Time Off

It's not all work,work, work over here. As the 3 day week has been wearing us out a bit, we have had a few days out lately.

Last month, we had a day out at the races, in Limoges, with our friends Jane and Pete. The course is quite small, with one sand, and it only costs 6 Euros to get in. We followed the French, and stood in the middle of the course, where there was a temporary bar, a food tent and the PMU bookmakers hut. A lot of people had their dogs with them, something you are not allowed to do in the UK, so Jane and Pete could have brought Archie their Border terrier, which would have provided entertainment between races, as he picked a fight with the biggest French dog he could find.

The racing was a mixture of flat racing and trotting ( with the jockey sitting on a buggy). The races all started late, in the French style, and you could tell when each race was getting ready to start when the stewards got on their cherry picker, and were sent skywards.

It took a while to work out the betting, as we thought that you could only do forecasts, but we found that you could also do wins and places as well. I actually had 3 winners in the end, so I was up on the day, even allowing for beer money and sausage and chips.

We left with 3 races still to go, as by this stage the races were 30 minutes late, so at that rate the meeting wouldn't finish until about 9 o'clock at night. They only have two meetings a year at Limoges, but we will definitely go back again.

We've also been to the Cinema for the first time in ages. We went up to Poitiers, where one of the Cinemas was showing the new Spiderman in English (Version Originale) . Strangely, we were the only English people there, but maybe some people prefer to hear the proper voices, rather than the same voice being dubbed over. It's an hour and a half each way to Poitiers, so it's another good excuse for a day off.

A few weeks later friends John and Sue were over with their kids for half term, and we ended up having a couple of late nights, with the girls keeping us up, playing cards all night, so we ended up having days of the next day to recover.

This week was Tina's birthday, so on Thursday we drove down to Bordeaux to watch the latest Pirates of the Caribbean. Its 2 and a bit hours each way to Bordeaux from our house, so it was yet another day off.

We parked up in the centre of town, as it happens quite close to La Tupina. This is a restaurant that was featured on Rick Steins French Oddessy, and has been voted one of the top 50 restaurants in the world . We went along for a look, and it although it was a bit smart and intimidating on the outside, we gave it a go.

It was excellent. We had the menu du jour, which was a cheese salad starter. followed by beef carpacio as a main course, and coffee and petit four to finish, all for 16 euros a head ( Just over a tenner) . The food is all cooked on an open fire, which you pass as you walk in, and Rick Stein waxed lyrical about the chips, which are cooked above the fire, in a bowl of duck fat. Yum. My brother went to Padstow last year, and it turns out that take away fish and chips from Rick Steins chippy cost about the same as our sit down meal in La Tupina. Go figure.

Check out the web link, as it has a good tour, and some menus. They have a 3 course menus for 33 euros, which includes 3 glasses of wine. We will be up for that next time we are in town.

http://www.latupina.com/

We were a bit late getting to the cinema after our unplanned lunch and missed the start of the film, but luckily we knew a bit about the plot (Johnny Depp is a pirate etc etc ) so it didn't matter to much.

The next day, Tina's birthday, we went to Limoges to her some presents. Limoges was packed out, as there was some sort of parade on. It took ages to find a parking space, then our favorite restaurant was all reserved. We ended up in the restaurant next door, which was nice, but not in the same class as the one next door. It did though, serve up comedy deserts in a gallon brandy glass, with a ladle. Luckily they don't make you eat it all, as a gallon of chocolate mouse could probably kill you.

Shopping and birthday are over now, so it's back to the grindstone.

Henri the Building Inspector

Henri, our French kitten has always had a penchant for hide and seek, mostly hiding, but lately he has been taking this to a new level.

He likes to climb trees, and had found a way to get into the top of the pump house by climbing up on a laburnum, then onto the pump house roof, and finally into the attic through a hole in the roof where some tiles had slipped. This reminded me that I needed to fix the roof, which I duly did, much to Henri's disgust.

That stopped him for a while, but he still kept disappearing. Then one day Tina spotted him, climbing up the tree, then shuffling out on two tiny branches ( two paws on each branch) till he was opposite an open attic window, and finally leaping into the open window. On the way out it is even scarier, as he leaps into space, grabs one of the branches and wraps himself around it like a monkey. It's only 10 foot off the ground, but is still a bit scary.

Luckily, he has now found a safer alternative, and has found a way of climbing up the back wall of the study, and climbing in to the attic space there. He does pop his head out occasionally, only to drop down with a loud thud on the ceiling below.

Niemi is not far behind him in the explorer stakes, but being more lady-like, she waits until our bedroom window is open and then climbs out onto the roof from there.

