Tag Archives: les guis

Wednesday 8th February 2012 – AFTER ALL …

… that I said yesterday about my heat pad melting the water in the deep-frozen water butt, the sum total of water received today was precisely zero.

Although we had a really warm night for a change (the temperature rose to the dizzy heights of -11.4°C in fact) we had some snow. It was overcast all day with snow flurries and the sun hardly broke through at all, hence the maximun temperature today was a crazy -7.9°C and not even a heat pad can cope with that and do anything worthwhile.

I also had a phone call first thing.

François, who I haven’t seen for ages, came on the blower. He’s having issues with the blog of one of his Associations and now that there’s no technical assistance with the reseau since Liesbeth moved away, it looks like I have the short straw.

That meant the first part of the morning tidying up. Can’t have visitors with the place looking like a tip.

I cut up some wood too, and brought up here a load of wood to make an impressive woodpile up here.

I had a couple of hours in the bedroom, having managed to scrounge enough water to mix some quick-drying filler to do the joints between the plasterboard and the ceiling. And quick-drying it needs to be too – to set and to dry before it freezes.

And after that, I had another good go at the ceiling.

François came round after lunch, and won the prize for being the first private visitor of the year (yes, 6 weeks in as well, it shows just how popular I am). We chatted for quite a while and I sorted out his problems.

But once he had gone, I didn’t resume work. The temperature is dropping rapidy and so I stayed up here in the warm.

As for tea, I had tinned ratatouille standing by but what with my late lunch (17:00) I wasn’t hungry. a kettle with a small amount of water boiled up in no time on the stove and I had a coffee instead.

Anyway, it’s bright moonlight outside and not a cloud in the sky. It’s going to be another stinker tonight.

-1

Tuesday 7th February 2012 – I’M MORE AND MORE …

… impressed with this new little woodstove of mine.

Almost impressed, in fact, as I am with my galvanised steel dustbin.

Last night I cooked myself the rest of the oven chips, some baked beans and a veggie burger in the oven.

Tonight though, leaving the oven open, I cooked a saucepan of pasta, beans and lentils in a kind-of curry sauce. And it’s all working really well.

And I think that I’ve found the secret of heating the room even quicker.

A nail has fallen down the back of the fire and as a result I can’t close up the ash tray completely. It’s open about a quarter of an inch. and if I open the air intake just a fraction, it roars away like nobody’s business.

Another thing that helps is having turned the divan round so that it is across the room, it acts as a heat-stop and all of the heat is concentrated between me and the fire.

And while I’m sitting on the sofa, if I prop open the lid about 30° when the fire is roaring, the lid deflects all of the heat right into my upper body.

But this morning it was cold in here – all of 8.2°C in fact.

And that’s hardly surprising because last night outside, was -16.3°C, the coldest temperature that I have ever recorded here.

It was cruel downstairs. Even the orange juice was frozen solid.

I had to go to the mairie as well to check over the projector for this exhibition I’m doing on the Trans-Labrador Highway, and Caliburn had a little struggle to start – not that I’m surprised.

Back here I made a heat pad with that heated seat pad and some insulation, and throughout the afternoon it melted about 25 litres of water. I’m now seemingly melting more water than I’m using so that’s progress of a sort.

I’ve also made much more progress doing the ceiling in the bedroom, and the unexpectred good side of this is that in moving a lot of the stuff around, I’m finding loads of things that I have misplaced. Knives, saws, the large mitre clamps, and also the missing 650-watt circular saw for which I’ve been hunting for ages.

So tonight, with having a big fire in here, it’s quite warm and so I’m off to bed in a minute.

Tomorrow I need to use some of that excess water to make some polyfilla stuff to fill the cracks in the plasterboarding that I did the other day. 15 minutes will see me finish the ceiling as far as I can go and I can’t do any more until the joints in the wall are sealed and smoothed down.

-1

Monday 6th February 2012 – SO AFTER THE LAZY…

… day yesterday, today though, I was back at work.

But before that I had breakfast of course and as it was so flaming cold in the verandah I ate it up here. And I did something that I have been longing to do – namely to run the electric heater simply for some casual heat for 20 minutes or so. We’re getting all luxurious around here these days

And so this morning I had a pile of paperwork to do and one or two phone calls to make. After that it was some wood to cut up from the dry pile in the lean-to, and to bring a load up here as I’m close to running out.

