{"id":181,"date":"2012-07-17T22:16:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-17T22:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=181"},"modified":"2017-07-05T16:03:17","modified_gmt":"2017-07-05T16:03:17","slug":"now-this-is-astonishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=181","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday 17th July 2012 – NOW THIS IS ASTONISHING!"},"content":{"rendered":"

You are probably wondering what the photo below is all about – but read on.<\/p>\n

Now to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed<\/em> … Rosemary came round today to offer me some more help in the garden and as I had no tinned potatoes for the salad I asked her to pick up a tin or two on the way round.<\/p>\n

Instead of tins, she appeared with a bag of new potatoes – and these needed cooking of course.<\/p>\n

\"potato<\/a>It was a glorious day – probably one of the best I have ever had as far as solar energy goes (and doesn’t that make a change just recently?) and it came to my mind that ages ago I had bought a 400-watt electric steamer – cooker. <\/p>\n

I’d never used it although I remembered a few weeks ago saying that I would like to give it a run out some time or other in the near future. With all of this solar energy right now it seemed that the appropriate moment had arisen.<\/p>\n

Result – 15 minutes later one perfectly-steamed pile of spuds. I’m well-impressed with this. This really is Progress with a capital P.
<\/p>\n

I remember one of my best friends (an ex-best friend now as it happens) taking the p155 out of me behind my back with all of his friends on the Land Rover forum about my plans to try a microwave oven here. <\/p>\n

They spent a considerable amount of time calling me a few choice names and so on. <\/p>\n

And while an electric steam-cooker is hardly a microwave, it’s still up there with the coffee machine and the electric fire that we have had running during the winter<\/a> as signs that home comforts are perfectly achievable with my set-up. <\/p>\n

As you also know, I’m running a 12-volt TV-cum-video player up here as well.<\/p>\n

Yes, I absolutely hate being surrounded by negativity – it drags me right downhill. One of the (many) reasons why I left the UK.<\/p>\n

Rosemary and I spent a few hours weeding and I’ve never seen the garden looking as good as this, that’s for sure. We even started to pull up the new spuds but that was a waste of effort – seems like my crop has disappeared. <\/p>\n

\"rebuilding<\/a>After Rosemary left, I carried on with the wall of the lean-to. You can tell how much I did by looking at where the mortar is still grey and not white. <\/p>\n

I’ve accomplished quite a lot there but there’s still plenty to go and I’m wondering if I’ll have enough stones. If not, I’ll have to go on the scavenge and see what I can find.<\/p>\n

But the wall underneath is in a bad way – there are three large cracks running down it. Seeing this made me glad that when I made a brief start in repairing it all back 10 years ago I had made that strip of reinforced concrete underneath where the breeze blocks are. <\/p>\n

That strip of concrete is embedding the horizontal beams of the floor and thus ties all of the thing together. But once the new bit is finished I can repoint all of the cracks.
<\/p>\n

I’ve also been attacking the hole that I’m trying to drill out, what with all of this electricity we had today, and I’ve grounded out with the circular drill bit. <\/p>\n

Of course, I lent out my other extension to Rob, didn’t I<\/p>\n

We finished the day with the hottest solar shower I have had for a long time, and it was gorgeous.<\/p>\n

But as for starting the day – how about 06:35 for breakfast? When has that ever happened before?<\/p>\n

-2<\/span><\/a><\/div> <\/div>
<\/div><\/div>
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You are probably wondering what the photo below is all about – but read on. Now to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … Rosemary came round today to offer me some more help in the garden and as I had no tinned potatoes for the salad I asked her to pick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4507,1616,258,1670],"tags":[2655,7309,2482,5466,2560,5565,390,7474,5315,423,5366,7746,2342,2316,403,1063,1147,288,5328,9063,782,746],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eric-hall-2","category-france","category-les-guis","category-rosemary-2","tag-coffee-percolator","tag-collapsed-lean-to","tag-early-start","tag-electric-heating","tag-eric-hall","tag-france","tag-gardening","tag-holesaw","tag-land-rover","tag-lean-to","tag-les-guis","tag-microwave","tag-new-potatoes","tag-paul_h","tag-potatoes","tag-raised-beds","tag-rob_julie-2","tag-rosemary","tag-solar-shower","tag-steam-cooker","tag-stone-wall","tag-weeding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8782,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions\/8782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}