She has also taken to exploring Thiery's field, again taking the lazy option of squeezing through the mesh on the fence, like it was a cat flap.

Henry has also started to dig around the lawn, but for mole crickets, rather than proper moles. The moles have been quiet for a couple of days now.

My friend John has had a bad reaction in his own garden when he put a couple of smoke bombs down. It seemed to make the moles angry, and dig up everywhere at once. This could explain why they have been quiet in our garden, as Charlie may not yet have the resources to fight on two fronts at once. However it may just be a coincidence, as Johns house is half an hour away, so it may not be the same moles.

On the house front, all of the plasterboard is up in the back room, and I have started jointing up the walls and ceiling, while Tina has started pointing the walls.

The pointing seems to bring out the stonework really well. The colour was a bit strange at first, as it looked a lot darker than we imagined, but it tones down nicely when it eventually dries out.

HERE'S MOLEY

The little man in black is back!






We have had a few months with no incursions from our furry friends, but now he is well and truly back. I think he took advantage of the fact that I was distracted by the play offs to move in.






Since we have been over here permanently, I have kept an eye on any mole activity, clearing the hills away as soon as they appear, so that we can see where the mole is active. I have tried a number of different ways to get rid of him, mole traps, mole replant, smoke bombs and even bakers yeast ( expands in the moles stomach and ..... yuch!) but to no avail.

Finally I bought some Canadian poison. I'm not sure why the Canadians are such expert mole poisoners, I would have thought they have enough problems with bears, but there you go.

Applying the poison is a bit grizzly. You have to dig up worms from your garden. Then you have to cut both ends off of the worms, put all the bits in a jar with the poison, and shake it all around till the worms have a good coating. Now you have to try to find the mole runs, as this is more effective than sticking the poisoned worms under a mole hill. Drop some worms into the mole run, and hope for the best.

As you can see, there is a lot of bad karma in the whole poisoning process. Some much so, that I had to watch a couple of episodes of 'My Name Is Earl' to redress my karmic balance.

Check out the link below, to see what the hell I am on about.

http://www.nbc.com/My_Name_Is_Earl/about.shtml

The poison did the job, and we had a few months with no moles at all, until I foolishly boasted to my mate Pete that the moles had all gone. The very next day Moley was back.

I have tried to poison him again, this time using some shop bought worms, from Psycho Bunnies hunting and fishing emporium, but with no results. It seems that Moley likes his worms free range, none of this factory farming for him!

I HAD A WHEELBARROW, THE WHEEL FELL OFF ..

It is a bank holiday over here today, so we have downed tools, as we can't afford to pay ourselves double time, and day in lieu.

I have been turning my hand to things mechanical lately, starting with the wheelbarrow. When we were building up the vegetable patch, it ran over a nail and got a puncture. I managed to get the wheel off, and then got the tube out, using a crowbar as a tyre lever, and found the hole OK.

I managed to patch it using a boat repair kit that we had left over from repairing our old paddling pool. Then I tested it again, and found another smaller puncture close to the first. I patched this one as well and the next day, after the patches had dried, the wheelbarrow was up and running again.

A few days later, I noticed that the tyre had gone down again. It must have had a slow puncture, so I grabbed my crow bar, and levered the tube out again. Sure enough, one of the patches was not quite suck down at the sides. I re-glued it and the next morning put it back on the wheel and tried to blow it up. Nothing doing, so I levered the tyre off yet again, and retested the the tube once more. There were two more holes this time. I must have torn the tube with the end on the crowbar when I was levering the tyre back on.

Two more patches ( the ratio of tube to patch is about 50-50 now) and 24 hours later, the tube was finally OK and the wheel is back on.

I'm getting quite fast at getting the wheel on and off now. If the Renault F1 team need someone to look after their wheelbarrow, I could be their man!

With the wheelbarrow finally fixed, I turned my attention back to mowing. I opened up the shed, turned 'Hank Hill' the mower on and tried to reverse it out of the shed. No movement. For some reason, the drive belt had slipped off of a pulley. Five minutes off groping around later, the belt was back on I was ready to go.

I did the front patch quickly, but then I had to go and get some more petrol, as the Jerry can was empty. Twenty minutes later, I had refueled, and I started on the main patch. I had gone barely 50 yards when the blades stopped going round. I stopped it straight away and had a look under the hood. A large bolt that acts a spindle for one of the blade-drive pulleys had decided to give up the ghost after eight years, and it had sheered off.

