Tag Archives: rake

Saturday 15th September 2012 – I FOUND SOMETHING SPECTACULAR …

… in LIDL at St Eloy-les-Mines this afternoon.

Rummaging around, like you do … “like YOU do” – ed … I noticed several twin-packs of LED light strips. About a foot long, they consist of about 12 tiny LEDs and consume just 1 watt of electricity.

They are 12-volt and come complete with tiny mains transformer and little movement-detector.

I’ve been looking for something to use as strip lights in the kitchen whenever it might be that I start it, and also for the bathroom over the sink and the bedroom over the dressing table.

You can buy 12-volt flourescents and indeed I have a few here that I was planning to use, but they take about 7 watts and they are big, bulky things.

So I duly bought a pack and brought it home. And after cutting a few wires and so on, I gave it a try.

And blimey!

for just 1 watt, that’s incredibly bright. Now I have to go and help Rosemary on Monday morning so I’m going via LIDL at St Eloy-les-Mines and I’ll buy the rest of the stock of those lights.

That’s another problem solved. Good old LIDL, hey?

There was also a sale on at Cheze – everything in the shop 20% off today. Now I have a few decent tools lying around here that don’t have handles, like a rake, a sledgehammer and a binette – that kind of thing, and so I popped in there today.

So that’s something else organised.

I also bumped into Bill and so we went for a coffee and a natter.

This morning I sorted out the radio programmes for the rock shows that I do for Radio Anglais. I’m now up to November, with records selected and scripts typed and so that will keep me out of mischief for a while.

And then I headed for town.

Back home after the shops, I went through the SD cards and copied their contents onto DVD – something that I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while.

And I’m supposed to take it easy at the weekend.

Phew!  

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Monday 10th September 2012 – OH DEER!

Oh deer indeed.

And to the deer that ran out in front of Caliburn somewhere between St Gervais d’Auvergne and Gouttieres on the way back from our Anglo-French Group meeting, Caliburn and I are really sorry.

But it’s a good job that I’m a vegan otherwise you would be in the pot right now.

Caliburn has a slight mark on the front bumper, which shows that he’s much more solidly built than the Chevy Malibu that I hired in Canada in 2003 (mind you, it was a stag that I hit back then) but I’m very much afraid that the deer went in all directions.

Ahh well 🙁

So apart from that dramatic end to the evening, what else?

After the usual bits and pieces on the computer, I went out and attacked the wall again.

collapsed lean to repairing stone wall les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut astonishingly, only 3 buckets of mortar went into the wall. And for a whol assortment of reasons.

  1. I had to take down part of the scaffolding. That’s major progress in itself
  2. But before I could do that, I had to move a pile of stuff.
  3. Once that had gone, I had to hack down a pile of brambles and small trees to make some working space
  4. I had to clear away all of the sand and cement  that I’ve raked out of the wall and was piling up against the foot of the wall. That took ages, and I DO mean “ages” too


But I did make two startling discoveries

  1. I knew that I had another garden rake somewhere, a big heavy duty proper one with real metal prongs.
    And I would love to know what I was doing with it because it was under the stones that fell when the wall collapsed back all those years ago.
    The handle has long since rotted away but I’ll buy a new one on Saturday at Cheze.
  2. I now know the secret of why the lean-to is collapsing.
    There’s a whole network of tree roots from the walnut tree that has infiltrated into the wall below ground level. Much of the day was spent extracting them, and I need to think of a permanent solution to deal with that issue.
    Also, this is the bit where the wall is really bad.
    Rainwater has infiltrated and washed the old mortar away and many of the stones are loose. They need extracting where possible and replacing with larger stones/
    Either that or they need to be well packed in with other stones so that they can’t move and the forces above them are spread out horizontally.

So now you know why that’s why it’s taking me ages.

But anyway, at 18:45 I called it a day and had a quick a solar shower and following that, legged it to St Gervais d’Auvergne where we had the biggest crowd for quite a while.

And that is always pleasant.

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