For the rest of the day I was working on the bedroom ceiling.

But with there being plenty of solar energy I had the electric heater running up here, simply for the sake of using the surplus current.

More importantly, bearing in mind the water issuaes that I’m having right now, I had a go with this 12-volt electric heated seat pad idea around the water butts that I mentioned the other day.

And that seemed to work okay in principle, because it produced about 20 litres of water out of the frozen mass in there.

But I can do better than this. if I can find some double-sided tape or something I shall make an amendment to that in that I shall set it inside some of that reflective space-blanket insulation stuff, to concentrate the heat against the frozen water.

That might work even better.

-2

Sunday 5th February 2012 – SUNDAY …

… is a Day of Rest.

And so I did nothing – not even to write up my blog. I just stayed in here in the warmth, read the odd book, watched a film and did some more of my presentation on the Trans-Labrador Highway. And cooked pizza, garlic bread and rice pudding in the oven. I didn’t even manage to watch the superbowl – I was asleep a long time before that.

Mind you, I did actually do something else.

I’ve changed the furniture round in the room yet again and I now have the bed-settee going across the room in front of the fire where I can see the flames. That’s a much more logocal arrangement and it also helps to break up some of the draughts that circulate around the place.

I’m certainly living the nomadic life these days, aren’t I?

Saturday 4th February 2012 – THIS OUGHT TO SILENCE …

… a few of my critics.

But I bet that it won’t!

Yes, it’s a halogen heater with two bars – that’s 800 watts – quite happily burning away this afternoon in my attic.

Considering that it’s the middle of winter, receiving more than 200 amp-hours (that’s over 2.5 kw) of solar energy must be something of a record and with the batteries fully-charged by 10:00 I had to do something with the surplus energy – solar-heated water might be fun but I felt like being adventurous.

At first I ran the heater at 400 watts but at the peak time (between 13:00 and 14:00) I ran it at 800 watts and the system took it quite happily.

I was quite impressed of course.

My next step now is to find a small microwave oven, and to cook my tea in it. You all know the reason behind this story.

For the benefit of those who don’t, a coule of years ago I was sharing my thoughts about running a microwave oven in here with someone whom I thought was a good friend. And what he did after this was to post the details of this chat into an internet discussion forum of which he was a member so that they could all have a good laugh about it and call me some rude and offensive names.

Of course, no friendship can remain after that kind of behaviour. And I am determined to prove them wrong.

This morning the temperature in here was just 9°C – rather disappointing because last night was quite warm outside, just a mere -14.1°C.

It was far too cold to go outside and work this morning of course and so I stayed in, had the halogen heater on and read a book or two. The room slowly warmed up (and I mean slowly) but with halogen heat, it heats a person pretty quickly and I was quite comfortable here with that

After lunch (durng which I encountered the likes of deep-frozen tomato) I carried on with the ceiling in the bedroom, seeing as there was no shopping to do today (I’d dealt with that in Montlucon yesterday).

That kept me busy for a couple of hours right up until 18:00 and then I knocked off. I’d done enough down there and I was freezing.

And so I came up here and lit the fire.

Tea at 21:00 was agony. Minus 8 in the verandah and everything was frozen to everything else. Outside we had -13°C and that was at 21:50 – I shudder to think what it might be now.

-2

Friday 3rd February 2012 – SO HOW DID THIS 06:00 START GO THIS MORNING?

Surprisingly enough, when the alarm went off at 06:00 I was already wide awake. Well, maybe not bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but I was there.

And what was nice about it was that it was 14.9°C in the room here, and when I riddled the ashes, there was still a glimmer of red heat in there.

So when the guy telephoned at 06:30 to say that he was on his way, I strode out of my room personfully and was almost knocked flat on my back. It wasn’t the -10°C in the verandah that did it but the -15.8°C outside.

The second-lowest temperature ever recorded here.

We inched our way into Montlucon and I went to sit in a cafe until 08:00 when the garage opened and I could reclaim Caliburn, which cost me an arm and a leg to do so;

bUt I’ll tell you what – for the first time ever, there are some real brakes on Caliburn and he stops just like he ought to do. He also handles so much better as well.

