I'm on a roll!

After the gate, I'm now progressing nicely with the trailer. It's ridiculous how expensive a new trailer is. I little one will cost 500Euros.
My little blue trailer (you can see the carcass beside me) was made of wood. Because I had been given it, I was a bit careless with it, left it outside too often. So it got rotten, and one day recently, when the guy at the sawmill was lowering a charge of wood into it with his forklift it cracked underneath.
The wooden one also had the axle bolted to the blue box and the towbar bolted to the box, so it was possible for the towbar to come away, and leave the trailer careering down the road.
The new version I've welded up has the towbar integral with the frame. I've also welded on four nifty threaded chain links on the sides that can be used to attach ropes or chains.
Today I must finish decking the floor of the trailer so I ca at least use it to fetch more wood.
Then I must work out a cunning way to build the trailer box, and I want the hinged tailgate to be removeable, so I need to find a plug that can take the 5 wires for the lights/indicators.

The trailer's first job will be to cart the old blue box down to the tip.

In other news, France is in a panic over Tunisian supporters whistling during "The Marseillaise" during the International friendly the other day. This lack of respect for the national anthem is causing angst because it is evident that the Tunisian supporters are in fact French born, children of immigrants.
The locals are full of "send them all home". When I point out that they ARE home the response is "send the whole family home".
The government's response is to abandon any future match where such whistling takes place. the difficulty is that matches are played under FIFA rules. Only the ref has the authority to cancel a match and whistling during the national anthems is not one of FIFA's criterea for abandonment of a match.
There is an added difficulty of trying to get thousands of dissapointed and angry fans out of a stadium after the game they have paid to see has been abandoned because of te actions of a few hundred.

It is EXACTLY like the cricket crisis in the UK a dozen years ago. English people were appalled to discover that the children of immigrants were supporting Pakistan or India during Test matches against England.

Amateur Archeology

I mentioned in this post that I had to build a gate to replace a temporary fence thing that we had put in place 5 years ago.

Well, the gate got built OK, and even got hung OK, but because of the slope of the ground between the pillars I knew I'd have to level the ground under the gate.
The gate of course had to be hung level. If you hang the gate to follow the ground, it won't open.
And I didn't want the black bitch digging under the gate. So I bought some cement blocks (parpang in french) and started digging a wee trench to bed them in.

Only to discover hidden stone paving slabs between the pillars.

Un fortunately they ran with the ground too, plus they are about 6 centimetres below the current lawn surface so I couldn't expose them without creating a swimming pool.
But what an example of how stuff gets buried and disappears. Only to be dug out by archeologists years later. And in 200 years if someone digs again, they'll find my stuff laid on top.


I decided to lay the blocks on top of the stone flags, simply bedded on sand to take up the difference in level. Behind me is the village church.


Hey! It looks like a grown up did that. You can see our little garden and garage and a runaway laurel hedge that I will shortly cut right down to ground level and allow it to regro, but at a manageable hight.

Today's project is rebuilding my little blue trailer that has rotted away.

Building a gate

There never was a gate into our garden. Two big stone pillars, but no gate.
Four years ago I strung up a fence, a temporary fix that in typical Paterson fashion became permanent.
Because the grass got too long for our mower, a nearby farmer with a ride-on mowed it for us, but I had to cut down my fence to let him in.
So a gate had to go up in its place.
I initially thougt of welding up a fate in steel, to save some money, but finally decided even more money could be saved with a wooden, picket type gate. And since our neighbour has a gate similar it would look OK.
Well in typical french country style, nothing is easy. The stone pillars which are over 200 years old if they are the same as the house are not straight, either with respect to the ground, or each other. the ground between the gates is not level, so the left gate is nearly touching the ground while the right gate is higher up.
the problem is that black bitch Bella, highly strung poodle/whippet/rat who will dig under the gate given half the chance.
So now I have to go to BatiLeclerc to pic up some "parpang" which will go in a trench under the gate to both make the ground more level and give some resistance to dog claws.

Tomorrow morning it's a 4:00am start at the factory for another 6 day cycle. I hope to not see Sad Sack, because the planning showed a week of shit tiles and I don't need it to be made any shitter.

On the other hand there is some juicy gossip of a colleague taken away in handcuffs after being caught working on the black and defrauding a major global enterprise.
More details tomorrow....