Tag Archives: pizza hut

Tuesday 23rd July 2013 – WELL I MADE IT

And if you ask me very nicely, I’ll make you one like it too – which is a story that I have told before, but don’t let that worry you.

I left home just after 21:00 – stopped for 5 minutes at the Carrefour at Montmarault to drop a little fuel in (I was going to fuel up at the Carrefour in Riom earlier but of course we went in Liz’s car instead), then 15 minutes at Melun for a total refuel and a stretch of the legs.

I arrived here at 04:05, which has to be something of a world record seeing as how it’s about 732kms. Good old Caliburn.

But I cheated really, because I’ve abandoned my traditional route over the mountains and despite the péage, these days I’m doing it all on the motorway.

Well, not quite.

I’m leaving the motorway at Fontainebleu, passing around the town and heading for Melun where there is a cheap petrol station, and then onto the N104 – the Francilienne – at the other side of the city.

That cuts a huge chunk off the journey and completely misses out the suburbs of Paris. It’s much less stressful and I’ve had enough stress right now.

Except of course when someone in a Porsche Cayenne is overtaking a long line of traffic, sees the radar, slams on his brakes and cuts in right in front of me. He got both barrels of Caliburn’s horn and when he pulled alongside me to … errr … remonstrate with me, he got what can best be called an “offensive gesture” too.

I was in no mood for messing about.

Anyway, I can’t believe that I left the apartment in Belgium in such a tip. I really don’t know what happened. It was as if I had been chased out by zombies and if Marianne had seen how it looked, she would have turned in her grave.

I went more-or less straight to bed and then up at 11:30, and a leisurely day recuperating. And also doing two big machine-loads of washing.

Now everyone makes mistakes of course, but what counts in life is how you get out of them. And here’s an object lesson in dealing with issues.

Tuesday night is cheapo night in the pizza place down the road – all medium pizzas at €5:95 and as I didn’t feel like cooking after all of my exertions, down I went and ordered a Country Vegetable without cheese.

When I returned (having picked up some wooden crates on the way back) I found that they had given me a ham pizza with cheese by mistake, so I rang them back to complain.
“Ahh – it’s you who had the ham pizza then. What’s your address?” which I duly told him.
5 minutes later the manager was round with my pizza. “I made you a large one, to make up for the inconvenience” he said, so I put some cheese on it and ate it all, musing to myself that “that’s how you get out of an embarrassing situation”.

Yes, hats off to them.

So an ealy night. It’ll be a day or two before I recover from the jet-lag.

Luckily tonight, I found Marianne’s cooling fan. And I needed it too.

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Saturday 12th February 2011 – We just worked half a day today.

Liz finished papering the bathroom and then painted the half that she had papered yesterday. It looks quite nice too. I carried on scrubbing down the walls in the living room and you wouldn’t believe how much dirt and muck and mess there is on them. Mind you, it doesn’t half look better now.

In the corner next to the bathroom is a little alcove where I hang the coats and leave the shoes. Marianne and I wallpapered there a few years ago but the bit at the bottom is quite badly soiled and needed doing again. But learning the lesson from my attic at home, and bearing in mind that we have a box of unused wall tiles going spare, Terry cut off some of the wallpaper and tiled down there. Now that’s so much better and of course if you are throwing muddy shoes about then all you need to do is to wipe down the tiles.

After lunch we had a brainstorming session and decided on yet another change of plan. The grouting of the WC tiles is awful and nothing we seem to do can clean it up. Grinding out the stuff doesn’t work either as it just creates dust everywhere and there isn’t the room to swing a grinder around so we decided that we would take them off and replace them. The sink is fine but the WC has seen better days and so we are going to replace that, put new pipework in the bathroom and change the tap.

And so with all of that, the stuff to seal the balcony, a pile of door handles and so on, we spent over €400 at Brico. The one at Mont St Jean instead, where they have the rudest staff in the whole wide world. And where they also have the rudest customers in the world too and Terry and I can give it back in spades.

At the Carrefour there we spent well over €100 in food for the next week. We’ve each given our orders for meals and so Liz knows what to cook. Spicy bean fallujahs with spicy rice, and rice pudding are on the menu – I can tell you that 😉

Once the shopping was finished the staff expressed a wish to be wined and dined at a Pizza Hut. Their wish is my command, unless I want to finish off this apartment all on my own, and so a good time was had by all.

But seeing how much these renovations are costing me, I hope that we can finish the work before my heart and my wallet give out. I’m not used to spending money like this.

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Saturday 30th October 2010 – TODAY HAS BEEN QUITE CIVILISED …

… and hasn’t it been a long time since anything like that ever happened?

In fact we had a recycling day today and with Darren’s big pick-up truck, Rachel, Hannah and I did a tour of the neighbourhood picking up glass bottles, plastic bottles and aluminium drinks cans.

Once we had a full load on board we went off to a recycling plant in Bath about 10 miles away from here where we weighed it all in.

The plant was quite interesting – it was a simple hand-sorting operation where you tipped out your containers onto a kind-of counter and two people hand-sorted the cans and plastic and they also weighed the glass bottles, not by scales but by eye.

And having seen the price is on offer for scrap over here, not only do I now understand why in several cities that I’ve been to and down several roads that I’ve travelled I’ve seen gangs of people picking up the litter, I’m also going to bring over the scrap aluminium off the two caravans that I dismantled and weigh it in over here.

giant inflatable pumpkin blown away by wind centreville new brunswick canadaIt was quite a windy day over here too and so the highlight was definitely this giant inflatable pumpkin that was busily making a bid for freedom down the highway in the general direction of the USA.

What you don’t see in the photo is the guy from a nearby house who was giving a rather desperate chase after it. 

Thanks in no small measure to the long piece of rope that was tethered to it the guy managed to restrain it but it was touch-and-go at one stage and my money was definitely on the pumpkin.

cadillac convertible centreville new brunswick canadaI was also taken out old-car spotting too.

Darren took me to see his brother-in-law who lives just down the road. He has an old Cadillac convertible that he has restored from a rusty heap and had taken it out for a run-around this morning. And so we headed off down the road to catch him up.

pizza hut houlton maine usaThis evening we all went out for pizza to celebrate Halloween and a good time was had by all. My pizza is the one in the foreground – the vegetarian one without cheese.

If I’m very lucky tomorrow I might get to spend some time with my great-nieces but the trouble with teenagers is that they always seem to have a much different agenda to any agenda that anyone else is ever planning. So I dunno.

Mind you, I have an important decision to make. Do I go out trick-or-treating with Amber and Zoe tomorrow night or do I stay behind with Hannah and hand out the candy?

But all three of them have decided that once Halloween is over I can take off my halloween mask. I don’t seem to be able to convince them that this is my REAL face.

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