Tag Archives: summer hours

Monday 17th March 2014 – I HAD AN EARLIER NIGHT …

…than last night. In fact I was in bed by all of 04:00 would you believe? Carried awy again by some work that I was doing.

Even more surprisingly, having set the alarm for 07:30 this morning (we’re back at wrok as of today), I was awake – and wide awake too – before it even went off. I’ll probably pay for that later today but never mind.

I was quite busy during the night too. It was the week of beating the bounds in Wales where everyone has to walk – or run – around the borders of the country to satisfy themselves of the correct location of the markers. You could start at any time of the day that you liked, and I remember always starting at 10:20.

Sometime during the night I ended up in broad daylight in Birmingham (a city that I detest) with Zero. I on’t know why we had gone there but I was carrying a geren folder with all of her mother’s bankruptcy documents in there, as well as two rather large kitchen knives. Zero wanted an ice cream and a cake so we went into a cafe and while I was sorting her out, one of the serving staff picked up the folder and started to read the papers within. She then came over and asked us to leave
“Why on earth should we do that?” I asked
“Well, I’m afraid that you might use our premises to solicit donations from the large number of customers (there were about 4 in the cafe) who use or premises”.
She was surprisingly insistent, and even more surprisingly, made no reference to the two very large knives, and they were certainly large enough to frighten anyone.
I made a remark something along the lines of “the trouble with most people in Britain these days is that they are totally paranoid and immediately see things in a situation that simply aren’t there” but that cut no ice with her.

So now that I’m on summer hours, after breakfast I attacked the computer and restarted work on the website. That went on until midday when I knocked off the computer and ent outside to work.

I’ve promised 2 half-days on the garden each week and so I made a start on one of the raised beds, digging it over and weeding it, but I didn’t get far as I had to go to Cécile’s as there was a man due to come to check the septic tank. Accordingly I had a shower in the verandah (and we are talking about nothing to do with the Open University Students Association by the way) and then rounded up all of the washing from my holiday.

Once he had gone I came back via the Intermarche where I bumped into Jean Lauvergne and his wife and then when I was back here I had a couple more jobs to do on Caliburn. Firstly to change the passenger-side mirror. It was cracked quite a while ago but I caught in on something at Rennes-le-Chateau and that finished it off.

After that, I changed his tyres and he now has his summer tyres on. That took much longer than it should have – one of the wheels was rusted onto the hub and on another wheel the jack couldn’t find a good purchase. But anyway that’s sorted out and now Caliburn is ready for the summer.

buds on trees les guis virlet puy de dome franceI went back into the garden after and promptly broke the handle on the fork. It’s not my day is it.

But I did notice that some of the more sheltered trees and bushes are now budding. That’s early this year. It can only spell doom as I’m not quite convinced that winter is quite over yet, even if we did have over 25°C.

We also had 170 amp-hours of surplus electrical energy today. That might sound a lot but it isn’t as much as yesterday’s 205 amp-hours, which is about a record as far as I can tell. But there’s a reason for this. Now that the days are lengthening dramatically and the sun is much higher in the sky, I’ve started disconnecting the lights of the house in daytime and plugging the fridge in there instead. That way it runs through the day and the current doesn’t pass down the overcharge circuit, which is still running too hot for my liking.

I’ll have to do something about that.

Anyway now I’m off to bed. A nice clean me and nice clean bedding too. Luxury!

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Wednesday 29th February 2012 – I’VE GONE …

… onto summer hours!

Yes, already! It’s now light enough to be still working outside at 19:00 and so that’s what I’m doing.

And the computing activities that I need to do, well I’m doing those from 10:00 until 12:00.

So with an early night after my dithering about, I had an early morning as well, just for a change. And on went the coffee pot again because if anything it was even nicer today than yesterday.

So much so, in fact, that I ran the electric heater up here. Not because I needed to, but because it was a shame to waste the energy.

One of the things that I needed to do was to print off about 50 pages of stuff that I need to complete. And I think that I’m having printer issues. The black ink didn’t work at all and in the end I put a new cartridge in.

That worked fine for a few pages and then we were back to the missing lines and dirty heads again. I cleaned the heads, and that worked fine for a while and then we were back in the missing lines and dirty heads.

I don’t know why that is. Printers never seem to last very long with me.

This afternoon I had a pile of fun.

I’ve had a few parcels delivered these last couple of days, and one of them contained the half-a-dozen 12 volt DC hour meters similar to the 230 volt ones that I bought to run with the mains inverters.

control panel solar energy wind turbine timer overcharge meter les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe purpose of these 12-volt hour meters is to wire them into the solar panel circuits to see for how long a solar charge is received by the panels (to help in resiting them to an optimum position), to wire into the wind turbine circuits ditto, and also to wire into the overcharge circuits to see for how long surplus energy is created.

And so I spent a happy afternoon wiring in the overcharge timers and the solar timers. I’m not able to do the wind turbine timers as I need diodes to stop the backflow of energy from the batteries and they haven’t come yet.

The wind turbines are connected directly to the batteries with no charge controller so if you wire a timer in there without stopping the current flowing back from the batteries, the timers will be running 24 hours per day, feeding off the batteries.

I also did some tidying up of the panel that I made a couple of months ago – the one with the 600-watt inverter, the electric meter and the electrical sockets, that I’m using in the barn. That looks neater and tidier, and works better than before.

