Tag Archives: bio planet

Thursday 5th July – WHAT A DEPRESSING DAY!

But let’s not go getting ahead of ourselves.

Last night was weird. I crashed out as soon as my head hit the pillow, woke up again after about half an hour, and then crashed out for good until about 04:30.

And then of course, I dozed off again just a couple of minutes before the alarm went off.

Consequently it was a very tired and weary me that hauled itself out of the stinking pit, and even a shower couldn’t really bring me round. I was feeling awful and for two pins I would have gone back to bed.

But I have things to do, and so I staggered downstairs to the van.

On the car park I met Hans who was loading up his van ready to leave, so we wished each other a good trip and like the Knights Of The Round Table, we each went our separate ways.

There wasn’t all that much traffic on the motorway given the time of morning, so I made it to Leuven in good time. And it seems that my parking spec has been taken by someone else. So I parked in an empty spec and anticipated a row when I returned.

The walk from there up the hill to the hospital was a long, weary walk and I almost didn’t make it. “I’m definitely not feeling myself today” I said, and just as well too because it’s a disgusting habit.

At the hospital I was early so I had to wait around for a while. And the first lot of bad news is that my weight has gone up by 3kg. Hardly a surprise seeing as I’ve been without my tablets for 12 days.

Plugged in and switched on, I slept for most of the day. With just the occasional awakening from the medical staff. And it was during one of those awakenings that I had some even more bad news.

The protein loss has doubled to just over 2.0 and the red blood count has collapsed to 8.8. No wonder I’ve been feeling so ill today.

They are totally dismayed by that and they want to bring me forward to three-weekly visits. That is out of the question for the next visit so we agreed on Monday August 6th – which means that I’ll be travelling back to Belgium with Alison.

And the one after that will be on August 27th, which is also bad news and rules out any possibility of going to North America.

Eventually they threw me out and I headed for Caliburn. Loads of things that I wanted to do but I just wasn’t up to any of them. No-one had said anything about Caliburn being in the wrong place, so we all came back to Liège, stopping off at Bio Planet for some vegan cheese and vegan sausages.

The traffic in Liège was horrendous yet again and it took ages to reach the hotel. By now I was thoroughly and completely tired and fed up so I went straight to bed and that was that.

It’s been a very bad day.

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Thursday 19th January 2017 – I HAD A NICE …

… day out today for a change.

I’d run out of lunch stuff and so I set off to the Carrefour by the football ground for a good shop. On the way down there I stopped off at Caliburn to see how he was doing, but it was a bit of a struggle to start him up with the cold and the fact that he’s not been anywhere for quite a while.

And so I decided to give him a run up and down the road and that in the end led me out to Kessel-Lo. I went to Bio-Planet for a baguette and some vegan cheese, and then to the Carrefour down the road for a big shop. It was 13:40 by the time I came back. But I’d had a good couple of hours out for a change.

last night was another bad night with me not dropping off until late. And then I was awake a couple of times during the night, finally at about 06:45. Alone again for breakfast and then back down here for a while.

There was no heating this morning – that was what made me go out for a good wander. It would have to be the coldest day of the year so far, wouldn’t it? But later tonight it was fixed and that’s better.

I’ve had a crash out as well this afternoon, and read some more about this Finnish expedition to Labrador. They are spending a lot of time talking about the Inuit and their wanderings around Labrador. It seems that the population insofar as it has been recorded has hovered around the 1200-1300 mark. But a rough count around 1921 came out with just 800 or so – this being just after the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918-19 which decimated the population of the Labrador coast and wiped out the villages of Okak and Hebron.

Tonight I finished off my curry and so I have my chips for tomorrow – well, in fact, croquettes. Trying to find oven chips here is next-to-impossible, even in a huge supermarket like the Carrefour. So tomorrow it will be croquettes, beans and sausages and Iam looking forward to that.

Now I’m having an early night if I can. There are quite a few new people here today and I hope that they are quiet.

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Wednesday 2nd November 2016 – I’M MOVING ON …

… tomorrow, so I must organise myself quite rapidly today.

I had a bit of a bad night again last night and had something of a struggle to make it up to breakfast at 07:15. I was joined by the usual crowd of students who popped in, made some butties and then popped out again, and then I was back down here.

I had an hour or so working on the website again – the missing bit of Highway 138 in Quebec – and then I headed off to Kessel-Lo.

