

Each time a bucket was filled, I poured it through my home-made filter into one of these proprietary jug filters and let it filter through there, and then I decanted it into my water container.

I managed to capture about 40 litres over the course of the afternoon and that’s eased the situation considerably.

However like most things, solutions don’t come on their own. Like London buses, after you’ve been waiting for hours, three turn up all at once.

And so it is with this. By the end of the afternoon the water butt had started to unfreeze itself.

Not that that’s a quick solution, because I looked inside the rear tank and that’s a frozen mass of ice, but I still managed 5 litres out of there as well.

And the third solution? Well, after all the freezing weather that we’ve had just recently, it’s p155ing down outside. All the snow will be gone by tomorrow if it carries on like this, and then we will be in the floods again. Then we’ll be having a different kind of water problem.

Despite a constant stream of interruptions today, I’ve now started on the final row of the tongue-and-grooving in the bedroom.

That involved finishing off the previous row, moving piles of stuff around the room, and then mixing some polyfilla to fill in the joins between the wood and the insulation that is already in the ceiling.

Maybe if I have a decent day tomorrow I can crack on with this. It would be nice to have it finished for the weekend.

One thing that has helped is that this row is by far the narrowest of them. When I’ve been doing the other rows and cutting down lengths of tongue-and-grooving, I’ve always been left with leftover bits that wouldn’t fit anywhere.

I’ve been labelling them with the size, and these are all fitting into the row that I’m doing now. This will save me a load of time cutting up full-size lengths.

For tea tonight I had ratatouille, green beans and baked potatoes. This time the potatoes were done properly and it was one of the nicest meals I’ve had for ages. It was definitely a good plan to move the kitchen up here for the duration.

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Tuesday 14th February 2012 – IT WAS A PLEASURE …

… to wake up this morning with a temperature of 13.5°C up here in the room. It’s been a while since I’ve had a temperature like that.

Mind you, what wasn’t a pleasure was being woken up by a phone call at some ungodly hour of the morning. However, it did concern work so I can’t complain too much I suppose, even if it did get me off on the wrong foot.

After all of that, I went to beat the bounds of the property. As you know, we had a right caning of snow through the night and I wanted to see what the weather had done to the place.

The answer is, as you might expect, that I’m properly snowed in and I shan’t be going anywhere for a bit. Luckily I had the foresight to leave Caliburn up at he top of the bank

As an aside, you can see the Sankey trailer and the Minerva, and also the old orange central heating tank that Simon gave me to use to store biofuels in.

And while I was checking up on the house, I had a brainwave, And it’s so simple that I’ve no idea why I never thought of it before – and I’m kicking myself for having suffered like this these last couple of weeks.

And so I dashed off for a rummage in the barn.

In the apartment in Brussels I had a small white kitchen table with two drop leaves and I remember bringing it down here. That had to be around somewhere and eventually I found all of the pieces.

I brought it up into the attic and assembled it in the room, and laid all of the kitchen stuff on it. It’s now making quite a useful kitchen worktop up here and I wished that I had remembered it earlier.

This afternoon I didn’t manage to do very much as I had a whole series of phone calls one after the other, and so it was pretty much a wasted day. Still, there will be other days.

Tea was baked potatoes and spicy beans, cooked in the oven. This was an excellent buy, this new woodstove.

But the temperature outside just now is astonishing – minus 1.6°C. That’s over 10°C improvement from last night. If that kind of temperature transforms itself into a decent daytime temperature, I might even have some water tomorrow.

And not before time either – I’m now reduced to melting buckets of snow.

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Monday 13th February 2012 – I HAD MY FIRST …

… culinary disaster tonight – almost inevitable that there would be one sooner or later.

Returning home after the Anglo-French group meeting (hardly a group meeting, there was just me, myself and I there) it was a wicked 6.4°C in my little room. That called for some desperate measures.

I’d finished off the beans and chips last night and so that meant pizza this evening. And I soon had a roaring blaze going – one that had the room up to 18°C in under an hour.

Unfortunately it was rather too roaring and it burnt the base of the pizza and of the garlic bread. I’ve never ever had that before – it just goes to show you what you can do when you really try. Especially as the rice pudding was cooked to perfection, and that’s a first as well

But this morning, in the cold and damp overcast weather I had another marathon woodcutting session in the lean-to. I’m cutting up the wood that is in there. It’s perfectly dry and been that way for years hence I can burn it up here straight away without having to leave it standing for a year or so.

That explains the roaring inferno that I had this evening.

Apart from that, I’ve been working on the ceiling of the bedroom again. It’s taking ages to do, but it won’t half look nice when it’s finished.

Tonight it didn’t go cold again. It just stayed hovering around the -3°C mark.

And at 18:00 the heavens opened and we had about a ton and a half of snow dropped on us.

It’s still snowing now in fact. Haven’t times changed?

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Sunday 12th February 2012 – IF ANYONE THINKS …

… that I’m going out and looking for a football match today, then they are very much mistaken.

Sunday is a Day of Rest, and that means not trying to extricate myself out of the little lane here and sliding and slithering around 100 miles of French countryside trying to find a football pitch that might be playable.

Because there will certainly be nothing anywhere in this vicinity.

Instead, I had a lie-in and when I finally did heave myself out of my stinking pit into Ice Station Zebra, I lit the fire and spent most of the day within about 6 inches thereof with the laptop, a good book and a couple of films.

Tea tonight was the rest of the oven chips that I didn’t cook yesterday, and that, dear reader, is your lot.

We are told that it will warm up tomorrow – I suppose that instead of -11°C that will mean -9°C.

We shall see.

