Tag Archives: orange

Friday 5th May 2017 – SO HERE I AM …

… about to spend my first night in my new chez moi.

Last night I had a really good sleep and was awakened from the dead by the alarm. I knew absolutely nothing about anything in between. I’d been on my travels but all memory of them had disappeared by the time that I had come round.

It was something of a painful breakfast – I’ve clearly been doing too much just now – and I ad to sit around for half an hour or so before I could hit the road. But I ended up at NOZ just as it opened.

NOZ was something of a disappointment. It’s a shop that sells all kinds of ends of series, bankrupt stock, all of that, and I was hoping for a pile of stuff to help me set up home, but it had almost nothing whatever.

I had much better luck in Centrakor where I spent almost €100. Tons of stuff in there that I needed, but most important, after a decent big waste bin of course, was some bedding. A single quilt, pillow and quilt cover. I’m sleeping on the sofa until I can sort out a bed, and I’ll need these to keep warm. It won’t be wasted because if I have friends to stay, they can use the bed and the double quilt that I’ll be buying, and I’ll use the single on here.

After that I went to LeClerc and stocked up with whatever I couldn’t get and also a pile of food. And then I came here.

Still creaking and groaning, it took me a while to bring everything up and then I sat down and made my butties – only to be disturbed by the man from EDF. It took him just 5 minutes to reconnect the electricity and another couple of minutes to show me how to figure out the switch to the immersion heater so that it works on off-peak hours only.

Once that was organised I went into town. I had to pick up the lease for this place, but the estate agent wasn’t in. And then I had to go to my internet provider to pick up a new box. On the way back, seeing as how I now have a working fridge, I picked up a box of strawberry sorbet. I may as well make good use of the freezer drawer I suppose;

This new portable halogen hob thing that I bought in IKEA a couple of months ago isn’t half the bee’s knees. Once I’d worked out how to make it function, it cooked a quick meal for me in minutes flat. It just shows you how out-of-date this old technology is. When I organise the kitchen I’ll be having a couple of halogen hobs to cook with, and I’ll see if I can’t find a halogen oven to go with it. I’m very impressed.

There’s no internet here for another week but I’m in luck because seeing as I am so high up here on the rock, I can pick up some really good signals and my internet supplier has a public wi-fi point in the vicinity to provide a service to the hostel for young workers just down the road. With my own ID and password I can connect into it, so here I am. I’m not sure just how reliable it might be though.

So now I’m going to try for my first night here in my new place. No curtains on the window so I’ll be awoken early.

And that’s the cue for an early night then, isn’t it?

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Tuesday 14th March 2017 – YOU MIGHT …

… or, more likely, might not … be wondering where I’ve been for the last few days. Well, almost a week in fact.

The truth is that I have had a very (un)pleasant stay amid the local facilities of the town of Verdun.

No, not the Nick, Rhys, the local hospital.

I was rushed in there on Wednesday night/Thursday morning after the landlady of the Hotel du Tigre found me flaked out in my bed having had the most serious relapse to date. She promptly called for an ambulance.

There was no internet in the hospital and somehow my telephone had become damaged so I was out of touch.

Anyway, they threw me out this morning and a taxi took me back to the hotel.

I’m still not 100% fit – far from it, in fact – so I had a slow, steady drive southwards and ended up at Bar-le-Duc where I bought a baguette and made myself a butty.

On my way through the town I’d seen an “Orange” boutique and so when it opened after lunch I trotted off round there to see what they could do about my phone. I’d managed to clean it up and dry it out but the keyboard wasn’t working, so I hoped that they could do something about it.

Nothing that they could do on the spot so repair would involve sending it away, and the hourly charge was something rather ludicrous. However, my contract has only one month to go before renewal and on renewal I would be entitled to a new telephone at a discount price. One or two deft keystrokes and I suddenly found myself the owner of a brand-new Samsung Smartphone, for all of €44:00. About half the price of the postage and minimum repair charge.