But I forgot to say that when I was in Brussels at Christmas, Marianne was chucking out an old hair drier – something like 400 watts or so. Anyway, I chucked it into Caliburn and brought it back here.

The reason?

Every now and again I use heat shrink insulation on bare wires and while you are supposed to shrink it using a hot-air paint stripper, I don’t have enough power to run a hot-air paint stripper.

I do have enough though to run a 400-watt hair drier and while it’s slower and not quite as effective, it does in fact work well enough.

I’m quite impressed with that.

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Monday 11th April 2011 – I made it …

… back home from the Maison Ducros-Maymat in the rue de la Poste without being hauled off to the local nick.

maison ducros maymat rue de la poste pionsat puy de dome franceIn fact it was all something of a disappointment. We didn’t need to break into this empty house because someone knew someone who knew someone else who knew someone else who knew someone who had the keys. That’s how things work here in rural France.

But to start at the very beginning, the story behind the Maison Ducros Maymat is that it’s one of these maisons de bourgeois that was built in the 1930s by one of the rich people whom, during the early 20th Century, infested Pionsat.

maison ducros maymat rue de la poste pionsat puy de dome franceThere are many of this type of house built in Pionsat during this period, built in the art-deco style with marble and all that kind of thing.

This one is considered to be special and for a very good reason – it has 12,000 square metres of ground that are laid out as parkland, orchards and a drive that connects the property upon which the new Intermarche supermarket was built earlier this year.

maison ducros maymat rue de la poste pionsat puy de dome franceIt’s been abandoned since the late 1990s and the town of Pionsat has just bought it for simply the price of the ground upon which the property sits.

The intention is, apparently, to demolish it, making a new salle de fetes, a town square, a medical centre, a new road through the back of the town, and a handful of building plots which will be sold to finance the cost of the enterprise.

maison ducros maymat rue de la poste pionsat puy de dome franceMarianne’s aim was to visit the property, make a description and an inventory, measure it all up and to photograph all of the important arty bits. I was roped in for the photography bit.

And there’s no doubt that the place is magnificent and it’s a credit to its designer and builder. But it’s huge, sprawling and unwieldy, totally unmodernised and in a really poor state.

maison ducros maymat rue de la poste pionsat puy de dome franceAnd hereby hangs a tale.

If people were to be totally honest, the only people who can really bear the responsibility for the events that have arisen must be, in my opinion, the people who have owned the building. I reckon that it’s had almost nothing spent upon it in the way or repairs, renovation and modernisation for probably 50 years and it’s this factor that has led to the lack of future for the property.

maison ducros maymat rue de la poste pionsat puy de dome franceThis is why I reckon that it’s been up for sale for so long and how come the town of Pionsat has been able to buy it for a pittance. This wealth of the early 20th Century is all very well, but there is not a soul in the whole of the region these days who has enough money to restore it to the days of its glory.

It makes you realise just how far these rural regions of France have fallen on hard times, and what the place must have been like in the belle epoch.

acoustic ballroom maison ducros maymat rue de la poste pionsat puy de dome franceBut I made an exciting discovery there.

There’s a ballroom there and we inspected it closely. And it’s been clearly designed and built by a real and proper architect who knows his job. The acoustics and sonorisation are such that it’s a totally perfect music room. It’s like being in the inside of a drum with everything vibrating in perfect pitch as you move around.

I’ve heard about places like this and so have you if you’ve read books such as those by PG Wodehouse, but this is the first time I’ve ever experienced one. It’s a shame that this is going to be demolished

In other news, I’ve now gone onto summer hours here. That means working on the computer from 10:00 until the battery goes flat, and then working on the house and garden until 19:00 instead of 18:00. Now that my web pages for the Trans-Labrador Highway are on line, I’ve started on the Newfoundland pages.

J’ai une centaine (au moins) d’images que j’ai prise en photo pendant ma visite aujourd’hui. Si vous avez envie d’en regarder, contacterez-moi via Facebook.

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Thursday 25th March 2010 – God it was hard this morning …

… but that’s enough about Percy Penguin, who doesn’t feature in these pages half as much as she ought to.

It was agony in bed last night with the muscles in my legs tightening up continually. It kept me awake for much of the night, as did the French Air Force, who decided on carrying out night-time manoeuvres … “personoeuvres please” – ed … until gone 02:30. Getting up for a gipsy’s at 06:00 was probably the most painful thing I have ever tried.

Going downstairs for breakfast was interesting too, and I was clearly in no fit state to go out working so I came back up here and did a load of outstanding work on the computer – much of which was the preparation for our radio broadcast next week. I managed a fair bit too – but that’s enough about … “you’ve already done that” – ed … and that’s got me thinking.

When I was in Brussels I used to do my computer work from 11:00 until 14:00 and then work on the apartment in the afternoon and evening. Pretty soon the clocks will go forward and we will have more daytime daylight  so bearing this in mind I could easily work from 10:00 until 12:00 up here on the computer and then work until maybe 19:00 or 19:30 outside. That would be much more useful.

By about 12:00 I felt a little better so I went outside and did another raised bed. That’s 5 in position. But the weather has changed. It was blowing a gale when I went outside, so much so that it’s lifted the cucumber and tomato seeds off the shelf in the greenhouse and spilled them all over the floor so I needed to replant them which was a pain.

Now the weather has really turned and it’s pouring with rain outside. I have mixed feelings about that. I love the hot weather but I’m getting low on water and also the plants that I have sown need the water. This is the sign if a true rural peasant, definitely a distinction from the vacancier.

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