Short Weekend....

A couple of faultless flights from London Stansted to Poitiers and back again find me sitting on the Stansted Express train going into London on a Sunday night, after a lovely, but short, weekend in Sigogne with almost wall to wall blue sky and temperatures into the twenties, this is why we moved to France.

It was a busy weekend since it was a short one, normally I fly back on a Monday morning. So I got stuck into the building work with a vengeance, though it is one of those weekends where you really can’t see much evidence of work representing a day and a half of toil. There was lots of measuring and scratching of my head going on as I worked out where the new walls were going to go and then marking up the floor, walls and ceilings accordingly.

It’s always jobs that you think are small that turn into the big ones and this weekend something that I thought would take an hour to do ended up taking 4 or so. All I had to do was chop out some poured concrete to lower a step by about 6 inches ready to be built up again to the correct height for the new lay out.

I started off by trying to save my tired muscles and so got out all the gadgets at my disposal, which comprised my mini kango drill, and when that was not working well it was joined by an angle grinder with a concrete cutting wheel, but between the two of them after and hours work I had not shifted more than a few square inches, so in frustration I hit the step with a hammer that happened to be laying around and a chunk bigger than that managed by the angle grinder and kango just fell off. So it was down to the garage for a club hammer, and after 45 minutes of brute force most of the step was off, so much for modern technology making things easier, there’s no replacement for a bit of brute force and ignorance.

Before I can go much further though I am going to have to buy some more materials otherwise the work is going to grid to a halt (pardon the pun). Also during the week our builder put in a plea for us to stick to our original plan to put in a wooden ceiling in the upstairs bedroom we are building, as he had already fitted up the ceiling to take the wood and not the plaster board we had changed our minds to on cost. So we went to the local DIY store and discovered some wood at a reasonable price, so he will have to work out how much he needs then go with Franca to buy it. So I have to remember to allow for that cost in my purchase of materials in these challenging monetary times.

As I mentioned before the weather was stunning and so we decided to take Fleur to the local park, half an hour’s drive away, well actually she asked to go and I could not refuse since I had been working all day yesterday. So we set off just after 11, and alarm bells started ringing when we saw only one car in the car park, the park was basically closed for the winter, though you could get in and play on the permanent activities such as swings and slides, all the trampolines, water slides and pedelos had been packed away for the winter, as had the snack bar that is there too. So Fleur played a bit on the swings and roundabouts then we went for a short walk along the river before heading back home again somewhat disappointed.

So that was my short weekend, though for many that do the same commute as me, this was a normal weekend, I am lucky to be able to travel back on a Monday morning most weeks. The winter schedules for our band of long distance commuters is going to set us some interesting challenges, as the cheap airlines turn their attention to the winter ski and sunseaker destinations. I can still get my Monday morning flights, but Fridays is proving to be a bit difficult until after Christmas.