Tag Archives: chamalieres

Monday 1st December 2014 – THAT HANGING CLOUD …

… that arrived at Chamalieres yesterday followed me home last night. When I went out late last night to check the stats, there it was hanging all over my little mountain.

It was still here this morning and it’s been here all day. In the barn I had the grand total of 0.350 amp-hours of solar energy, and here in the house it was about 1.5 amp-hours.

All day it’s been drizzle and tonight at 21:00 the temperature had dropped to 1°C – the lowest temperature so far. That means that tonight it will probably drop below freezing outside. Anyway, I had the fire lit in here and cooked the last portion of my last week’s curry. As an aside, those small sealed storage jars that I bought at IKEA are doing the business. Filling them up with hot food is creating a powerful vacuum and the food seems to be keeping much longer, as well as tasting better.

At lunchtime too, I had a go at making my own hummus seeing as I’ve run out of vegan cheese and I’m not too keen on this vegan pate. 12 spoonfuls of chick peas all mashed up, three spoonfuls of sesame seed paste, a pile of fresh garlic, some olive oil and some cumin powder and there I was. And it wasn’t all that bad either.

indespension plant trailer les guis virlet puy de dome franceAs for work today, this morning I braved the weather to go out and do some work on this new trailer. The lights on the trailer don’t work at all, and I’ll be resolving that issue in due course. It came with a huge trailer board but the light lenses weren’t so good on that, so I had a hunt around and found and old trailer board that still had some bits of light attached to it. I did a bit of mix-and-match with that and now the big trailer board is working properly.

I also cut a bungee strap in half, threaded the two halves through the holes in the traile board, knotting them at the cut ends, and now the trailer board can be hooked properly onto the trailer pro tem, until I can fix the lights on the trailer.

There was a number plate, off the old LDV that I used to have, on the old trailer board, and so now that’s attached to the trailer. The law here in France is that large trailers have to be licensed separately and carry their own number plates. In the UK, that’s not the case. Trailers carry the registration number of the vehicle that is towing them. With this trailer being an old British trailer, it doesn’t have its own number, so I stuck the LDV number plate on it.

That way, the trailer has its own identification and as the LDV is still on the British computer (it was scrapped in Belgium) any information about the trailer will eventually find its way back to me so until I can sort out some paperwork for it, that will have to do.

And then, apart from that, I’ve been up in the upstairs of the barn sorting out the wood and panels to make the power board in the barn – I want to start on that. I also found a decent but of wood for the portable power board, so I’ve been working on that. That should be finished tomorrow morning and then I can start on the power board in the barn.

High time I made use of these new batteries that I bought the other day.

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Sunday 30th November 2014 – GRRRR!!!

It was a lovely bright sunny day today and seeing as this is the last good day of autumn (the high winds of the other day tell us that the weather is changing for the worse and there will be snow here by midweek) I took advantage of the bright weather for a leisurely drive down to Chamalieres and Pionsat’s 1st XI away.

Chamalieres have a very good footballing side and Pionsat’s team was the weakest that I have ever seen. Yet they took the lead with a good free kick into the area from Cedric, headed across from almost out of the keeper’s hands, right across to the far post and a simple nod in.

Pionsat only had 11 players today and apart from Cedric, the rest of the defence was all 2nd XI players. Didier, the 2nd XI right winger, was playing at right back and he was carried off after 20 minutes with a knee injury, leaving the team with just 10 men. Chamalieres scored twice later in the first half, and yet Anthony had the ball in the net from a corner (which was disallowed for handball but which will nevertheless do his confidence the world of good) – and then the fun began.

Chamalieres’ ground is situated in a bowl that was an old quarry, in the forest high above the town, and just before half-time a deep, thick cloud rolled in. No-one could see a thing and after waiting for half an hour to see what was going to happen, the game was abandoned.

And so we all had to go home. And not half a mile away from the ground, the weather dramatically improved and we went home again in bright sunlight. Mind you, this might fo Pionsat a favour as when the match is replayed, Pionsat might have a stronger team out.

And I didn’t sleep through the alarms yesterday. They simply didn’t ring.

And how do I know this?

Well, at 0è:30 the perishing alarms went off here. it seems that somehow the date on the telephone has advanced one day so yesterday was, according to the phone, Sunday (hence the absence of alarm) and today was Monday (hence the alarm).

So after the early start, I wrote another radio show for Radio Anglais, to match the Christmas Special that I wrote earlier in the week.

That’s the radio programmes for the month of January now completed, except for the rock programme, and that’s next weekend’s work. I’ll crack this yet!

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Monday 3rd May 2010 – Winter has returned.

Yes, blasted weather! Outside 2 hours ago it was just 4.2 degrees and threatening to go even colder. The sky is full of damp and there’s a mist rising from the ground, getting ready (I shouldn’t wonder) to combine with the cloud that is rolling up the hill. I hate this weather!

This morning I had to ring up the British Embassy in Paris and also the Chambre de Metiers in Chamalieres but of course, with them being civil servants they are closed today. So if they are having a bank holiday then so am I, and I stayed in.

I wasn’t idle though. I’d been letting the footy website slip a little just recently so today I edited and uploaded all of the photos, wrote all of the outstanding commentaries that I could find and then uploaded them too. So all you need to do is to follow the links from this page and you will see the history of FC Pionsat St Hilaire this season in technicolour glory.

There are still some reports missing but I reckon that they are on the digital dictaphone, wherever that may be. Whenever I find it, I’ll do them as well.

At the Anglo-French group tonight in Pionsat something happened that has p155ed me off completely and I’m going to have to do something about it before it escalates out of control. After all the work that we put into running it I’m not going to stand by and watch someone wreck it out of sheer bloody-mindedness and behaviour that would be unacceptable in a three-year-old.

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