Although I bought the mower in France, it is an American make ( Murray) and so all of it's bolts are imperial ( 5/8 th 's etc) . This makes it hard to get spares, as everything over here is metric, and 5/8th of an inch is between 8 and 9 mm. So, I took the broken bolt off to Chabanais, were I last got the mower repaired, and waited in line, as they were very busy. After a while, they took the bolt, but after much searching, they came back with a slightly bigger bolt, asked me to try it, but didn't charge me for it.

I drove back home and tried the bolt. but it was too big to go in the centre of the pulley. I then drove of, in a different direction to Chasseneiul, to the shop that sold me the mower years ago.

I explained to the mower counter that it was an American mower, and that the bolt was not metric, but was imperial ( as best as I could ) but they could not help me, so the sent me across the road to a different part of the shop. The guy there got out his gauge, measured it up and said that he didn't have anything, as it was not a metric bolt. I then went through the whole story of the mower being American, and the fact that I had bought it there in the first place. He then phoned up the mower counter and explained it to the once again. Back across the road, they did have one the right width, but it was longer. Knowing from past experience how long it takes to order anything. I took a chance.

Back home, I got the pulley back together and threaded it up, The long bolt fitted with a few millimetres to spare. Drama over.

It only took me an hour and a half to mow the hole garden, as dad had done such a good job on it when he was over, but it took an extra 3 hours getting petrol, fixing belts, getting bolts and making repairs.

So remember, a tractor mower is NOT A TOY! ( It is really) .

Nature Watch

The weather has been good lately, up to the last few days ( Bank Holidays mean rain, in any country) , so we have been out in the garden a bit more.

My parents were over for a week, and Dad is on a personal mission to turn an acre of French woodland into a suburban English garden, so work on the interior ground to a halt for a week.

We all built up a raised bed for our vegetable patch, but it was hard work filling it in. It looked much easier in "The Great Escape", when all you had to do was get a load of middle aged, middle class Englishmen called Roger to empty the contents of their trouser legs.

It is ready for planting now, although it may look a bit small to some, it is fine be me as I don't eat much veg anyway. We had thought about getting some chickens as well, but I don't think I would be able to slaughter one, unless it was called Harry, or Thatcher.

Henry, our kitten, has had his bits removed, and not before time, as he got chased by something big the week before ( cat/sheep/bear ? ) and he flew in the cat flap, spraying a lovely 'eau de Tom-Cat' as he went.

He seems OK after his op, as you can see above, he is enjoying the benefits of clean laundry.

Things are starting to blossom in the garden. We have a lot of grapes, some cherries and even some olives on Tina's potted tree ( none on me big tree in the garden) . We think that the walnut crop will be bad this year though, as the tree got a bit scorched when we did our latest bonfire.

The bonfire was a bit huge, what with the dead conifers that Tina had chopped down, and dad's hedge work. It was so tall that I thought I saw Edward Woodward on top when it went up.

Our summer visitors, the Hoo-poes are back. They nest every year in the back of the study, but this year some Starlings had got there first. However, they seem to have found somewhere else close by, close enough so they can wake us up every morning with their extra loud 'hoo-poe' bird call.

DIRTY LEEDS

Things were getting very twitchy in the Fuhrer Bunker this weekend, listening to 'Dirty' Leeds hold out with 10 men for 85 minutes, until BWP found the onion bag. Now Saints still have an outside chance of going up and now Leeds look odds on for the drop. I try not to put football references in the blog, but I just can't stand Leeds, ever since the 70's and outraged my brother by cheering on Munich to win the European cup against them!

On the building front, things are starting to take shape, and I got to use a new power tool! When the windows were replaced, a couple of tiles had to be removed by the front door, so I finally got to use my new electric tile saw. It's a small table saw, with a disk cutter and a water tray to cool it down. It can even be set at an angle for mitre cuts. When I think of the hours I've spent doing this in the past with a handsaw. This did two tiles in two minutes.

Once I'd finished playing with my new toy, it was back to the plasterboard, finishing off the back wall. This required lots and lots of cutting, to get round the roof joists, and a lot of battening out at the top of the walls, as there was a deep recess where the stonework finished. Tina came up with a top idea for this, to use the steel rails that you would use to make a partition wall, instead of wood, and this was a lot quicker than trying to put wood up there.

The wall is now boarded up from end to end, cutting it out as much as possible around the stone features on the windows, and the old beam on top of the french windows ( or doors as they are known over here. I have even done a little bit of stone masonry, cutting and fitting some limestone on the ends of the window sill to fill in a gap.

It's not easy trying to keep some of the original features, but hopefully we will be able to mix the new insulated walls with some of the old , to retain a bit of character.