And that was only the beginning of the expenditure. After that, it was off to Lapeyre, from where I bought the house windows.

They told me last time I was there that they were discontinuing that particular product line in February and so if I wanted the matching door I needed to order it before then.

And so I did – a nice fully-glazed front door, one large panel to match the windows. Cheapest there is, as it happens but why I wanted it is that it lets in the most light.

Back in Pionsat I bought a few bits and pieces off the tool lorry at the market and then went round to Marianne’s for a coffee and a chinwag.

After that I came home and did some work. There’s a pile more timber gone into the bedroom ceiling and I’ve also carried on drilling away at the wall in the lean-to. But that’s hard work as the drill is really heavy and I’m up against some granite right now.

I also experimented with ways of unfreezing the water, something that I’ll need to be thinking of soon. One way I’m going to try is to wrap an old Volvo heated seat pad around the tap and connect it to the excess charge circuit – see what that does.

Tonight I had a gorgeous tea – a huge plate of chips and baked beans.

It’s so cold that I’ve bought a large bag of oven chips, put it in a plastic container and buried it in a snowdrift. I brought a pile of them up here and cooked them in the oven bit of my stove,

I cooked the pan of beans in there as well. It took a while but it was well worth waiting for, and i’ll be having oven chips again.

But washing up after was something else. Chopping board stuck to the table, tea towel stuck to the oven, everything else stuck to something else. I’ve got the water and the fruit and veg up here with me. Frozen lettuce goes not taste very nice, especially with frozen cucumber

I shall have to do something about this on a long-term footing.

-3

Thursday 2nd February 2012 – I HAVE TO BE …

… up at 06:00 in the morning GRRRRRRR!

Yes, having left Caliburn in the Ford garage at Montlucon and having arranged to pick it up today, the snow fell really heavily in the night.

And snowed to such an extent that Liz was snowed in at her home and couldn’t get out to go to work, and so couldn’t take me to Montlucon to rescue Caliburn and Strawberry Moose.

She doesn’t go back into work until Tuesday and that’s a long time to be without transport – not that there’s anywhere you can actually get to right now with all of this.

Anyway so ringing up the garage to tell them about the change in plans I ended up talking to a guy who I know who works there, and it turns out that he actually lives in Virlet.

To cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … he’s offered to take me there in the morning which is wonderful. The downside of this being that he opens up the garage in the morning and so leaves home at 06:30.

Still, beggars can’t be choosers.< So what did I do today then if I didn't go to Montlucon? Not much because when I went down to breakfast at 08:45 (early for once) the temperature in the verandah was -6.3°C and outside, a healthy -8.5°C. Yes, winter is here and you don't feel much like working. Back up here I lit a fire and did some more work on my presentation of the Trans Labrador Highway until the laptop battery went flat, and seeing that it was 13:00 I went to keep warm by cutting up some wood.

And I have piles now, but enough about my personal life.

After lunch, which was exciting as the water in the water jug that I was using to fetch water from the container in the barn was freezing over in just the time it took to walk 10 metres,

Another thing that I did was to into the bedroom and made a good bit of progress on the ceiling.

I had a few phone calls, not the least of which was from Dave in Hexham and that’s always a pleasant surprise.

Cooking tea was exciting. -7.0°C in the verandah and the food was freezzing rather than cooking, and washing up with snow is exciting too. But I’m not going far – in fact I’m off to bed. I need my beauty sleep.

06:00 in the morning. Hah!

-2

Wednesday 1st February 2012 – I’M CALIBURN-LESS…

… at the moment.

He’s gone to the mender’s for his annual check-up and I fear it’s going to be another expensive one as apparently he has a warped front disc. And that might explain why the tyres have been wearing unevenly and also why the braking has never been as good as I would have liked ever since he was new.

But something to do with me that is “warped”. That’s no surprise to anyone, is it?

So this morning Caliburn and I dug ourselves out of a snowdrift and headed off to Montlucon. And I found a car wash that was open (despite the cold) next to the LIDL, so Caliburn could have his annual bath.

