Petrol and Diesel

The last few weeks has been a time of disruption in France; as the trade unions and the government battle about the retirement age.

Currently it is 60 and the government is proposing to increase this to 62 if you have 42 years of payments into a retirement fun.  This has not gone down very well with the majority of the population (70% according to the polling organisations).  The trade unions have organised day long demonstrations twice a week against this measure and others have taken action to block the refineries and the fuel depots.  The result has been petrol stations closed for want of a few litres of diesel or petrol or long lines of cars waiting to fill up at those lucky enough to have fuel.  And just to make things a little worse the railway workers have been on strike only providing the minimum of services, as prescribed by law.

Any way last week the government took the initiative and obtained the necessary votes to put the law into force. Needless to say the opposition was not happy but the conjuncture of the law being passed and the school holidays has rather defused the situation and the next few weeks should be a bit calmer and easier to use the car.

It has also exposed an interesting side battle, that of the figures.  Each time there is a demonstration two sets of figures for the number of demonstrators are published.  One from the trade unions and the other from the police.  Normally the police figure is slightly less than one third of the trade union figure.  Interestingly they both use the same system for counting, which is to estimate how many people there are in a row passing the counting point and then how many rows have passed.

Another, typical French action has been the “casseurs”.  These are groups of usually young people how attach themselves to a demonstration.  They have no interest in the topic of the demonstration, but are there to engage in a battle with the police and if possible indulge in a little pillaging of shops, setting cars on fire or just destroying public property.  This time the worse outbreak was in Lyon and involved over one hundred casseurs.

 

 

How to plant bulbs

Planting bulbs, but not the normal method
When you have 9000 bulbs to plant and the ground  is rock hard then the traditional use of a bulb planting trowel really does not work.  So other approaches have to be considered.  In my case it was the digger.

Digger in action

The advantage is that, if you scrape the surface and only take off a few centimetres at a time it turns the soil into a fine powder which is suitable for putting back on top of the planted bulbs. You get a better idea by going to the link and playing the slideshow (set to one second), unfortunately I am unable to insert the flash sequence here.
When the hole has been dug to a depth of 12cm then the bulbs are placed at the required distances and the covered over with the earth.  The later has to be done by hand so there is still a considerable amount of hard work – but tant-pis as the locals would say.

The bulbs are planted with the smallest next to the drive,  gradually progressing to the larger daffodils.

This should mean that the first flowering will be the daffodils in February to March with the tulips lasting to the end of May and the Ranunculus and De caen anemones filling out the intervening months.  Hopefully there will be some pictures next year.

The planting order was

• Ranunculus nearest the drive
• Anenome de caen next
• Tulip hageri
• Tulip linifolia
• Tulip turkestanica
• Daffodils

More work round the house
A couple of weeks ago I related the planting of the grass seed on the bank to the house.  And here it is – just visible if look closely.

The main problem has been again lack of rain so the seed is having difficulty in germinating and if it is not quick then it will be paralysed by the cold.  We had the first frost this morning at -0.9 deg C.

The main work is the continuing work of creating the path around the house with 20 -40 mm gravel.  Here it is arriving in my big wheel barrow

before being transferred to the little one and then tipped into position.
Hopefully this will result in an all weather path all round the house and one that is permeable.

Technically – I have put a geotextile under the gravel to stop the gravel mixing with the soil and preventing some of the weeds pushing their way upwards.

Some other bits and pieces

A couple of photos taken that I particularly liked.

The first is our meagre display of pumpkins.  They are reasonably large considering that they have never been watered.

The second is of a holly oak (Quercus ilex) that has survived the dry summer.

 

Lets chose which laws we will obey

Shopping

You will have seen from this site that I do a fair amount of DIY.  As a result I buy things from DIY shops. The local shops have a policy of not providing refunds when things are returned even if the reason for the return was that one of their staff advised you wrongly.  The French law is clear on the matter you have seven days to return an item and get your money back provided you have proof of purchase.

