Tag Archives: out of recession

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.

Sunday 31st January 2010 – Absolutely shocking!

Yes! You may or may not believe this but I have had some electric heating on in the attic this afternoon.

This morning was the day I’ve been waiting since November to have – a real Alpine winter’s day with brilliant blue skies and a hard crispy frost. Despite not going to bed until 03:00 I was up and about at 09:30 with the sunlight streaming in through the windows. First job was to get on the roof and shovel the snow off the solar panels. And that’s a job I won’t be doing much longer as I’ve found a place that does 12-volt trace heating especially for this kind of thing. As you might expect, it’s nowhere near Europe and it isn’t in the USA either but in Canada. They are used to this kind of thing. 5 watts per foot and I need about 35 feet of it so that’s about 175 watts in total. 5 minutes of that will shift as much snow as you like and I’ll get my charge back in no time.

After breakfast it was round to Claude’s to do another van load but he reckoned that the roads are impassable and in any case just a quick glance at him told me that yesterday finished him off for good. He won’t be lifting another box of belongings and so he needs to think again. I’ve made a suggestion to him but it’s up to him if he accepts it. It’s still amazing though, with everything that he has done for everyone else in the past for everyone in Virlet and when he needs help they just totally ignore him.

So back home to find that the batteries in the house and in the barn are fully charged and it’s only lunchtime. Shame to waste the surplus solar energy so I dug up an old oil-filled 400-watt electric radiator and plugged it in – and had the pleasure of watching the temperature in the attic rise by 5 degrees while I caught up with more correspondence.

Yesterday in LIDL I bought one of those plug-in wattmeters for mains current – the type that you plug into a mains plug and you plug the appliance into it and it tells you how many watts and amps the appliance draws. They are of course much more versatile than that and I have lots of plans for it so I took it apart for a nosey. And as I thought, it’s an interated circuit with two wires in and two wires out. So I just cut the wires off the plug and socket bits and then I can hard-wire it into my circuit. It makes data recording much easier.

In other news, the UK is now officially out of recession. At long last – the last “major” western economy to do so. The value of the Pound Sterling is steadily rising in world stockmarkets too. Earlier this afternoon one Pound reached 2.3 Maldive Island Seashells and 1.9 Zimbabwean Bongo Beads.