I've also done a succesful continuity test on the earth for the sockets in this room, using my training at last.

Sandblast-it!

We had a delivery from E-Bay this week, our long awaited Sandblaster. It is a small pistol with a plastic tank that you put the sand in. You then have to put it in the end of an air-compressor, to push the sand out. That's where the fun started.

Not knowing a lot about compressors, we had a look on-line and asked around to try and see what we needed. The box with the compressor said it needed 90-115 PSI (pounds per square inch) and 3 horsepower, but the French people we spoke to spoke a lot about the number of litres of air that it put through each hour and that it must have a 100 litre tank.

We made up our mind that a 200 Euro 3CV compressor in Castorama would be OK for us, although it only had a 50 litre tank. However , when we got there they had an offer on a 2CV compressor (that could produce the right pressure) that was on offer for 84 Euros, so we to a chance, and bought the bargain. We also picked up some safety gear, a face mask and a respirator, along with a connecting hose, we picked up a sack of sand and we thought that we were ready to go.

When we got home, I put the compressor together, but couldn't work out where to connect the hose. I went to the local builders merchants with the instructions to get some help. I managed to get an adaptor for the end of the hose, but not before getting the piss ripped out of me by the lad in the shop, for buying a crappy castorama compressor in the first place.

Armed with the new adaptor, I put on my safety gear and started work. It started of OK, and cleaned up some of the stones, but soon seemed to struggle. As it was getting dark, we decided to stop, and try again in daylight.

The next morning, I had another go and it soon became clear that the bloke in the builders merchant was right, the compressor wasn't up to the job. I rang up castorama to see if I we could swap the compressor for a bigger one, even though I had tested it. They said yes, so I took it apart, cleaned it up, put it back in it's box, and headed off back to Limoges.

This time, I took the advice of the the bloke in the shop who pointed out that the only compressor that was up to it was 500 Euros, way out of our price range. Armed with a refund, I was now off to the local hire shop, to try one out for the day.

At the hire shop, the owner showed me how to operate the compressor and helped me load it into the car. When I was writing out the deposit cheque, I asked the owner the date. 'Vendredi 13eme, le meme en Angleterre ? ' . I told him that it was the same in England. I also thought that maybe it was not the best day to use some industrial kit for the first time.

So, I got the compressor home, connected it all up, and turned it on. After two seconds it stopped. I checked the fuses, and found that it had blown a 10 amp one. Next I connected it up to a socket on a 16 Amp fuse, but it wouldn't go. I checked the socket and extension lead out. Everything was OK bar the compressor so , in desperation I phoned the shop. The owner said that he would come out and have a look, and luckily, I didn't get him lost with my French directions.

He played around with it for five minutes, but it did nothing. He had a look at the blurb which he had brought with him, but it held no clues. All the time, I'm thinking 'Friday 13th'. Finally, he fiddled around with the machine, and found a tiny black button, on a black background, which turned out to be the reset button. Success!

Sand came out for a while, but then stopped. We had some more fun and games, while he drained the water that had built up in the bottom of the tank, but when he left, it all seemed to work OK. He had a look at the area that I wanted to clean that day, wished me 'bon courage' and left me to it.

The sand flow was a bit intermittent, but it did work most of the time, once I had blown any remaining air out of the compressor tank, but it the effect wasn't quite as good as we had hoped.

We had hoped it would be like a pressure washer, cleaning the moss of of a patio, but it proved a lot harder to clean the stones, as you had to hold the pistol a few inches away from the stones. It didn't come up like Salisbury Cathedral, but it did clean out all of the joints around the stones, so we are almost ready to start re-pointing.

As for next time, a proper sized sandblaster costs £1,500 and then needs a compressor the size of the ones that BT uses to did up roads, so we will see.

THE VAN FROM HELL

It's been a busy week. We started with a trip to a new builders merchants on Monday, as they had a lot of special offers on, and we've ordered the slabs for the poolside, as they were half price. It will be a few months before I can use them, as the pool isn't due until June, but they were a bargain. It just means the garden will even look more like a building site for a while.





In the barn, we needed some more plasterboard, so it was time to borrow the scary van again from the local 3MMM.









It doesn't look that big in the picture, but to me it feels like driving a bus. The last time I hired it, I nearly took out half the warehouse, trying to corner. The gearbox seems upside down, (although they have now got a sticker on the dashboard with where the gears are, rather than it being scrawled in marker pen) and the gear lever is now stuck on with gaffer tape. It scares the hell out of me, driving it, but it only costs 9 Euros to hire, so needs must.