Later on, I was back on the road and had a gentle drive across the northern Burgundy mountains as far as Auxerre. This is where the new telephone came in handy because a quick search on the internet told me where the Première Class Hotel was situated – it’s quite a way out of the city.

Hopefully I’ll have a good sleep and a decent breakfast and make myself ready for the next stage of my journey.

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Sunday 24th May 2015 – WASN’T THAT A NICE …

… sleep last night?

I had a reasonably early night and went out like a light. And then I remember absolutely nothing until about 09:30 this morning. It’s a long time since I’ve had a good sleep like that.

A nice leisurely breakfast and then I sat down to carry on with the radio programmes, but I didn’t get far. I’m easily sidetracked, especially on a Bank Holiday weekend, and I ended up cutting my hair. it really did need doing too.

My experiments for watching the internet-streamed football on the laptop via the medium of the big screen on the DVD player were not so successful. But that wasn’t the fault of the screen.

In fact the screen worked very well, once I remembered that I could enlarge the web browser to fill the screen with the image, it worked quite well. But where it all fell apart was in the streaming.

Orange promise me between 2 and 8 Mbs, and according to the meter on their website, I’m receiving about 2.13 Mb. I don’t know where it’s all going though, because according to the meter that I have on my laptop, I’ve never had more than 280 Kbs and on Sunday we were having about 60 Kbs. That’s with everything else switched off and a very downgraded Google Chrome browser running just the one page.

Clearly something isn’t right.

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Tuesday 5th May 2015 – HAVING CURSED ORANGE TELECOM …

… with what can best be described as “an expletive-ridden rant” on Saturday, it’s only fair that I report on my visit this morning to the main Orange Telecom shop in the centre of Montlucon. And apart from not being open unti 10:00, I do have to say that the personnel in the shop could not have been more helpful. It was a stark contrast to Saturday, and had I had today’s treatment then, I would have been delighted.

So now, after having been to Montlucon and back, reconfigured the new Livebox and made a couple of phone calls, I now have a proper working home telephone, a proper working mobile phone (and one of the guys in Orange helped me configure it so that I could access the internet) and my e-mail and website back up. So it’s all systems go here in Pooh Corner.

As for the website, I finally managed to speak to someone at the Danish Domain Registration Service, and they were so horrified about my two-hour hold yesterday that they extended my domain renewal by 12 months free of charge. So all’s well that ends well there too.

So having done that, I propped Caliburn up on axle stands, removed the spare wheel (and checked it over) and then made a start on rustproofing the underneath.

rustproofing underneath caliburn ford transit les guis virlet puy de dome franceAs you can see, what I have done so far has come out quite well.

The wire brush on the angle grinder was far too savage so in the end I cleaned it off by hand, and the rustproofing paint went on quite easily, giving a lovely finish. I let in dry for a couple of hours and then put the spare wheel back and dropped Caliburn back off the axle stands.

I’ll be doing the rest of the floor bit by bit (there’s nothing cluttering the rest of the underside) and then going round to give it all a second coat. Once that’s been done and it’s all stabilised, I can underseal it all and that will keep it good for another 8 years.


When that had been done, I checked over Caliburn to make sure that there was enough oil, water and so on and then gave the back a really good clear-out.

french air force place low flying over les guis virlet puy de dome franceWhile I was starting to load up Caliburn, I had spectators. The French Air Force came for a look around to see what I was up to. They’ve come round to check up on me a few times

But in Caliburn there’s now about half of the stuff that I need to take with me, and I’ll do all of the rest tomorrow before I go. It shouldn’t take too long, I hope, and then I can clear off.

I’m taking the horizontal axis wind turbine with me too. I’s never had a decent run out yet, and I reckon that parked up on the side of the autoroutes, or by the side of a big lake, it ought to do something, and this would seem to be a good time to try it.

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Monday 4th May 2015 – HAPPY STAR WARS DAY

And it’s another day when I’ve been heavily sidetracked and not done anything like what I intended to do.