I was quite tempted myself but mine’s not due for another couple of months or so. But Caliburn is clean, anyway and the salt has been washed from out of his wheel arches.

At the Auchan, where I did some desultory shopping, I came across, at long last, a decent camera bag. The right size, with lots of pockets and so on. It was expensive, but then again so is my camera equipment and leaving it rolling around on the floor of Caliburn is not really a solution.

I also bought some tins of ratatouille for the storeroom, having noticed the label and thinking “that’s just the brand for me!”. But with lesdyxia luring KO, a closer look at the label revealed that it is in fact branded “Pre-vert”, or ‘Green Meadow’.

Ahh well.

Having left Caliburn at the garage on the edge of town, I had to walk into the centre to meet Liz who had been teaching there today and who had offered to bring me home.

And dressed up in layers of coats and jackets with gloves, hat and furry boots to counter the Combrailles weather, while Montlucon was basking in a barmy mere -2°C, it made me feel like Nanook of the North. and I spent a good while looking around, but I couldn’t find him anywhere.

I did however catch a glimpse of myself in a mirrored door, and I reckoned that I looked just like someone whose trawler had just docked in the harbour. Ahhh, the sartorial elegance of it all.

Back home, we are about to experience something of a crisis – we’ve run out of Christmas cake! Whatever am I going to do now?

But the good news is that I’m sitting here in my little room, basking in a balmy 23°C while outside, it’s -6°C. And all done on free fuel as well.

What an excellent buy this woodstove was!

-5

Tuesday 31st January 2012 I DIDN’T LAST LONG …

… outside this morning.

Just enough to cut up an old rotten chevron and then cold damp hands (I forgot to dry my gloves) drove me inside.

First thing that I did was to clear the bedroom of some of the junk that was in there. A pile of cardboard boxes were flattened down, the old woodstove went outside, and they were followed by the old windows. And as an aside, I now have a woodshed with windows 😉

Next task was to dig Caliburn out of the snow. And there was plenty of that to move as well. I eventually put him at the top of the hill and we went for a little drive in the snow – I need to be sure that I can move around tomorrow as he is off to be serviced.

After lunch I made some more space in the bedroom and carried on in there.

Now all of the plasterboarding on the outside walls of the bedroom is finished – something about which I am very pleased. I’m glad that I’ve done that. It looks quite good too. What it needs now is to be all taped down at the edges and then filled.

And when that’s done, I can carry on with the ceiling.

That’s two outside walls that have been plasterboarded. The third wall is the back wall and of course there’s a fitted wardrobe built into that. The fourth wall is of course the stud wall and half of that – against the corridor – is done. The half that is against the bathroom I can’t do yet until I’m able to sort out the plumbing. And then I also need to fit the door.

The window opening needs edging too, and then the floor has to be done.

But thinking about it, I’ll be putting hardboard on the floor and then putting some of that flooring stuff on top.

But it’s nice to see some light down at the far end of the tunnel and if this cold spell continues, I might see even more.

I’m also at the stage where I’m actively thinking about the bathroom too and how that is going to evolve. I reckon that it won’t be long before I have the plasterboard on there as well. But that means replacing the floor first.

But seeing how the weather has suddenly turned nasty, I’m still impressed with that 10 days of warm weather just after New Year when I managed to do the roof on the lean-to.

It really was astonishing and I’ll be talking about that for years.

-2

Monday 30th January 2012 – I FORGOT …

… what I was intending to to today.

It’s sad, isn’t it, when that happens.

But probably the … errr … late start this morning might have had something to do with it.

And when I noticed that the sun was actually shining, I had a run round and cleared the solar panels of snow, to give them a head start.

So woodcutting came next, and I spent quite some time dealing with two huge tree trunks that filled a good deal of the woodshed and will keep me going for three months, I reckon.

And when I talked the other day, about all of the wood that I had on hand on the ground floor of the lean-to, which is almost full of the stuff. All of that has been in there for years (and I do mean years) so seeing as I’m short of wood in my little room, I cut up a pile of that and brought it up here. It’s bone dry of course and so it burns quite well.

But that led me on to sorting out some of the wood in there and I made a little more space. And what with finding the box of hooks, I screwed some of them into the beams and started to hang gardening tools and the like from them.

