Cheap #@@#$$#@ Imports!

I don't know which fine company where made it but the bastards did a fine job...burned up the plug of my plugged in Refrigerator and blew out the electricity in 1/2 this bloody house! Now since this house was wired in the dark ages sometime not all of it's little wiring secrets have been revealed to me...er...US. What goes where and how it gets there is anyone's guess. I pulled the curtain back to reveal the electrical workings of 1926 or so and with my rudimentary knowledge of said circuitry clicked off the main circuit breaker, this at 5:30 this morning. Then I went back to bed. Up at 7:30 I got to work trying to sort this thing out with diarrhea chasing me into the water closet every 5 minutes! The shits I tell you, the shits! I pulled each of the three phase fuses and examined them for breakage...nope! The other line fuses in the wiring nearby were likewise whole and wonderful. So I pried apart the refirs plug to find carbonization and destruction as though an acetylene torch had been used on it! Kelly and I visually traced every wire we could find in the house looking for more of those obscene in-line fuses to no avail. They may be there but they are hidden somehow from easy view. Armed with a ladder, common screw driver and Kelly with a flashlight we went about or newest fun activity and came up dry time and time again. Then, a thought, maybe an electrician would understand this layout in copper spaghetti having seen it a thousand times, so off to the yellow pages of Lignieres to find one each electrician. 2, there are 2 in Lignieres. Could they do any better than I could at finding the fault and repairing it? Hmmmm. So off to the barn for a long extension cord (one with a better standard of construction I hope!) and up to the attic to obtain an wall plug from a short extension cord donor. That done I trailed the extension into the larder and set to cut off the fried plug and install the new one. I also plugged in the freezer which also fell victim to this outage. That done, plugged in the reefer and heard the compressor kick into action and the door light works too! Yippee!
Then I ran a second 50 footer to the computer room up the curly-queue stairs and rearranged the plugs so that that was now a running operation once more and here I am! Best electrician at 35 Rue Marechal Joffre...currently.

Points South

So this day we decided to seek out a bBQ for our trip south to Bordeaux in coming weeks. We dropped the RV rental idea as just too damned expensive, roughly 1500 USD a week! Gads, lotta money to drive a vehicle around that will get probably 10mpg at 6 dollars a gallon, wow. Cost per mile is a bitch!
So we will feature a BBQ each evening and sandwiches during the day with local products all the way!
So we went off to Montlucon about an hour southeast of here and a big city.
Our target there was the Troc d'Lille, a used furniture antique sort-of store with many outlets about the region. We've bought lots of things over the years to decorate and furnish our French homes. This time I saw not a thing of real interest but Kelly got caught by a un-set of restaurant quality bowls and plates in red and white with a Chateau depicted on the plate edges. Checki9ng with the iNet after we got home she found out that indeed it was a real chateau and that it was a Mental Hospital! Wonderful! Per4fect!
Andy's parcel, the last one expected, arrived today with a new video card for this machine as well as a REAL router (NETGEAR) which I will install tomorrow with any luck. The TrendNet one I had worked flawlessly for years until 2 weeks ago when i went south for some reason. No email, slow as hell access when it did work at all...who knows what went wrong but perhaps a local lightning strike did the damned thing in, anyway it has been replaced with a swith instead, no wireless, and is working now.

Watching France vs Poland with my damned neighbors interference broadcast on top of the signal. Alas...

Dongles, Bangles, Bright Shiny Beads

So today was to be the day when we were going to see Liz get her Internet up and running. We planned it since last week to go to the SFR store in St. Amand, purchase a SFR/Vodaphone Dongle and sign her up for a 2 year stint with 3G iNet service (aka 2G internet slow service) and that would be that.
Not so easy there poopsie, first they wanted her passport...? huh? Why a passport, who knows but it was a no go without one so we took a round trip BACK to Lignieres to get it. Once signed up, the dongle was inserted by the wonderful SFR stewardess to no effect! That's right, it inserted the software alright but it did not wish to connect! What? Right, SFR itself couldn't make the dongle dangle , jangle and ring bells. Nonetheless, we accepted the proposition that it WOULD work once we got to Liz's and fired it up. So off we went to the Le Massilia just down the street when we discovered that La Pizz was closed. Lunch was nice, service was surley but effective and the bill was relatively low and Liz paid which was dear thanks for the help getting me online. Sure. Maybe. We drove back to her house outside of Lignieres where last week the little machine with my very own SFR dongle had found and connected to a 2G SFR network signal. We sat down with the fine Dell laptop with Windows XP installed and inserted the dongle and double clicked on the SFR icon. Up pops the SFR Banner quickly followed by a connection window. Down near the bottom in tiny print it says Periferique 3g Non Connected...and that's the way it remained when I moved outdoors in the dripping drizzle to check the signal. Blink, blink but no solid connection lite was forth coming. I fiddled and frustrated myself for another half hour to no good effect. Sooo, we wrapped it all up and the last we saw her at 4pm she was off to the nice SFR person to fix the problem with her dangling Dongle. Further she was to return to our abode to report on the results of the return visit. It is now 5:50 since we left her.