As luck would have it, and in a complete surprise, the Fortis Bank had my bank card ready and once they had reactivated it, it worked fine too. That’s even more of a surprise.

At Bio-Planet I picked up a baguette and then drove back. I prepared an envelope for the insurance claim form, picked some stuff for tea from the collection in the back of Caliburn, and then came back here. And here, I cracked on with the web-site.

after lunch, I phoned up the hospital to find out the time of my appointment. And I know that I had hoped for an early appointment but this is ridiculous. They want me there at 08:10 and it doesn’t come much earlier than this. I’ll have to change all of the alarms.

After lunch I went off to the Post Office and posted the claim form. That’s another job done. Then I came back and crashed out for a while.

I found the time to carry out an amendment to the website – I’m trying to update at least one page per day, although today’s amendment wasn’t anything considerable.

For tea I had a tin of vegetables with chick peas, tomato sauce and rice, to finish off a few bit that were lying around. And when the washing-up was done, I took everything down to Caliburn except for what I can take tomorrow to the hospital. And finally I had a shower.

Now I’m having an early night again, ready for tomorrow. And then we’ll see what happens. There are three choices – they could keep me in hospital. Or if I’m released for at least two weeks, I’ll be off home. But if it’s only for a week or so, I’m off to the seaside.

I can do with a holiday after all of this.

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Monday 31st October 2016 – “SURELY NOTHING ELSE …

… can go wrong” I hear you say.

And I say they can. And it doesn’t just relate to Terry not having a socket to fit the wheel nuts on the trailer either. Ohhh no!

Instead, I drove all the way out to Kessel-Lo this morning to the Fortis Bank retrieve my bank card, only to be told that they don’t open the safe until Wednesday morning. So that was a total waste of time, wasn’t it? But at least the baguettes and free coffee in the Bio-Planet are worth having.

And getting back into my parking place here wasn’t easy either. They are doing building work in there and one of the builders had parked his vehicle across my parking space. I had to wait a while until he moved it.

Other bad news was that I had to pay for my week’s stay here. That’s left a hole in my pocket and no mistake. But at least they have a photocopier there, so I could photocopy my accident report form. I’ll send that off tomorrow.

And so what else (as if that isn’t enough)?

The good news, I suppose is that having gone to bed comparatively early last night, I actually managed to sleep right the way through until about 10 minutes before the alarm went off. It’s been quite a while since I had a decent sleep anything like that.

I’d been on my travels toolast night and they were rather vivid too. I’d been given several tasks to do and one of those was to go off any pay a bill to the Tax Office. When I finally arrived there it was someone whom I knew at the cash desk. I’d paid over the cheque, and so she asked me about the £2:2:0 administration fee for the cheque. I explained that the Government certainly insisted on its pound of flesh, didn’t it? She told me not to worry – seeing that she knew me she would pay it in on my behalf. And as well as that, she gave me some notes that had been rejected by the Tax Office – some Lei notes. Lei is of course the currency of Romania but during the night it was Czech money and these notes were of different size (which I knew to be a possibility) but they had been endorsed “wrong size” which I knew was quite probably wrong.
My next port of call was tomorrow at 15:00. I’d been asked by some friends whom I had known when I lived in Chester in the early-70s to appear in court on behalf of someone detained overnight who owed a sum of money and my task was to pay it so that he could be released. But I had suddenly acquired an urgent appointment of my own for that time which meant that I couldn’t go on behalf of this other person. I reckoned that I could go off to the court and pay the money in advance but that was across the town (I was in Macclesfield, but not a Macclesfield that I would ever know) so I walked down through the main street which had been pedestrianised and where there were some important buildings being built – but then I remembered that I had an appointment of my own at 15:00 this afternoon and if I attended it, I would be too late to go to the Court and pay this money. But if I went to the court and paid in the money I would be hours late for my appointment. And so with all of this confusion, what would I do?

But waking up solved that problem for me. I went off for an early breakfast instead.

Around everything else that I’ve been doing today, I’ve been working on my website. And by the time that I knocked off for tea tonight I’d organised all of the photos and text in Upper Quebec and Labrador that relate to the trans-Labrador Highway. They are all in the correct place now. And that wasn’t easy either because I must have had a bad day or two out there last year because I forgot in many instances to record the mileages of the photos that I’d taken. Not only that, where I had recorded the mileages, I had to convert the trip readings on two vehicles – the Dodge from 2014 and Strider the Ranger from 2015 to correspond with the mileages on the road.

later on though, I managed to put two revised pages on line – this one and this one. I ought to me making more of an effort to bring some of my earlier entries up-to-date with things that I have subsequently learnt.