I was putting up a mast to mount the anemometer high on the roof, more on this later.  The one I bought would not fit on the existing mast and there was no alternative, so I asked for a refund so that I could buy it elsewhere.  This was duly refused so I suggested that as they chose which laws would apply then I would do the same.  I would take some things from their shop and pay them in a few days after I had tried them out. This was obviously done with a smile.  The point was made and I got the refund.

The main shop that I use for DIY materials does not apply this type of rule but they are 60 kms away.

Grants and things

Previously in this blog I have referred to making application for grants for the house and the solar panels. In France you can claim a credit against tax for installing solar panels of 50% of the material costs.  In the region of Poitou-Charentes there are additional grants for solar panels and high performance houses.

We applied for every thing, the credit against the tax arrived as soon as the calculations were done by the tax people and made a nice surprise when we received the tax bill.  The grants from the region took a long time to come and we had to jump through several hoops, but eventually they arrived last week, so they were well celebrated.

Schwoerer

Still no news on when they will come to mend the shutters, but this is not yet too pressing. Though the colder weather is coming and having a shutter that does not close will not do much for the energy efficiency of the house.

Schwoerer sell houses in several countries but I do not think they have got their head round the fact that not everyone understands German or lives in Germany.  Today we received a letter and questionnaire all in German and a prepaid envelope restrict to Germany.  Thank fully Google translate provides a rough understanding of other languages though I did have to type in the letter myself to get the translation. Anyway it turns out to be a questionnaire about energy consumption.  As you will know I am rather keen on monitoring this so did eventually manage to cobble together a reply.

Now another little point to mention, is that my internet service provide is called FREE, and as well as providing broad band internet at 18Mbs/sec they also provide free telephone calls to anywhere in the world and the ability to send faxes for free and receive them.  So I was able to use this to get the reply back to Schwoerer without feeling that I had been discriminated against with the prepaid envelope.

Stage two of putting up masts and things
The last blog showed the tower being used with a ladder.  This time it is being used on its own as I needed to get to the roof once again.  This time was to mount an anemometer so that I can accurately measure wind speed.  This means ensuring that it is above the roof ridge.

Now I am not keen on heights, in fact I would go so far as to say that I am scared to death. Sothe first stage was to get another friend to help me put up the tower, especially the last scary bit when it is at its maximum height.  So thanks Stephen.

Once that was done all I had to do was to climb the nine metres to the top and put in place an additional mast, with anemometer on top and then align it due south.  Remount the aerial and attach the wire from the top of the house to the temperature gauge under the eaves.

Eventually all was completed and the rain gauge installed as well.  The weather station, by the way, is a La Crosse WS-2355.  Chosen because it was cheap compared with many of the others but it still has data capture capabilities and the data can be transferred to a computer.  It comes with a program called heavy weather which looks like a modified DOS program from the early 1990′s.  however it does everything that I needed it to do and is now happily recording, temperatures, pressure, wind and rain every hour.

I found another program called Cumulus from a company called SandaySoft based in the Orkney Isles north of Scotland. This was a really good program but it requires you to have the computer on all the time which in a energy sensitive household is a non-starter.

Of Pensions, workers and governments

At present France is going through one  of its occasional upheavals as large numbers of people go out on the street twice a week to protest against a plan to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62.  As part of this “action” various worker such as refinery and railway worker have decided to block the petrol storage depots and refineries, resulting in many petrol stations closing as they run out of fuel.  As well as inconveniencing as many people as possible this has also prevented people getting to the demonstrations as they have no fuel for their cars and of course the trains are severely reduced in number as the railway workers are on continuing strike action.

There is one thing living here is always interesting.

 

Fiddler on the roof and other things

One of the big advantages of being retired is the pleasure of having a coffee by the windows looking out over our garden.  I have shown the garden before so here a picture of the coffee.  The chair behind is protected with a throw so that I can sit there without changing out of work clothes.

Again thinking of close ups my wife took these with her new camera.

For the techies it is a Panasonic Lumix TZ8 and it seems absolutely fantastic, in terms of picture quality and ease of use .

On the left are the colourful flowers in the new bed that we created earlier in the year.  And on the right is “froggy protector” sitting on the entrance to the house.  He has the heavy responsibility of discouraging any unwelcome visitors but saying a big hello to those who will give us pleasure.  Not sure how he does it, but we seem only to have nice people visiting us.