Courtyards, Weeds and Prickly Things

Yes I have those here. All of them and one of the preceeding. The weeds run the gamut from dandilions 4 feet tall to things I'd think we'd eat as salad if we could just get by the unknowns. Lots of berry vines too, where the hell did they come from anyway?! Horrible plants that don't mind taking over an entire garden if allowed to grow and grow through 20 months of absent owners like us! Shit! The roses are so very overgrown with new growth 10 feet long on some plants....yes 10 feet! Maybe more! They are hardy things those roses, old vine stock three inches in circumfrance on some. I cleared out a small section of ground near Kelly's kirchen door for Basil, Parsley and another often used spice/herb that I can't thi8nk of the name right now. I got done yesterday about 3, grabbed a beer and sat down under the unbrella in the courtyard to look at what wonder I had wrought. At 4 the first drops fell, big, fat, wet rain-like they were. They wetted the umbrella fully in a few minutes and by 4:10 I gave it up and ran inside as it was a torrent by then! Then it started to lightning and thunder, a mico-burst or two with winds near 50 mph took down the umbrella and tipped over the iron table it was anchored to. I watched from inside my cozy, rustic kitchen as the leaks of the century began spouting rain onto my cabinets and cooking utinsels! Oh my what a disaster! I kept up with it through using many copper pots to fill and empty as the water just ran and ran. This continued for almost three solid hours! Now France at large and even here drought conditions exist and this rain certainly won't end the drought but it sure helped out the plants I planted and the general condition of all others hereabouts. Nice timing too.

I WAS going to continue my yardwork today but the weather put me off again, not by raining but by the ground being soaked and under cloudy skies too boot. I hate mud. Bye for now...Thai Chicken and Eggplant Curry tonight. Whoopee!

4G in the States, 2G Here, can you say WTF?

Yes folks I'm writing and have been writing for OVER TWO YEARS on this miserable slow coonection through a 2G Dongle from SFR/Vodaphone. Oh gee.
Now don't get me wrong, I miss it when it's down (as it is often that way) and the reward of not having to constantly deal with France Telecom/Orange is pleasure enough perhaps BUT I've paid full price for this miserable connection for OVER TWO YEARS without a word of apology from SFR/Vodaphone for the screwing we are getting every download. Yes, I pay the same 34.00E per month as someone within the range of a 3G signal, that's over 47 USD for the previledge of being an SFR dupe. Lovely.

The good news is that my email now works thanks to me openning the windows and pushing open the shutter that the storm closed about 12 days ago now (I liked the shade you know) and l'viola! Outgoing email is alive again. The signal here is THAT weak?! A damned wooden shutter dropped it down so low it couldn't get through? My oh my...moderne technologie! I couldn't believe it but yes, the shutter is enough of an attenuator to keep the basically line of SIGHT signal from rising to my dongles needs, close it...no email, poor inet, open it, email with inet. Huh.

Got a new Logitech C-600 web cam, one of the less than HD but 2 MB sensor jobs. Nice picture, full of crisp detail and the software works pretty well to if a bit of a clunky interface. It doen't know how to send pics and videos to a server via timed FTPs but...it's ok 'cause YAW-CAM does. Now you can see out the window of our home in Lignieres towards the Champ du Foire where the annual Donkey Faire will be in another week...Heee Hawwwww!

Gotta work in the courtyard today amidst the brambles and aoutat biting things that you can't see...the drought has brought them out and oh boy do they like me. Chomp, tasty California Import! Nice. Tried to find some clear nail polish yesterday at one of the many stores we visited but no luck and now...I'm an itchy thing let me tell you, an itchy thing! I hate AOUTAT! Bought 5 Basil plants so we can start having pesto and capressa salads with dinner. They do very well here in the humidity but the sun and dry are killers for sure. Place them in the sun in the morning and the moon...no shade in the afternoon for best results.

Off to get coffee folks, have a wonderful day wherever you are, I'll be here scratching.