And I managed not to crash out this afternoon either. That’s a rare occurrence these days, isn’t it?

Tea tonight was a chick pea curry with vegetables, rice and boulghour. The crowning ingredient of the curry was the stock cube of course. That makes a world of difference.

Nad now I’m planning on another early night once I’ve washed the dishes. I’ll see where I end up tonight.

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Saturday 29th October 2016 – IT NEVER RAINS …

… but it pours, doesn’t it?

I decided that in order to changer mes idées, as the French so aptly put it, I’d go out of town this lunchtime and do my shopping out at Kessel-LO, to give me a good opportunity to have a wander around.

And the net result of my external perambulations?

The Fortis Bank there has swallowed my bank card.

That’s all that I need, isn’t it? Lurching from one disaster to another while I’m here this last two or three weeks. I’m getting totally fed up of this. It’s about time that something went right with me for a change.

But at least I’d managed to go to Bio-Planet and buy some more vegan cheese and a beautiful baguette, as well as helping myself to the free samples and the complementary coffee. I bought some stuff (but nothing exciting) in Carrefour that I need to tide me over until Thursday when (hopefully) I’ll leave here and I had a good look around in Krefel to see what they had in the way of electrical appliances. But there was nothing that particularly excited me.

Last night, it didn’t take me long to go to sleep. And once I was asleep, I stayed asleep (except for one trip down the corridor). I awoke about 5 minutes before the alarm, and for once, I was washed and breakfasted and back in my room by 07:45.

My voyage last night was something of a strange parallel to real life. I was somewhere in north-west England, Lancaster or the like, and I had a few days spare. I was torn between going back home to Crewe for a short while or finding somewhere to stay up there. The idea of going to Silloth appealed to me, but I had a look at the map, which was in a holder up above my head in Caliburn and found the town of Oxenhope right on the coast not too far from where I was (and Oxenhope is of course miles away from the sea in real life) I could see that it was fairly large with a port and harbour, with a main street running along the front and so I reckoned that I would go there. But I couldn’t get Caliburn to start – and that was painful. We also had two children – rather like two kids that I know in real life – and they appeared on my voyages for some reason or other.

After breakfast, I had a little doze and did a few bits and pieces and round about 11:30 I wandered off down to Caliburn and out to Kessel-Lo.

Back here, it ended up being a late lunch and then I attacked the web site again. I’ve been working on it again and I’ve amended three web pages, this one, this one and this one. Stuff from my 2015 voyage needed to be added into the first two pages, and that led to adjustments on the third page.

I had a good chat with Liz and another one of my friends on the internet too. It’s certainly been a marvellous invention, hasn’t it?

Tonight, I finished off my curry from yesterday and now I’m planning on yet another early night. i’ll hopefully make the most of it because the clocks go back tonight. Back 100 years for those of you who voted for the Brexit.

But for me, it means that I might have an extra hour in bed asleep.

But I’ve heard all of that before.

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Saturday 20th August 2016 – WE ARE BACK …

… in the realms of uncertain sleep – not that will be too much of a surprise for anyone. And that’s despite my having been for a nice walk in the afternoon too.

And so last night I was still awake at midnight, and I forget how many times I had to leave my stinking pit during the night but I reckon that it must have been a new world record. That’s enough to fill anyone with a load of dismay before you start.

But it didn’t stop me from going on a nocturnal ramble or two during the night. Apart from the odd one or two travels that would be of no interest to you while you are eating your breakfast, one one occasion I was out driving with a girl as my passenger. We were visiting various rural areas and in the distance further down the road we noticed a hump-backed bridge that could well have been a railway or canal bridge. It rang a bell with me, this bridge, and I expected to see a rather dramatic northern French town just over the bridge. And so I keyed up my passenger for the view, but once we passed over the bridge I was disappointed to notice that firstly, the bridge took us over an abandoned, weed-infested canal and there was an abandoned, weed-infested marina type of place to the right, and the town that I expected to see was non-existent and the view was quite banal. It was here that, at a road junction, we fell in with another delivery vehicle similar to the one that made an appearance the other night. And as well as delivering parcels, he had some letters to post, as well as having some gas bottles on board his vehicle.