Even the brushcutter has a hook of its own now.

This afternoon I started to move the wood around on the car park by the end of the barn. I’m making more space there now and I reckon I can start to think about how I’m going to build the shed to keep the motorbikes and the cement mixer

I’ve also done a little experiment.

I bought a handful of 12-volt work lights – the type that look like the halogen security lights that you hang from a building. What I did is to try it with a LED cluster light rather than a 50-watt halogen. And while it’s nothing like as bright, of course, it’s effective and I shall be using that for working purposes in future.

Finally I carried on with the wiring in the lean-to. I’ve found the pull light switches so I’ll be installing that tomorrow.

I had to cut a hole in the floor of the upstairs part of the lean-to to pass a cable through. Off to the barn I went to find a holesaw. I happened to glance at the sky and thought to myself “that looks like it might snow”. So I went into the barn, found the 33mm holesaw, and walked out right into a blizzard.

Yes, we’re back in the snow again.

I’ll be up to my knees in the stuff tomorrow morning.

-3

Sunday 29th January 2012 – IT’S BEEN SUNDAY TODAY …

… and so I had a nice drive out in the countryside in the freezing (and I do mean “freezing” weather. In fact as far as Terjat, where the home team was playing Target in the Allier League 3rd Division.

It’s a beautiful setting up there at Terjat, and you can see right across the valley to the snow-covered hills in the background. It’s over there somewhere in those hills, at the back of Montaigut where I live.

Another thing about Sunday is that there’s no alarm clock and so with no-one ringing me up at some stupid time of the day, I can lie in until 10:24 without the least pang of guilt, in clean sheets and bedding the bed in its “double-bed” position, back in its old place by the little window.

Luxury!

The temperature in here was 13.2°C and that’s another thing that I like about this new fire that I’ve bought. With the old one, there wasn’t enough residual heat to keep the room warm once the fire went out and the temperature would often drop into single figures overnight.

But this fire keeps warm for ages and it’s maintaining a reasonable heat (up to now, anyway). and first thing that I did, even before breakfast, was to light the fire again. And I’ve been warm all day, which is really impressive and just what the doctor ordered.

In the warmth and comfort of my attic I’m well on the way towards the end of my presentation of the Trans-Labrador Highway – one or two more days and it will be done, I hope.

The football promised to be a real struggle, in the cold (coldest day of the winter so far) and the wind. And with Turgid being 3rd from bottom of the lowest possible league in the Allier, and Target being one place below them, I’m not quite sure what I expected. But it wasn’t much.

But having been overly critical of the football in the Allier, I have to say in fairness that this was a good game. Turgid played quite well, helped by the fact that Target, while they weren’t “bad”, they were rather clueless and ran out of ideas whenever they had the ball.

In the Allier, where there is no official referee, it’s the away side that provides the referee. And so it was a Target referee in the middle today. And he disallowed no fewer than three Terjat goals (two for offside – on one occasion overruling the *home* linesman) and one for pushing in the box.

To be fair I have to say that I was in no position to make any judgement.

But despite the handicap, Turgid scored two more goals that were allowed by the ref, and should have had three or four more. Had those disallowed goals been given and had Turgid won 5-0, it would have been a fair reflection of the match. Third from bottom in the worst league in the area?

Not on this showing they aren’t. I’ll be keeping my eye on the fixture list for whenever Pionsat don’t have a Sunday match, and I’ll wander along here again.

And this evening, with a rip-roaring fire and 24°C on the thermometer in the attic, I carried out what is fast becoming a ritual on Sunday evenings, and cooked pizza and garlic bread and rice pudding in the oven bit of my stove.

At €270 or however much it was, this woodstove is proving to be something of a bargain.

-4

Saturday 28th January 2012 – IT JUST GOES TO SHOW …

… that those people in football clamouring for a winter break mid-season quite simply don’t have a clue about whatever it is that they are trying to say.

Here we are in the Puy-de-Dôme, having had our 6-week winter break in the mildest winter in the area since records began, and the football season restarts this evening.

And today we have had the heaviest snowfall of the winter and so all the matches are postponed.

