A Week on the Tiles

Although the work on the house is progressing, I will not say that things have been going that well, I seem to be getting more and more uptight and grumpy, a day really goes by without me snapping at Theresa. After a rather tiring week of work finishing with a very late night grouting, the dining room was ready to become a temporary kitchen. Then a day of intense cleaning, to rid the house of construction dust and another day to move the fridge and washing machine in to the newly finished room and put up a false wall to stop dust from the work on the new kitchen and things are looking good.While doing the tiling I thought it would be good to fix the few tiles that had fallen off of the wall in the loo/shower, there were only about 8 or 10 tiles to put up and we had some spare tiles in the under croft (original 1950 or 60 tiles in a wooden crate). So I started removing the old tile cement so that the replacement ones would be at the same level that current ones are. removing the old cement was not to hard as it was quite loose but then the old tiles were not that well attached to the wall ether and stared fulling off.... in the end I hand to put around 30 tiles back on instead of around 10.
The other job that we have managed to get done is to finally have a proper path and steps to the loo so after a year we can now go to the loo without risking a broken ankle.

Inside Plumbing

Finlay Hot water in the house - pity there is no tap yet...
The first stage of the pluming for the temp kitchen is done and so is all the painting and the varnishing of the doors (still have to put the bedroom door on its hinges).
OK the pluming is not much only a few meters of pipe (cast iron, old but it works) And we can plumb the washing machine in.. no more moving it around and connecting it to a long pipe that dumps water in the garden..I will just be glad when we can get rid of the lopsided hot water tank - but that will not be for a while.
The only thing left to do now is put the tiles down and then the dinning room is ready to become a temporary kitchen. How long it will be before the real kitchen is ready will depend on when we get some more money in as our building reserves are now just about run out, but we will have what we need to get on with things and see if we can make a living out here. That is going to be the real test is it not... Mind you we still will move slowly on some things, like knocking the old kitchen about, removing the concrete kitchen units and fire place (shame about that but its is just too big and low).
As to how we are feeling, well things are OK but we are a bit touchy at the moment, I have so many things I want to do and as usual Just cannot seem to get any of them done. As I have never lived in another country for more than two years I am a little worried that it will be the same this time. We will just have to wait and see.

1st Helresa Star Party

A while ago a friend of ours moved from the capital of the island Santa Cruz over to the other side of the island, they moved into a small place just outside puntagorda. She had moved there to escape the noise, she is a singer/songwriter and it was hard for her to record in town.
Having moved over there she commented on how many stars there were in the sky and suggested that we bring over the telescope one time so she could take a look.

So last weekend that is what we did, just like the old days we packed our tent and telescopes into the car and headed off. We got there mid afternoon, having had to make a short detour after getting so far along the road only to be told that there was a rally on and we would have to turn back.

Why the F*** didn't it say that at the junction you ..........

I thought to my self as I turned round.

So as I was saying once we got there we started to put up the tent in the blistering heat. Once the tent was up it was time to sit down a have a cup of tea. Our other friend Sheila was there with her son to enjoy the stars. We had a barbecue tea and settled down to watch the clouds roll in. So there we sat outside drinking red wine and chatting Until at last the clouds parted.

Telescope and Palm Trees at Dusk

There was just enough time for me to swear at my computer as I tried to get it to talk to the telescope, as Helen went old school and manually pointed my old trusty ETX90 at Jupiter. Before the clouds rolled in again and we packed up for the night.

The second night was a little better but not by much, The cloud rolled in again but we did manage to get a good look at the Moon and Saturn before we clouded out again.

The Moon, Saturn, Mars and Regulus

Next year at our house with the scope mounted in it permanent location I hope. More on that in the next week or so I hope

21st Centry arives in Franceses

After a year of trying to cope with an Internet connection that ran at 56 Kb (just like the old dial-up modems), we now have 3 G and at last have something that is usable..
There was no announcement I just logged on one morning and there it was. Now all we have to do is sort out how to connect several systems through one connection that gets re-created each time you connect, so you have to share it a new each time.... We may look at another company if we can not get something that works better.. But it is OK for now.