Saturday 11th February 2012 – IT WAS COLD …

… this morning … "ohh what a surprise" – ed … 9.5°C or thereabouts up here at 10:00 am this morning.

But that really was no surprise really because at that moment outside it was a mere -12°C. This weather certainly is ridiculous.

Anyway a blazing wood fire had the temperature up to 18.5°C within an hour and that was the important bit.

I stayed in and cracked on with the presentation about the Trans-Labrador Highway that I’ll be doing for the village, and by 14:30 it was done.

At least the text and the graphics are. I just have to make a powerpoint presentation of the photos, and that won’t take too long.

From there I nipped into St Eloy-les-Mines and did some shopping. And I excelled myself. Some potatoes to cook in my oven, and also some more oven chips.

Saturday night might be curry night and it has been for as long as I can remember, but not when it’s cold enough outside that half a packet of frozen oven chips will stay frozen for a couple of days while I had the rest with a veggie burger and baked beans.

But in Carrefour there were some young kids running amok, nominally (but not actually) under the control of a young woman with earrings and piercings through the nose and chin and the like.

And when she spoke – yes, it was in English. and we came out here to keep away from people like that, snobs that we are. Jarspur and Hooray Henries one week, chavs the next week.

I picked my way delicately to Rosemary’s after that, eventually, and we had a good chat for a couple of hours.

and so back here where I have a big fire going and I’m not moving.

The word on the streets is that things shall warm up dramatically on Monday night. The bad news is that we shall be covered in snow though. If it’s not one thing it’s another.

And once you get started, you’ll be surprised at just how many other things there are.

-1

Friday 10th February 2012 – THIS WEATHER IS STARTING …

… to get on my wick a little bit.

Yes. Deep-frozen veg and deep-frozen chili beans for tea tonight.

No big deal, you might think, but these were deep-frozen vegetables and beans from out of tins. And when your tins of food are freezing then you know that you really do have problems.

Not much water today either. It’s becoming harder and harder to melt the solid ice that is in the water butts.

We are at the stage where I’m beginning to think that the next time we have a really decent day’s solar energy, I’ll take the halogen heater outside and use that to melt the ice.

So I spent a major part of the day in the lean-to. I’ve stacked some of the wood so much better, moved some bricks outside, moved some stones upstairs, shovelled some bits and pieces out of the way, made up three large containers of wood for up here, and that’s given me plenty of space to move stuff from out of the house.

But you’ll be amazed (or maybe you won’t) at just how quickly the space is filled up, and things don’t look all that much different in the house either, which is really rather sad.

Anyway, there’s tons of old waste paper and old waste cardboard so if I have a huge bonfire once the weather improves (whenever that might be) it’ll make the place look emptier (I hope).

I’ve also done a bit more on the ceiling.

I was going to have a really good crack at it but Rosemary rang up and we had a big long chat instead. It’s her first winter living here, and she needs encouragement. Luckily she decided on moving here more-or-less full-time to sell her old rear-wheel drive saloon and buy a 4×4. She’ll certainly benefit from that decision.

Confronted with the deep-frozen tinned food, I’m now moving more and more stuff up here. The washing-up stuff is now in the attic (the sink in the verandah has been frozen up for over a week anyway) and so all of the crockery, cutlery and saucepans will be staying up here.

It’s pointless taking them all downstairs to wash, leaving them there overnight and then bringing them back up here the following evening. It’s the coldest winter for decades, apparently, and no-one expected it to go on for as long as this.

Consecutive minuses in double figures for well over a week – something that’s unheard-of. But I have done the roof in the lean-to and I have a really good wood stove, so who cares?

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Thursday 9th February 2012 – IT WASN’T QUITE …

… the stinker that I was expecting last night.

Here I was expecting some kind of phenomenal temperature and all we had was a measly -14.1°C.

A bagatelle.

But it was cold up here in my attic this morning though, 8°C when I woke up. And that’s not surprising that the temperature up here is falling slowly. This cold spell has lasted well over a week and shows no sign of letting up

So after breakfast it was down into the firewood and I’m at the stage of looking for larger kindling because that’s getting low up here. I’ve worked my way through a big pile this winter.

I’ve brought up a large IKEA bag full from out of the lean-to, and that’s making even more space in there, which is good news because I’m at the stage where I need to think about moving things out of the house to give me space to start working elsewhere. It’s beginning to get too crowded in here.

Most of the rest of the day was spent working on the ceiling again, and I’m making good progress, even though I did manage to fall off the trestle thing that I’m standing on. i’m not quite sure how I managed to do that.

But I did find time to rescue the two coffee percolator things and give them a really good clean. I tried the big one on the woodstove and although it took a while it made a decent cup of coffee.

For some unknown reason it took ages to cook the spaghetti though and I’m going to have to think of a way to do this better or to improve my technique.

But I can see why in North America they go for tin-roofed houses. Although it was freezing cold outside it was bright and sunny. And the intensity of the sun must have heated the tin roof of the barn sufficiently for at a certain moment all of the snow slid off the barn roof and fell with a crash to the floor.

And that does rather remind me of the British Trade Delegation to the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. Having been warned about the possibiity of eavesdroping and hidden microphones, they diligently searched the room for hidden wires. And sure enough, they found four wires stapled to the floor under the carpet. A pair of nail scissors took care of them.

Next morning, one of the members of the Trade Delegation engaged the babushka – the old lady who monitors the corridor in the hotel – in casual conversation.
“How are things?” he asked, practising his Russian.
“You won’t believe this” she said “but something really extraordinary happened last night. For no apparent reason, the chandelier in the room under yours came crashing down to the ground!”

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EPIC HALL

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