So much for the winter break

But not that I am complaining too much. I spent the morning and some of the afternoon working on my presentation of The Trans-Labrador Highway for the local village social evening in a month’s time. and I’ve managed to reach the outskirts of Goose Bay – i.e. well over halfway.

It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good.

But at about 13:30 the snow stopped and we had a little thaw. That was the cue for me to race off to St Eloy and so some shopping.

And I was back by 15:00 with the usual stuff, but also two Harry Potter films, the director’s cut versions, for €9:99 the pair. I’ll have to see what Herry Potter is up to – so far I’ve managed to avoid those films (except for one that I caught a glimpse of – in French – with Marianne over Christmas).

This afternoon I’ve turned my room around again. I’ve done a lot more sorting out, repositioned the furniture and by the time you read this I will have the bed back where it used to be. Only this time, with a proper array of chests of drawers behind it for the clothes.

What inspired this was the fact that the new large set that I bought in IKEA in the spring, and the medium sized set that I acquired at a brocante 18 months ago fit together nicely and are exactly the right size to fill one of the alcoves.

But I’m surprised at all of the bedding and stuff that I seem to have acquired since I emptied out Expo. I can see me having a really good sorting out one of these days.

I’ve left Caliburn on the road at the top of the lane in case the weather continues to turn nasty. From there I can drive him out.

Because tomorrow afternoon, Terjat, who I saw last Sunday in a basement Allier 3rd Division clash, are at home again. If I can move around, I’ll go for a nosey to see if they really are as bad as they looked last week.

-4

Friday 27th January 2012 – I CAN ALWAYS TELL …

… when I’m enjoying myself when i’m working. It’s when I suddenly notice that the light has gone and it’s 18:15 and I’m still out there happily working away.

And so it was today

I did the customary pile of woodcutting and now the woodshed is looking quite impressive. There’s probably now enough cut to last me for next winter as well and there’s still a load to do out by the barn.
And then there’s all the wood from last winter, that’s still down the fields.
And then there are all the chevrons off the house roof and the barn roof.
Wood isn’t something that I’m going to be short of for a while

Once I had done the wood, I made a start on the wind turbine, and that is now in position.

Doesn’t it look smart with its new stylish aerodynamic blades. But I shall have to stop mounting all of these wind turbines. I’ll end up being arrested.

It wasn’t as easy as you might think, organising this wind turbine. But then again, nothing ever is when I’m involved, is it?

It all started to go wrong when I tried to mount the hub onto the spindle. And immediately the bolts holding the blades to the hub fouled the casing.

So I turned the bolts round so that the threads were exposed – hardly aerodynamic but it all fitted.

Then, tightening up the hub, the hub ground out against the casing and locked up the blades. That meant using a couple of packing washers underneath the hub.

One I had, the correct size of diameter, I had to file out the hole to 19mm. The second one, I had the correct sized hole but the diameter was wrong so I had to grind the excess off with the angle grinder and the bench grinder.

So instead of an interference fit, I now have three extra faces and so under a great deal of wind pressure, I can see the faces sliding instead of the blades turning.

Won’t that be fun?

Much to my surprise, the wiring was pretty straightforward and didn’t call for any major revision. But putting it into position was something else. I didn’t have a scaffolding pole long enough and so I had to join two together and that’s no fun trying to do that on a ladder with that kind of weight at that height pressing down on your shoulders.

It’s for that reason that, after much cursing, I invented the wind turbine pole lifting handle, and I was astonished at how easy it was once I had a lifting handle in place.

I had to lower the anenometer though – the wind turbine was fouling it

Wind turbines need a load in order to work, and so I’ve wired it directly to an external weatherproof 12-volt socket, and to the socket I’ve wired a 12-volt 100-watt halogen light.

The faster the wind turbine turns, the brighter the light will become.

It reminds me of Doctor RV Jones and his experiments into the cathode ray tube. In his book Most Secret War, one of the best books I have ever read, he describes that they tentatively connected two lorry headlights to the tube, hoping for a faint glimmer of light. Instead, they managed to illuminate the whole building before the headlights blew out with the intensity of current.

Wouldn’t I like to have something like that with this wind turbine?

-3

Thursday 26th January 2012 – I DON’T SEEM …

… to have done very much today.