A late night last night, and I was on my travels too. A Mercedes 25-seater bus, a 407-type of thing, came down the lane and when he reached the junction he didn’t know which way to go, so he travelled straight on, right through my hedge (which I don’t actually have of course).

Naturally, I was furious, and buttonholed the driver, and his response was “it’s okay. I’ll buy you a srink and it will be fine”. I told him that I expected much more than a drink for the damage that he had caused, but he ran away.

After breakfast, I did all of the paperwork for Orange Telecom and then went into Pionsat to post it off. On the way back, I gave Caliburn a really good wash and soak. And I can see that I’m going to have to give his bodywork some attention in the near future.

From there, I could carry on with cleaning and grouting the beichstuhl, and once I’d done that, I started to fit the top. And that took a huge amount of work – much more than you might think. It needed considerable modification.

Cecile hadn’t been able to contact the telephone company about my line, but at lunchtime I noticed that Liz was on line, so she gallantly took up the cudgel. And with Liz and I exchanging messages on here and Liz passing them on to the technician on the phone, we finally worked out that the problem was in the Livebox, That’s no surprise as it’s quite flaky and nothing like as good as the previous one.

However, about 10 minutes after the call ended, the Livebox gave a peculiar squeak and Lo and Behold, the phone line came back.

That was the queue to catch up on a few outstanding phone calls and having been kept hanging on the line by a Danish computer company for no less than TWO HOURS, I called it a day.

So tomorrow, I’ll have to change my plans and go to Montlucon for this blasted Livebox. I wasn’t anticipating having to waste my time doing that.

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Saturday 2nd May 2015 – I WON’T HAVE MUCH …

… of my mind yet at this rate, the amount that I have been giving out to other people just recently. And today was the day that capped it all and they will remember me in the Orange telecom boutique in Montlucon for quite a long time.

For in there today, I have had customer service of the kind that makes Belgium look impressive.

It all started when I arrived at the place and there were two assistants on duty (on a Saturday morning!), of which one of them sat there all morning just tapping numbers into a telephone, making no attempt whatever to deal with the huge crowd of people in there.

I’ve never seen anything like this at all.

I had to wait there for a good hour before I was finally seen, and we started off as we meant to go on when the assistant refused to take back the television decoder that I have mysteriously been sent.
“You can do that at the other shop” she said.
“So why not here?”
“Because you do it at the other shop”.
Quite.

And then we finally had to deal with the issue of the contract for the new service. Despite my asking for hard copy stuff because I don’t have a printer, Orange still managed to send it to me by e-mail. So I needed them to print it out.

She could manage that fine, and so I suggested that I can fill in the papers then and there and that would be fine, but …

Ohhhhh Noooooo –
“you did this by internet”
“yes I did”
“so you need to post this off”
“why?”
“Because you sis it on line”
“But this is an Orange shop?”
“yes”
“So why can’t i just do it and hand it in here?”
“Because you did it on line”.

It was at that point that I exploded and, as I said, they won’t forget me in a hurry in there. It’s a long time since I’ve reacted like that. And even though it won’t solve anything, I felt so much better afterwards.

And I haven’t finished yet, by any means.

Apart from that, I’ve done the rounds of the usual shops in Montlucon and bought a pile of DVDs and also some new cotton bedding in the sale at Auchan – some nice dark brown cotton pillow cases and a quilt cover and a light brown cotton sheet.

I’ve bought the stuff in Brico Depot that I need to finish off the beichstuhl and the lights in the bedroom, and probably a few other things besides. There was a nice wooden toilet seat that will fit nicely on the beichstuhl too. But not the worktop – I’ve seen something that might provide a solution for this.

It was also a day for meeting people too. I had a coffee with Liz and Terry, whom I had met at the Orange boutique, and then bumped into Pascal, Marianne’s son, at leClerc. In the Auchan it was the turn of Michel, who used to be associated with the football club at Pionsat and he told me few things that answered several but by no means all) of what has been going on at the football club.

