Tag Archives: drivers

Thursday 18th January 2018 – IT WASN’T …

… such a good, exciting day today as it was yesterday.

It started to go wrong when I went to bed last night and found that, once more, I couldn’t sleep. Tossing and turning for much of the night and waking up bolt-upright part-way through.

Mind you, I had been on my travels during the night but you don’t want me to tell you about them. You’re probably eating your tea or something. It’s what probably awoke me too.

When the alarm went off I managed to crawl out of bed at a reasonable time thereafter, and after the medication and breakfast I had a shower. And SHOCK! HORROR! I did a machine-load of washing, including the bedclothes. Tonight I’ll have brand-sparkling-clean covers on the bed and won’t that be luxury?

But no chance of going out. The rain was back, and in spades too. I really didn’t fancy the walk up to LIDL in this kind of weather.

I’m not really sure where the morning went, because I don’t recall doing anything much. It wasn’t as if the washing took all that much time. It was actually 14:00 when I noticed that it was lunchtime.

After lunch, checking my e-mails, I found that I had had a reply from the French Agence Nationale des Titres Sécurisés. I had sent them an e-mail to ask them where I could find the two documents that I need for Tuesday. They sent me a link, but that wasn’t the answer and I had to spend a good hour or so exploring the site before I found them.

They are not at all called what the Doctor told me that they were called at all, but they correspond to the description. And so I downloaded them.

And then they needed to be printed.

It took a while to sort out this mains connection but it seems to work now, which is good news. But the next issue is trying to make the thing function. The drivers aren’t loaded onto this laptop and I don’t seem to have brought the disk with me.

And so I had to track down an installation disk image on-line and download it – only 255mb of it and that took an age. And then set it up.

And much to my surprise it actually worked and I was able to print off the documents.

While it was doing all of that I did some more sorting out of papers and all of those are ready for a good examination in due course.

digger working in tidal port de granville manche normandy franceThe weather had cleared up by now so I went for my little walk around the headland again.

And there’s yet more excitement in the port today. Part of the port area is tidal and this is where some of the yachts and smaller fishing boats tie up, and ground out at low tide.

But there’s a digger out there just now working away. On what, I have no idea but it’s interesting to say the least. I shall have to go back tomorrow for another look.

Back here, i made myself a coffee. But I didn’t drink it though. I crashed right out and was gone for over an hour. A really deep sleep too and I felt quite feeble when I awoke.

Not too feeble though to have a session on the bass guitar again. And this time, one of the things that I was working on was “Orgone Accumulator” – the Hawkwind track that I played when I was with Mike Allen and one or two others whose names I forget. After all, it is over 40 years ago.

For tea I tried some pasta and managed to eat it all although it took some time.

But the walk was a bit of a disaster. I hadn’t gone 400 yards before the heavens opened and I was drenched to the skin. NO point in risking double-pneumonia so I came back home.

So here’s hoping for a better night, and a better day tomorrow. But at the moment I don’t feel like it at all.

Tuesday 14th September 2010 – I haven’t done a tap today.

Well, that’s not strictly true – after breakfast I started on the website for this season’s adventures for Pionsat’s football club. Even though I might not be there as much as I have been in the past that is no reason for ignoring it and I already have match reports for four games.

When the battery went flat in the laptop I went outside to see what the postie had brought me. I was hoping it might be good news, after all it’s been a long time since I’ve had any. And – to my surprise if not total astonishment ……

…. Yes, I’m very quick with the criticism of French public service and beauraucracy (and not without reason in many circumstances) and so I ought to be just as quick with the praise. And so hats off to the lady in the Prefecture at Clermont Ferrand. Not only did my International Driving Licence arrive today, attached to it was a new bright and shiny French Drivers Licence with medical certificate for driving lorries and buses and also for cars and vans pulling heavy trailers. This latter bit is very important as a French driving licence specifically states that a car or light van pulling a heavy trailer (one up to 3.5 tonnes laden weight) is fully authorised. And of course, what is the total laden weight of our new trailer?

A short while later Bill came round. And he stayed here having a really good chat until quite late in the afternoon. I couldn’t download a driver for his old printer – it’s not supported – and in any case he told me the price of the ink cartridges he needed to buy to fire it up. Over €50, he said, so I pointed him in the general direction of these Epson SX115 all-in-one things that we have been buying. Complete with ink cartridges, it costs a mere €49.50 and the replacement inks are €4:00 for the black and €15.99 for the three colour cartridges.

We were also looking at dial-up modems (broadband hasn’t got to him yet) and the cost is unbelievable. They are clearly a breed close to extinction. But we did find that Orange was offering a basic internet connection on “dial-up” for just €10:00 per month so as he is going to Montlucon tomorrow he’ll stop by the Orange shop to see what they can do for him.

We spent a while looking at photos of old cars and so on, and the discussion turned round to next summer. He has an old Peugeot 106 at his place that hasn’t gone anywhere for a while and isn’t worth anything much as it’s right-hand drive. No-one else wants it so we’ve decided that we will bring it round here and strip it, and then prepare it for grass-tracking. Bill was a racing driver of sorts in his youth and I reckon it won’t take too much persuasion to get him behind the wheel again. And in any case we need to find something else to do in the summer when there’s no footy.

He had a good look around the Ebro and reckons that he will help me have a bit of a play with that too when I can make some space (whenever that might be).

But I also got to thinking again as well. Terry and I have a scaffolding and a heavy duty trailer between us. He has this amazing pressure-washer and I have a big diesel generator. Simon has a huge crepi machine. You can see where I’m going with this. We have all the basics of a little plant hire business here. A big petrol cement mixer which you can buy really cheaply round here and which I can fit my single cylinder diesel engine to is something else we can consider. I reckon that there might be some mileage in exploring avenues such as this.

Once Bill had gone the phone rang twice and each time it was someone reading War and Peace to me and it wasn’t worth starting anything after that. But still, things are slowly progressing and that’s a good sign.