Tag Archives: gilles

Thursday 8th November 2012 – I’M BACK!

And I bet that you didn’t know that I’ve even been away.

You may remember that a couple of weeks ago a small group of us went round to Nan’s for some kind of soirée – well tonight, we all went round to chez Gilles.

6 of us there were – Nan, Cécile, Zoë, Gilles, Yours Truly, and Isabel. We wined and dined and then played a board game.

It’s quite rare this – me socialising, isn’t it? But I think that I really ought to get out more, and that’s an opinion which everyone else shares.

This morning I didn’t have my usual go on the website.

In a change to the advertised programme, straight after breakfast I attacked the shelf unit and varnished it all. This would give it much more time to dry, of course.

And then I had a problem.

When I went to take off the lid of the varnish tin, I discovered that it had rusted on and so I had to chisel it off. And what I had to do to it to make it come off meant that it was clearly in no fit state to go back on afterwards.

It was a large tin – and expensive too – and so I had to find a few more paint tins, throw away the content, clean out the tins and pour the varnish into that.

Such is life.

Once the varnish had dried I fitted it all into the cupboard – not without having to do a few little alterations, it has to be said, butnow it fits beautifully – exactly as it should.

7 shelves there are, and soon there will be 8.

The metal shelf unit that I had brought upstairs and put in the shower room to store some of the bits and pieces that were loitering around – what was on there didn’t even take up one shelf on the new unit.

Yes, it’s a monster and quite right too.

Actually I’m impressed – it goes quite well in there and fits the little cupboard quite nicely.

And it’s amazing – with that I’ve already managed to put on there, there’s already so much more room to move around in the bedroom and work

When I’m organised – whenever that might be – and the house is well-advanced, there will be tons of room in there to store all kinds of stuff – you can’t have too much storage room.

Tomorrow I’ll finish off rounding things up and stacking them on the shelves. and once it’s all done I might even have enough room to start cutting plasterboard again.

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Thursday 25th October 2012 – A BIG THANK-YOU …

… to everyone who thought about me while I was ill. I appreciated it very much.

A couple of you have suggested taking it easy for a while – sentiments with which I totally agree. Accordingly when the alarm clocks went off, I turned over and went back to sleep for a while.

Most of the day has been spent with paperwork – or rather, fiddling about with the printer so that I could print off a pile of paperwork.

It didn’t print in black last month and so I did everything in blue, but today I spent ages cleaning the heads and managed to get half a black printout.

One of the nozzles is blocked, and so I went to clean the heads again, and it ran out of black ink. I changed the black ink, but it still wasn’t printing properly and so I cleaned the heads again.

This time it ran out of blue ink.

I changed the blue ink, cleaned the heads, and it’s still not printing properly in black.

This means that for the foreseeable future I’m back to printing everything in blue again. I never seem to have any luck with printers.

This afternoon, I selected all of the music for the rock programmes but this evening was something exciting and unusual – Nan was having a little do and I was invited, as were Cécile, Gilles and Zoe.

We had a snack and played charades and so on for a few hours. It’s not like me to be sociable, is it?< Tomorrow is recording the Radio Anglais rock programmes for Radio Tartasse and so I won't be doing too much tomorrow morning either.

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Thursday 8th April 2010 – It was quite interesting …

local history meeting la cellette pionsat puy de dome france… this discussion about the history of the area. Going back to Pre-Roman times and up to the 1950s. There was quite a good turnout too, as you can see.

It’s not quite the same as when I used to sit in on the open lectures at the University Libre de Bruxelles but you have to admit that for an isolated rural area like this they are putting up an excellent show, so chapeau to them!

The questions were quite interesting. The organiser – him on the stage – asked the audience what they knew about pre-Roman Celtic and Liz and Bill put their hands over my mouth to stop me saying “don’t they play in the Scottish Second Division?”

Yes, Bill and Liz were there, as were Mark, Tom and his wife, and a German lady who I know but whose name I have forgotten and which I will remember as soon as I press “send” … "Heidi" – ed. Quite a good turnout from the Anglo-French group in fact, but then again Marianne did ask me if I would send the invitation on to anyone whom I thought might be interested.

A few of us went over the road to the village bar for a coffee and a chat about a few issues involving the group and all in all it was quite productive. And while we were in there Gilles drove past. Now he’s someone I haven’t seen for ages so when they threw us out of the bar I wandered up there to say hi. Liesbeth was there cooking his tea for him and I was invited to stay but my diet (you probably know that I’m a vegan and don’t drink alcohol) prevented it.

Nothing got done in the garden but then again it’s nice to have a day off occasionally and do exciting cerebral things.

And tonight the cold weather has returned and there’s a hanging cloud on the mountain. I wish the weather would make up its mind! 

 

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Monday 2nd November 2009 – This perishing flooring …

… is getting on my wick.

I know now why it was reduced for sale at Brico Depot and why there was so much of it. Most flooring is just plain good old ordinary tongue and grooving and it slots together quite nicely. This stuff has “our special patented interlocking system” and that should have set the alarm bells ringing in my head. There’s nothing wrong with tongue and grooving and there isn’t any point changing it, especially for “our patented” system which, as far as I can see, doesn’t work.

It clicks together nicely on the shortest ends – on the longest sides it’s quite a struggle even with Ashley, my super-heavy-duty mallet; but you try to do both together. It’s now four times that I’ve had this floor restarted in an attempt to get it fitted properly. I’ve now resorted to cutting off the ends of the clips, nailing it to the floor on one side and twisting it in on the other. It sort-of fits but it looks untidy but I’ve got to the stage that I knew that I would reach sooner or later, namely that I can’t be bothered to waste any more time and I just want to be in there and settled down no matter what.