Mind you, that’s not very much of a surprise considering that I managed to sleep through all of the alarms in here this morning and was … errr … somewhat late in raising myself from the dead.

In fact, much of the morning was spent sorting out the wood that is leaning against the end wall of the barn, and then sawing up a dozen or so lengths.

The strange thing is that while the woodpile is slowly increasing, the number of lengths of uncut wood standing up against the wall doesn’t seem to have decreased.

Perhaps I have hit upon the secret of the self-reproducing wood supply – something that reminded me of the story of the Irishman, granted two wishes by his fairy godmother, asked for a bottle of Guinness that refilled itself every time he poured some out of it.
“And your second wish?” enquired the fairy godmother.
“I’ll have another one of those bottles”.

This afternoon I carried on with the wiring in the upstairs of the lean-to.

Most of that time was spent looking for equipment of course, but I now have two lights and two pairs of 12-volt power sockets. They are all wired up, but they aren’t wired into the circuit of course – I need to drill a 40mm hole right through the stone wall into the house to do that, and that’s something that is going to have to wait for a bit.

I’ve a drill that will do it – a 1050-watt SDS drill, but with the current that it draws, you need a brilliantly sunny day. And while a strange golden thing did pop out from behind a cloud for 5 minutes, it’s been about 9 days since we have seen the sun.

It shows just how lucky I was with that little dry spell earlier in the month that enabled me to do the roof of the lean-to.

Regular readers of this rubbish in one of its several predecessor forms will recall that I bought 2 x 400-watt wind turbines from the manufacturers in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 2002. One of them flies proudly above the barn but the other one is in the back of the barn because the blades on these turbines are rather brittle and I’ve ended up having to make up one set out of the two that I had originally. And the manufacturers never ever replied to any of my mails asking about buying s new set of replacement blades.

So a couple of weeks ago I bit the bullet and contacted a company in the USA that makes parts for home-build wind turbines, and I’ve bought a set of blades from them, complete with hub, to fit on the other wind turbine.

In what was left of my working day, I’ve assembled the blades onto the hub unit and what I intend to do tomorrow is to resurrect the abandoned wind turbine and stick the blade and hub assembly onto it, and then shove it onto a pole somewhere where it will catch the wind.

These blades have the lowest drag co-efficient of any after-market wind turbine blades and so I’ll be interested to see just how they perform.

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Wednesday 25th January 2012 – HAVING RUN …

… out of room to store firewood once it’s been cut, I’ve now invented the two-storey woodshed – and I bet there’s certainly something narsty in that!

It’s become something of a necessity to find a space to store the wood these days with all of the wood that I’ve been cutting up just recently and having acquired a cement mixer and needing a place to store it out of the weather.

The logical thing to do is to build a lean-to shed, out of old scrap beams off the house roof and the corrugated iron sheets that I took off the lean-to roof, probably on the car park up against the end wall of the barn.

But for this I need to move all of the wood that is leaning up against that wall, and the easiest way to move it is to cut it up into firewood-sized lengths and stack it somewhere.

Hence the two-storey woodshed.

Of course this isn’t going to be its permanent home, but it will give some kind of shelter to the wood for now.

And so this morning, as well as building the woodshed, I cut up a yet another load of wood. Some of it was quite thick and it showed the benefit of buying a decent saw.

And it also showed the benefit of buying a wood grenade – something similar to a large chisel but with a point, not a blade, and four serrated sides. Stuck into a log of wood and wallopped with a sledgehammer, it splits the log cleanly and effectively into a more-manageable size.

This afternoon I noticed, to my surprise, that the batteries on bank 2 of the barn were fully-charged. And that was a surprise in this weather, I can say. Yes, miserable, wet and depresssing – but that’s enough about me.

So with the batteries fully charged, I decided on a change. I disconnected them and connected up a couple of others, to let them charge up for a few days to see what they might do.

Following that, I sorted out the extension leads and put them upstairs in the lean-to. I may as well use it now I’ve built it.

And that led on to another idea, and I’ve started to install lights up there. Not that there’s much need because I noticed that at 18:00 when I knocked off work, the evening was still light. Yes, the nights are getting shorter again.

-2

EPIC HALL

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