Once I was half-awake, I was in the kitchen early for breakfast, and in fact I made a couple of trips, because the bread that was there this morning was the best that we have ever had. I had a bit of a doze and then headed off to the launderette.

I wasn’t there long. I checked my mails and the like, and had a good chat with Liz, and then headed off to Caliburn. Once we were reunited we set off for Kessel-Lo and the Bio Planet place. As well as the wholemeal baguette and the nibbles that are always on offer, I picked up some vegan cheese. They had a new variety of sliced cheese – one that I haven’t tried before – and so I bought the only packet of that which was left.

Round the corner and LIDL, I stocked up with a few other bits and pieces, and then over the road to the Carrefour for the rest of the shopping. A big pile of stuff, but nothing exciting except, maybe, a bag of sweets to suck on through the week.

There was an advert that had caught my eye a few days earlier. About a student accommodation agency in fact, and it was advertising open days between 10:00 and 17:00 every Saturday from May to September. Accordingly, I went round there on my way back from Kessel-Lo and, sure enough, it was all locked up and there was no-one there. Of course, this is Belgium, isn’t it? It’s the kind of thing that you can understand in France – the best-laid plans of mice and men oft go gang agley when the cow gets loose or the boulanger calls and if you don’t expect that sort of thing then living in rural France is clearly not for you, but there’s no reason for this kind of behaviour in Belgium, which is supposed to be much more cosmopolitan.

After lunch, I had a quick shave and shower because Alison was in town. We met up and went for a coffee and a good chat before her bus took her home. I picked up a tin of exotic curry stuff for tea but I wasn’t really all that hungry. Instead, I went back to the launderette to check the mail and had another chat with Liz.

But I have had a reply to one of my enquiries. One place was advertising studios “from £750 per month” and so I had enquired. Of course, £1350 per month is quite clearly “from £750”, but I only wanted to rent a room, not buy the building. I’m clearly going nowhere here.

And so now I’m going to have yet another early night. Tomorrow is, of course, another day and we’ll see what tomorrow might bring.

I hope that it’s more positive than today because all of this is starting to get me down.

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Saturday 11th June 2016 – YESTERDAY AFTERNOON …

… I sat down and sent off a whole ruck of e-mails about accommodation, asking for appointments to view for this weekend. And how many replies do you think that I’ve received?

Krys guessed right (good old Krys!). She said “none”. As I have said many times before … "and you’ll say many times again" – ed … there is no such thing as a recession. There is just a whole load of people who are letting all kinds of income-generating opportunities melt away before their very eyes. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall dozens of similar occurrences – solar panel suppliers in March 2009, caravan suppliers in July 2015 – two examples that spring readily to mind.

And not forgetting two suppliers of slide-in camper units for Strider whom I visited, one in New Hampshire and the other one in Quebec – and asked them to send me quotes for the Spring so that I could order one ready for the summer. That’s an order worth over $12,500, would you believe, but it’s too much trouble for any of the sales staff to reply to me.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. I have better things to do.

Like waking up at 07:00, long before the alarm, finding out that two of my friends are on line already, and having a chat that went on to … errr … 13:00, with me missing breakfast. And then just as I was about to nip off, Liz came on-line for a chat and so I was here for another 90 minutes.

Not that I am complaining, of course. Far from it. It’s nice to see friends and chat aimlessly for ages. I’d much rather chat to a friend than eat breakfast. That’s much more important.

And so I eventually made it out to buy a baguette for lunch. Dunno if I mentioned that yesterday I finally discovered a boulangerie so I went there first. But by that time they had long-since sold out. I ended up at the Bio-Planet where I bought a lovely artisanal baguette, sampled a pile of delights and had two free cups of coffee. You have your money’s worth in the Bio-Planet.

Back here in my room it was stifling, but I’ve managed at long last to force the window so that now I can open it, and listen to the arrival of a serious rainstorm as the weather has broken.

But not before I went out to make my tea. The chick peas left over from Thursday had gone off already and so I ended up with pasta, tinned vegetables with chick-peas already mixed in, and tinned mushrooms followed by the usual pudding.