Before we could start hanging the boards, we had to bind the walls to give the boards something to grip. In England, you would water down some PVA and paint the walls with it. Over here you use a fixateur which is like PVA, but two or three times more expensive. Might be a business opportunity there, setting up a PVA website?

Hanging the boards has proved a lot more difficult than on the breeze block walls. Even though we had bound the walls with the fixateur, the first piece of plasterboard had trouble sticking to the mortar on the walls, and added to that the stone walls are very uneven. I had to take the first piece down again, and add a lot more plaster dabs to the wall before it would stick. I have also had to cut round the window, as it had some nice stonework that we wanted to keep, and cut round the roofing joists at the top as well. On top of that, we could barely get a sheet up the scaffold between us, so we had to take it down and cut it in half before I could hang it, as there was no way that I would have been able to dangle over the edge of the scaffold with it.

You can probably see in the picture that the joints are a bit uneven, due to the wall behind them being all over the place, so we think that we will have to use my agricultural skimming to finish the wall off, rather than dry lining it, but that is probably more in keeping with the rest of the room anyway.

We have also fitted six replacement windows as well. An impressive weeks work you might say. Not really though. It was Monseur Chatillon. All we did was make him cups of chocolate chaud as he doesn't drink coffee or alcohol (not typically French) .

The doors look good, but now we have to wait for him to replace the shutters, as they look crap by comparison.

March Madness

I borrowed the title from the Saints web-site. They used it to publicise the new Season Ticket offer. Unfortunately it has been proven to be true in more senses, as Saints have lost their Chairman, lost the plot on the pitch (blowing their promotion chances) and erected a statue of Jimmy Crankie instead of Ted Bates ( I always thought that Strachan was the Crankie look-a-like). Still it could be worse, I could be an England fan as well (DOH!) .



On the home front, we have made more progress, working round interruptions for visitors. My brother was the latest. He kindly treated me to a round of golf. We both went round in about 150, but he managed to get a par on the 18th (the b#st#rd) which is the only hole I've ever managed a par on. 150 is a lot, but the course was very wet and so my scuff shots didn't trundle as far as normal.

In the garden, the rockery is finished and has the first lot of plants in. We used some of the rubble left over from the roofing as a base, and then built it up with rocks that came from the new window openings. It was hard work, and in hindsight, it would have been easier to pile the rocks on top of the rubble heap and call that the rockery, but I think it was worth it.











Tina has now finished pulling out the brambles in all the hedges, ready for them to start growing again, and we have another heap ready to burn. Having a large garden is very nice, but it is a hell of a lot of work. Hopefully, now that we are here full time, it might be a bit easier to keep up with it.





In the house, I have got the third lot of plasterboard on the ceiling at the back, and Tina has scrubbed down the outside facing walls, ready for plaster boarding.













It's getting to the stage now where we need to sandblast the walls before we can do anything else. We got a quote over the phone from someone who wanted 700 Euros a day ( I don't think Matt Le Tiss was on that much) so now we have bought a small sandblaster on E-Bay for £50.00. Hopefully it will work OK, and if so we can undercut the other guy and still make a mint!

We're now on the look out for a diving suit to act as safety gear, as the sand gets everywhere.


a bientot

Productivity

I saw somewhere that the French have the highest productivity in Western Europe at the moment, which goes against the shoulder shrugging stereotypes. Perhaps it is because they haven't outsourced all their manufacturing to India and China, rather than the UK model of keeping all the management and getting rid of anyone who actually produces anything!

If the stats are true, then someone in France must be working very hard, 'cause we haven't done much for the past few weeks, as we have had an attack of visitors, so we were forced to down tools for a while.

One visitor, Phil, did help me start putting an extractor fan in the bathroom, and Tina's Mum did help out with planting the seeds for our vegetable patch, but otherwise that was it for a fortnight.

The fan is now in and working, but it took a full day to install it and wire up, which is a bit scary for when it comes to doing estimates for other people. I have seen figures that you should allow up to one day to install a new socket, but I had thought that that was allowing for cups of tea, reading the Sun and testing the new socket by plugging in a tele and watching the racing ( not me of course, I am a professional).

Motivation has never been my strong point, at the Banque de Cheval Noir where I used to work, they relied on threats of reprisals as a motivational tool.





However this week the weather has been good , so we have been hard at it in the garden ( ooh er ! ) . I have been out on Hank Hill, the mower, Tina has been stripping loads of brambles out of the hedge and I have been stripping the ivy of the dutch barn. The hedge is so bare now that you can see for miles and we've got a huge bonfire ready to go.




It's supposed to turn cold next week, so it'll be back to some proper building work.