And who can blame ne with this weather? It’s pouring down with rain tonight.we’ve had 13.5mm of rain so far this evening and my water butts are overflowing. A far cry from the end of September when we went something like 15 days without any rain.

At the Anglo French group tonight no-one could remember whose turn it was to animate the evening so I had everyone playing charades, miming the use of tools used in DiY. Everyone entered into the spirit of things although Gilles did get carried away with his impression of a chainsaw – cutting Mark’s hand off was going a bit too far, I thought

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Sunday 25th October 2009 – It was 9:03 when I woke up this morning

I thought to myself that that can’t be right – and it wasn’t.

Well, it was because in fact the clocks went back this morning and we are now on real time, although by yesterday’s time it would have been 10:03 and that is much more like a respectable time to wake up on a Sunday.

So having breakfasted I had to do a CD of footy photos for Xavier. He has some friends who play for Cebazat and I had photographed them the other week so he had asked me for copies of what I had. And as I was meeting him at Beauregard Vendon where the 3rd XI were playing this afternoon I needed to get my skates on.

First stop though was the fete de la pomme at La Cellette. I’d been invited by Marianne so I went along to say hello. Antoine, Liz and Terry were there so we had a good chat and then it was off to the footy.

fcpsh football club de foot pionsat st hilaire beauregard vendonPionsat’s luck ran out today – they only had 10 players and not one of them was what could be called a goalkeeper. For much of the match Xavier was in goal and today’s pic features him diving to push a Beauregard shot round the post for a corner. There was precious little else to cheer.

On the way back home I went via the brocante at St Gervais. And what a waste of time that was. Most of the stallholders were Dutch and if you are a keen follower of my blog you will know that the problem with the Dutch is that they have no word for gratis. I was looking for a metal bucket or something similar to take away my ashes (well, not mine, the ashes out of the stove) but there was nothing that would do. Some stallholder had a battered aluminium casserole and he wanted €4:00 for it. It’s not very often I come away from a brocante empty-handed. Mind you, I met Gilles and Heidi there and we had had a good chat.

Back home I plucked up the courage to tackle that wiring job seeing as it was now dark. I took me about an hour to do it, most of which time was spent trying to fish the torch out from downbehind the battery box.

We’ll know tomorrow whether it works properly.

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Friday 7th August 2009 – NEVER ONE TO MISS OUT ….

strawberry moose gilles party la cellette de dome france… on a photo opportunity, Strawberry Moose tagged himself along to Gilles’ barbecue this evening.

Of course he made plenty of friends, mostly of young ladies of the female sex, and was even taking part in the “jumping off the wall” game – to match the games of “hide and seek” that he played with students of Hatfield University the other week.

gilles party la cellette puy de dome franceAs for my part, I don’t “do” social stuff but I force myself to go out – otherwise I’d never ever do anything.

Terry and Liz are good company as are Bill and Gilles. Rebecca’s mum is quite nice to talk to too, but after a while I long for the peace and quiet of my own four walls such as they are.

And talking of walls, I started the pointing today. Followers of my ravings from previous incarnations will know that my cementing is total carp, and so I didn’t expect much from my efforts at pointing. But even though my technique improved dramatically, my target of Monday afternoon for this is hopelessly optimistic.

There are holes in the existing cementing big enough to put your hand in and god knows what kind of livestock is lurking in there. One hole swallowed up an entire bucket of cement so after that I resorted to filling the big holes with gravel and then cementing them in, to bind everything together. I was interrupted by a rainstorm too at 17:30.

It’s just as well that I’m pointing the wall as it is in desperate straights but finished by Monday? Not a chance.

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Thursday 30th July 2009 – THE HOUSE ROOF IS ALMOST FINISHED …

ASPIRE RECYCLED PLASTIC ROOFING SLATES les guis virlet puy de dome france… as you can see in the pic. The only part that remains to be done is the bit to the side of the chimney and seeing as we have to get up to there to treat the woodwork (we are very generous) and put slates down the sides, that bit can wait til we have the scaffolding around there.

The aluminium troughs you see on the roof are the mountings for the framework for the solar panels and we should be fitting them tomorrow if all goes well. 800 watts near enough if all goes well and with that I shall be certainly ready for action. And if Terry is feeling up to it we may even have a go at putting the wind turbine up too.


By the way, do you like the ridge tiles? They are the ordinary plastic slates scored down the middle with the groove filled with contact adhesive. They were screwed onto the front of the roof with the stainless steel screws and silicone-backed washers and left for a few minutes to catch the sun. Once the sun had caught them they were easy to bend over the apex and screw onto the back of the house. Those silicone-backed washers were quite a find, I can tell you.

After Terry had gone I noticed that the water I had in the black plastic container covered with an old caravan window had reached 35 degrees. Cue the 12-volt shower (not the OUSA Executive Committee – the xylophrene for disposing of nasty little pests will take care of them) and I had a gorgeous scrub of my dirty bits. Following that I crashed out for an hour (it’s wearing me out all this work) and then tidied up my room so I now can sit comfortably in it.

In other news, Gilles came round this morning and had a guided tour of the works. He’s just finished renovating his cottage at La Cellette and he’s organising a barbecue for a week on Friday for all of us. I like Gilles and he did help me out when a solar panel needed fixing after a gale that we had in the winter so I shall be delighted to go.

This is an isolated rural area here with houses few and far between yet I’ve engaged in much more socialising and made many more friends than I ever did when I lived in Brussels.

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