But no football this weekend, so tomorrow I might even have a blast at the radio programmes.

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Friday 10th April 2015 – I HAD AN UNEXPECTED …

… day off work today.

But that was partly because I had an expected visitor, in that Liz came round to inspect the premises at lunchtime. Consequently I had to spend the morning tidying up. It certainly made quite a difference, and you can actually see the top of the table now, as well as the coffee table.

A job well-done.

Liz thought so too – she was quite impressed with what I’ve done so far (and so am I of course) and then we had a coffee and a long chat.

After she had gone, I installed the new Livebox and, as I expected, it didn’t go anything like according to plan (mainly due to the fact that the screenshots in the destruction manual were nothing like what I had on my screen). This meant a phone call to Orange, and that was the end of the early afternoon.

Still, the thing is working now, and it does seem to be faster, which is good news. maybe they weren’t wrong about upgrading the phone lines.

All of this meant that I had a very late lunch – more of an early tea really – and it wasn’t worth starting work after that. I had a play on the internet instead.

At 18:00 I went into St Eloy les Mines and did the shopping, bumping into the Laotian girl whom I know (and whose name I have forgotten) and also Desirée, both of whom were doing their shopping. We had a bit of rain too, but nothing to worry about.

second hand ford ranger 4x4 for sale montaigut en combraille puy de dome franceDriving past the big car sales place in Montaigut, I noticed that they had a Ford Ranger for sale, just like the one that I own in Canada. So I went over for a wander.

And it’s astonishing. It’s 3 years older than mine, with a much lower spec, yet they want almost twice as much money for it than I paid for mine. Still, the more that I see of them, the more that I like tham and I hope that I’m not going to be disappointed with mine.


And here’s something to record. With the temperature up here in my attic yesterday reaching 23°C and looking like it might be just as hot today, I’ve opened the skylights in the roof.

First time this year, too. It’ll be nice sleeping in here with a little breeze sweeping around the room.

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Friday 17th January 2014 – DURING THE NIGHT …

… I was in Berlin, on the Underground with the much-maligned Percy Penguin (who doesn’t feature in these pages half as often as she deserves) and we became separated as a train that she stepped onto pulled away before I could stepon it (Strangely enough, such a situation did actually occur when I was in London once with Liz Ayers).

I made a gesture to PP to get off at the next station and wait for me, and I would follow on the next train.

However we were waiting for hours and hours. It turned out that there had been an accident and the line was blocked, and then they hauled into our station a smashed and damaged Underground train)

We couldn’t continue on the Underground and so we had to take an overground train and then a bus, which dropped us a few hundred yards short of our destination. And the station was so big and confusing from above ground, and there were so many people milling around, and we had taken so long to get there that I was certain that I would never ever find PP again.

As I’ve said before … "and you’ll say again" – ed … if only my real life waseven half as exciting as my dreams.

Today, in the glorious sunshine that gave me a world-record January total of 107 excess amps of solar charge, I remeasured all of the uprights (and how I wish that I had noticed that I had my measuring stick on a piece of wood when I measured Upright 3 – GRRRR!) and all 6 are cut, as are the lets into the floor beams above.

This afternoon I cut the joints in the first two and also cut all of the horizontals.

I’ve also fitted a batten across the uprights that support the stairs, screwed about 20 screws into it and I’ve started to hang up the tools there. I’m really in danger of being organised before I’m much older.

I had an interesting ‘phone call too.
Caller – “This is France Telecom Orange, your service provider. We would like to tell you about the massive reductions in telephone charges that occur as of today”
… (lengthy discussions on phone charges) …
Caller – “Now we just need to take your address details to check them with our records”
… (no problem with that – it’s in the telephone directory anyway) …
Caller – “Now if we can check your bank account details”
Our Hero – “Madame – what tree do you think that I fell out of?”
Caller – *click*
I suppose that there are some people who fall for calls like this.

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