The roof bit

Last year when the chimney top blew off the aerial also decided to take a turn and has not worked since as the nearest transmitter in the direction it is pointed is probably a few hundred kilometres away.  So today it was decided that drastic action needed to be taken to change its direction.

The first thing is to get on the roof and as I am a wimp I was not going to climb up the tiles as the builders did, neither was I going to remove tiles and climb up the battens, so long suffering friends were called.  I knew that they had a tower so, on, bended knees I asked if I could borrow it.  If the answer had been other than yes then I would not have been writing this bit.

With my long suffering friend we had to get he roof ladder into place once we had got the tower into place. This proved difficult as the aerial was close to the vent pipe and because of the direction of the aerial it could not be placed in the ideal place.

After acrobatics of the first attempt, we worked closely together to move it up to the ridge, but still not too successful.

Eventual by mounting the roof we eventually got it into place.

Here you can see it being turned over after it had been pushed to the top on its wheels.

By the way I still had to remove a few tiles to get high enough, because the ladder was too short.

Looking at  the aerial and trying to get at the screws holding it in place proved rather difficult.

Eventually it was loosened and the real work started.  Thanks to wireless phones I was able to move it whilst my wife watched the television to report on any changes in picture quality.

Eventually we settled on this as the direction to point even though the picture is still not right.

So was it a wasted time, probably but as I started off this session, that is one of the benefits of being retired you do not have to worry that every second has not been used profitably!

 

On climate change

Well actually that was just to get you started; I am not sure whether it is change in climate or just a dry year within the normal range of variation. Any way it has been exceptionally dry.

Where’s the water gone?
I attempted to illustrate this with a photo of the bottom of a stream but I had the wrong lens with me.  75mm instead of 25mm.

Nevertheless this should show a rapidly flowing stream not a puddle surrounded by dry land.  The creatures that depend on its humidity must be really suffering.  In fact when I see this I often wonder whether they have a mechanism for survival or do others that have found a humid location repopulate this dessicated area.

Perhaps someone will be kind enough to tell me.

Currently rainfall since Easter is about 30mm, which is not much.  The result is not only dry stream bed but trees shedding their leaves early and other evergreens showing signs of stress.

Its not spring, what do they think they are up to?

Whilst taking a wander this afternoon I caught sight of two butterflies, being very amorous.
They chased each other around and I caught them on the ground.

Again I wondered if they had been fooled by the exceptionally warm day.  It was 26deg C today and yesterday it had been 28.

Just to prove that it is well into autumn I managed to catch an acorn in the photo.  It is currently rather dangerous to stand near oak trees as the high winds have meant a liberal scattering of acorn and when they fall from a great height they can sting.

But talking of autumn, I mentioned a few “blogs” ago that the swallows were gathering for departure and now I think they have all gone and every day we see flights of swallows going south.

Man does not help
Here are two photos taken in opposite directions.

They both show hedgerows pulled out to create a large new field.

I have no great problem with farmers becoming more efficient as there are more mouths to feed and so more food has to be be produced and in any case many of the hedges were put in to make previously common land private.

The problem for me is that the land thus put into one large field is likely to be sown with maize that requires irrigation.  This uses water which seems to be scarcer by the year.  This maize is then fed to cattle to meet the increasing demand for meat eating.  The number of cattle has increased substantially in this area in the last few years.

Again I need to explain that I am not a vegetarian but eat meat moderately and often I am very happy to eat meals with no meat, especially in summer when the vegetables are so tasty and plentiful.

Schwoerer survey

A couple of days ago we had a visit by a nice young lady engineer who had come to inspect the house for Schwoerer.

She spent a lot of time outside taking photos which seemed odd, until we asked what she was looking for.  She explained that she was especially interested in evidence of any leaks or potential water ingress into the house. So we showed some of the photos of the construction and explained the blower door test.  It was obvious that she was used to looking at houses of a more conventional nature and had not come across a house put up in two days before, especially one that we like to think is a little special and of a higher quality than the standard house.

We had a long chat once she had finished and it was nice to talk to someone who is a building engineer and with whom you can talk technically.