Tomorrow will be an exciting day for me as I’m taking all of my possessions to my new digs in Leuven. I hope that they are okay but for the money that I’m paying to stay there, I’m not expecting too much. It’s all a question of money’s worth, as you all know already. I’ll put up with inconvenience if I’m not paying very much – I’m on the economy package.

So i’ll clear off now and listen to the rain. It sounds lovely outside.

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Thursday 12th May 2016 – HA HA HA!

Who was it who said something about “an early night” last night then?

For not only having stayed awake to watch a Mr Moto film (starring Peter Lorre in the title role), I stayed awake and awake and awake, and I was still tossing and turning at 03:45 this morning. So much for my predictions.

But I did manage to drop off to sleep at some point, and I was back at my old school, with a pile of girls, climbing up (not down) a rope of sheets trying to get in through a window or onto a balcony. And as for why I might be doing this, I’m afraid that I don’t have the foggiest. It’s gone clean out of my mind.

For the first time in ages I slept right through until the alarm went off and, resisting the temptation to turn over and go back to sleep, I went off for breakfast. Mind you, I paid for it later on in the day, crashing out at about 17:00 for an hour or so.

bio planet tiensesteenweg bierbeek kessel lo belgiumAfter breakfast, I went off on a prowl with the intention of exploring this famous bio shop in the Tiensestraat in Bierbeek about which I had heard so much. I’d driven past it the other evening but I didn’t have time to stop.

It’s certainly good at what it does, that’s for sure, but for me it was a little disappointing because there was none of the vegan cheese that I like. There was some – a kind of spreading mozzarella substitute – so I bought a couple of packs to see how it goes

knacker diabolique vegan sausages bio planet tiensesteenweg bierbeek kessel lo belgiumI also bought a beautiful seeded baguette for lunch (which tasted delicious) and a couple of raisin buns, but I’ll be passing on the Knacker diabolique vegan sausages though. No matter how nice they looked, I couldn’t cope with the name.

But here’s another example of me having to change my national stereotypes. This shop, the Bio Planet, is another establishment that offers free coffee to customers, and there are a few broken biscuits to sample too, so I’ve added it to my ever-increasing list.

Things are definitely looking up here in Belgium.

low energy consumption fridges krefel tiensesteenweg bierbeek kessel-lo belgiumAnd that’s not all either.

Just across the road is a Krefel electrical appliance shop so I went over there for a butcher’s. And I was astonished – really astonished. When have you EVER seen a standard-size domestic fridge that has a rated annual consumption of just 64 kilowatts per year? That is amazing.

And if you think that the fridge next to it, the one with freezer compartment, is equally astonishing at 98 kilowatts per year, there was one further down the row that had a rated consumption of just 93 kilowatts per year

low energy consumption freezer krefel tiensesteenweg bierbeek kessel lo belgiumAnd if that isn’t enough, the best is yet to come. Here in the shop was a standard-size freezer with an annual consumption of 101 kilowatts per annum.

This figure, and the one of 64 kw/A for the fridge, are figures that I have never ever seen for these appliances and had I been in a better place in my life right now, the fridge and freeze would be coming back home with me.

The fridge actually uses much less energy than the little 12-volt fridge that I have, and the freezer would go nicely in the barn running off the solar panels and wind turbine in there. I’d be set up for life with this lot.

vegan cheese carrefour tiensesteenweg bierbeek kessel lo belgiumYou may remember the other day that I was moaning that my vegan cheese had been “tidied away” from the fridge at Sint Pieters. I knew that I wouldn’t have time to go back to Brussels for more and how I’d be stuck for my next series of travels.

But no longer, because here in the Carrefour – a mainstream supermarket – they are now selling vegan cheese slices too, and at about two-thirds the price of anywhere else over here. I was equally as astonished by this.

Yes, things are definitely looking up in Belgium right now.

Back here, I’ve pushed on with updating the older bits of the blog. In a mad fit of enthusiasm I’ve done all of January 2011 and I’m stuck well into February. But I won’t be going much further than this for now because I’m leaving here tomorrow as you know. I’m going to have a check-up and then I’m hitting the road.

I did mention that I crashed out this afternoon, and I had a strange occurrence when I awoke. I had a dizzy spell and was staggering around in here for five minutes until I sat down and gathered my wits (it doesn’t take me very long these days).

And for tea, I had pasta and ratatouille followed by spicy loaf and soya cream for pudding. Now I’m off to bed and I shan’t say anything more because I don’t want to tempt fate.

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