Friday, June 27, 2014

Arc! Spark! Work Continues...

Progress is...happening.  The Electrician is hard at it!  He works at a steady and quick pace with no signs of letting up.  He asks me questions and most of the time I get about 50% of the words, sometimes more and most times less.  It's ok, I know enough pidgin and sign language relevant to the task that his questions and replies are understood mostly and work continues.  His breathing is labored like a person with chronic bronchitis or a very bad cold or...COPD!!!  Hoping not the later and only that it's a result of heavy exertion and lifting and struggling with difficult to reach places with large drills.  The results are looking quite together and well thought out though and of that I'm very pleased indeed!   The circuit breaker box is up on the upstairs landing and all the channels down the hall are in and some wiring has been completed too.  We're excited at the prospect of having our electrical restored CORRECTLY by someone so skilled and capable.

Our GUEST will arrive at Maison Blanche next week...July 1st.  We are going to pick her up in St. Sever southeast of La Chatre where she has been working on a local farm as part of a program that sponsors such activities.  Pay is nonexistent or very low with room and board being most of it.  Seems a healthy thing to do for a young adult wanting to explore the world a bit.   She'll have many stories we think and it should be very interesting to have her here with us for a short while.  She then wanders off to the next workplace, wherever that may be.  We may even take her if it isn't too distant as the work here will still be going on full blast we think.

Our long-in-history Best Friend Ted wound up in the hospital last week with a Necrotic Gall Bladder! Gasp!  I looked it up, it's not a good thing to have alright...basically a stuck gallstone that caused a gangrenous condition in the tissue of the gall bladder itself and there he went to have it checked and excised.  Communication went blank as he had no email and ours wasn't getting to TJ who was on top of the situation.    Today we finally heard from her, then him...he's back home recovering from the surgery and the PNEUMONIA that struck him at/near the same time!  Too close!  We can't do much from here except call and chat and keep our fingers crossed for rapid and complete healing.  He's a tough ol' bird but this was quite a hit on him.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Big Electrical Day!

8:30 am, 0830 French time.  The electrician called.  A trip to Brico Depot in Bourges is in order in 10 minutes.  Much rushing around, getting dressed, finding wallet, money, checkbook incase some damned plastic credit card doesn't scan or they don't have the friggin' scanners anymore (has happened!).  Then we follow our intrepid guy through the forests and wheat and colza fields for the next 40 minutes or so.  Then into the maze that makes up La Charite with all the big boxes, medium boxes and small boxes you can imagine...the architecture of supply and demand.  What a visual mess!  It's there somewhere, whatever it is and you can almost always buy it.  Stores open about 9am but 10am ce normale' too.  Close at 12 or 12:30pm and reopen at 2:30 or 3 or, in some cases 3:30.  This all depends on Holidays, special days set aside by the local cities and the mindset of a zillion different organizations and corporate bean-tank members.  We fly into the Brico Marche with E taking up a parking place near the rack of rolling carts and I take an adjacent one.  He gets a cart and away into the giant store of hardware bits and pieces we go!  Oh what an adventure awaits.  Down the electrical apparatus aisle, he picks out wire bundles of some familiar colors and others odd to my US standards, but hey! he KNOWS what he is doing and I am but a novice.  Switches, circuit breakers, circuit breaker panels, connectors, fasteners, long fixtures for placing wire on walls and overhead, 25 of those and that's just 1/2.  Each is 3 meters long...10 feet more or less.  500+ feet of all the wires, some "romex" type stuff too with multiple conductors.  Piled on the cart in about 1/2 an hour we go to the cashier with it and after all is said and done it's about 600 Euros, about $840 USD.  That's under what I thought it's be but this is ONLY the 2 upper floors one (the grenier...attic) which gets only 4 outlets and a switch.  Out the door in under an hour and back on the road to Lignieres...there's much work to be done and some of it is/will be done today!