Tag Archives: tool lorry

Friday 2nd November 2012 – I KNEW THAT …

… it was a mistake to have that second mug of coffee.

05:30 and I was still going round and round in my little room without the slightest thought about sleep.

When I did eventually drop off (simply lying down on the sofa), having switched off all of the alarms, it was all of 09:56 when I woke up – probably less than 4 hours sleep.

After something of a hurried breakfast I went off to Pionsat.

puy de dome franceThe tool lorry was there and I was bent on buying a new toy – and I bet that you are wondering exactly what it is

All cars made since 2002 (and many earlier ones, my 1988 Senator for example) are in principle fitted with an on-board computer, an ECU (Electronic Control Unit).

This analyses and stores all of the data about the running of the car, and keeps a list of faults on a computer chip.

Garages have machines that plug into the ECU (something with a connector like a SCART socket) which enables them to read the ECU and note any problem from which the vehicle might be suffering (a series of “fault codes”).

There’s a computer program that can decipher the fault codes and translate them into plain English.

In the USA all of this is in the Public Domain but in the UK, certainly as recently as 5 years ago, and maybe still today for all I know, this was all jealously guarded.

I’ve no idea what the situation might be in France.

Anyway, to cut a long story short – “hooray” … ed –  the tool lorry was selling hand-held ECU readers and the associated computer program, for just €69.

That kind of thing is worth its weight in gold, as you can imagine. And now there’s one here.

This afternoon, with the pouring rain, I carried on with the shelving. One of the side rails is now finished, and looking quite impressive too, rather an upmarket version of Richard Hauptmann’s ladder.

The other one is cut, worked and polished and will be assembled in the next rainy spell.

All that will remain then will be to cut the shelving to size and to varnish it all.

With the temperature up here being just 13°C that was the signal to light the fire again. And I cooked rice and another helping of my red pepper-and-lentil curry in the oven.

Beautiful it was too.

So now I’m off to bed, early for a change. I have a full weekend ahead of me and I need to be on form.

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Friday 3rd February 2012 – SO HOW DID THIS 06:00 START GO THIS MORNING?

Surprisingly enough, when the alarm went off at 06:00 I was already wide awake. Well, maybe not bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but I was there.

And what was nice about it was that it was 14.9°C in the room here, and when I riddled the ashes, there was still a glimmer of red heat in there.

So when the guy telephoned at 06:30 to say that he was on his way, I strode out of my room personfully and was almost knocked flat on my back. It wasn’t the -10°C in the verandah that did it but the -15.8°C outside.

The second-lowest temperature ever recorded here.

We inched our way into Montlucon and I went to sit in a cafe until 08:00 when the garage opened and I could reclaim Caliburn, which cost me an arm and a leg to do so;

bUt I’ll tell you what – for the first time ever, there are some real brakes on Caliburn and he stops just like he ought to do. He also handles so much better as well.

And that was only the beginning of the expenditure. After that, it was off to Lapeyre, from where I bought the house windows.

They told me last time I was there that they were discontinuing that particular product line in February and so if I wanted the matching door I needed to order it before then.

And so I did – a nice fully-glazed front door, one large panel to match the windows. Cheapest there is, as it happens but why I wanted it is that it lets in the most light.

Back in Pionsat I bought a few bits and pieces off the tool lorry at the market and then went round to Marianne’s for a coffee and a chinwag.

After that I came home and did some work. There’s a pile more timber gone into the bedroom ceiling and I’ve also carried on drilling away at the wall in the lean-to. But that’s hard work as the drill is really heavy and I’m up against some granite right now.

I also experimented with ways of unfreezing the water, something that I’ll need to be thinking of soon. One way I’m going to try is to wrap an old Volvo heated seat pad around the tap and connect it to the excess charge circuit – see what that does.

Tonight I had a gorgeous tea – a huge plate of chips and baked beans.

It’s so cold that I’ve bought a large bag of oven chips, put it in a plastic container and buried it in a snowdrift. I brought a pile of them up here and cooked them in the oven bit of my stove,

I cooked the pan of beans in there as well. It took a while but it was well worth waiting for, and i’ll be having oven chips again.

But washing up after was something else. Chopping board stuck to the table, tea towel stuck to the oven, everything else stuck to something else. I’ve got the water and the fruit and veg up here with me. Frozen lettuce goes not taste very nice, especially with frozen cucumber

I shall have to do something about this on a long-term footing.

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