La Darnoire

Today was bunny-sexing day. It turns out we have four males and four females. They have now been put in separate cages for obvious reasons.

In the afternoon, a friend brought her 8-year-old son to do some fishing in the pond. Quite a few small carp were caught, and these were not returned to the water as there are too many. After some thought about what to do with them, they were offered to our part-time neighbour, and he said he would definitely like to add them to his pond.

In the morning I had also retrieved an old bicycle from the aged FIL’s workshop, ready for my sister’s visit in June. Whilst making sure everything still worked – oiling the chain, pumping up the tyres, adjusting the brakes and that sort of thing – I found a small metal identity tag attached to the frame. This was getting in the way of the saddle adjustment bolt, so I removed it. Upon closer examination, it turned out that the bicycle originally belonged to the above-mentioned neighbour’s grandmother. When he came around with a dustbin in a wheelbarrow (to collect the carp), we gave him the tag as a keepsake, and he was delighted.

I also planted three new trees to replace the two which I felled. On a previous visit to Neighbour J, LSS had mentioned that we had recently been unsuccessful in obtaining any suitably-sized ash trees (frêne in French) in the garden centre. Well, yesterday LSS took some strawberry plants to Neighbour J, and she had a surprise for us. Three ash tree seedlings in a plastic bag. Except they weren’t ash tree seedlings at all. I think they might be alder (aulne in French). Never mind, she meant well. I planted them anyway.

Today was another sunny day. The past two days have been completely grey, which meant that the boiler stove had to be lit once again in the evenings. Using some pallets I constructed another (temporary) wood shed. You see, five out of the six bays of the current wood storage complex have now been filled. We are currently using the last of the two-year-old wood in the sixth bay, so this bay is now nearly empty. The plan is to move what remains of this seasoned firewood into the temporary wood shed – this will free up bay six, enabling it to be refilled with all the wood I am currently collecting!

I went for a short walk with LSS in the afternoon to show her where all the wood was coming from, and we discovered another wild pear tree. One more to be tidied up!

The ruins of the garage at the aged FIL have now been completely flattened, and we have three huge piles of debris: rubble, bricks and earth; scrap metal (including a huge engineering lathe weighing well over a ton); and half-burnt oak roof beams. This latter pile will join the La Darnoire firewood stack. It looks like I will need another woodshed after all!

Compare this photo with one taken from nearly the same position about a year ago:

The current batch of rabbit pelts were removed from the pickling solution and hung out to dry. I’ve already started defrosting the next batch. Tanning these things is a lot of work, but at least we end up with a useful product instead of just putting them in the compost (which is what a lot of farmers around here do).

As we are now unlikely to see sub-zero temperatures until the end of the year, I re-connected the pipes to the external shower. These had been disconnected for the winter so that they wouldn’t burst. There were a couple of small leaks at the various unions, but gentle tightening with a couple of large spanners soon solved that issue. Of course now that we are able to have an outside shower again, the weather will probably turn chilly!

A huge tracked excavator has arrived at the aged FIL in order to start dismantling the burnt-out garage tomorrow:

With the arrival of spring, it’s a real cacophony first thing in the morning here. The fabled “peace and quiet” of the countryside is anything but. The amount of bird song really has to be heard to be believed. And at night it’s not that quiet either; we have some nightingales around. They’re lovely to listen to, though. Oh – and speaking of birds; we’ve seen yet another new species here; the greenfinch.

Yesterday, I used the newly-upholstered tractor for the first time in order to fetch some more firewood (mainly small trees which had blown down). The seat is indeed more comfortable, but the angle isn’t right; one is leaning forwards all the time. Obviously some more fettling needs to be done, which means the entire thing has to come out again. This I am NOT looking forward to. I think it may well be easier to remove the cab from the tractor, and working on the seat in situ.

Today we got another two hens, bringing the total to 16. This was totally unplanned. You see, one of LSS’s adult pupils had three hens, but wanted a goose. As their space is limited, her husband told her if she got a goose, two of the hens had to go. So they ended up here. The other 14 don’t seem to mind. I don’t think hens can count. “One, more-than-one” is probably their limit. The two newbies soon settled in.

I have discovered another large aspen which the wind has uprooted, so it seems as though I may need yet another woodshed.

The garage building was beginning to look like it belonged somewhere in the jungles of Borneo. Some ivy had taken root at the rear wall and had been left unchecked for years. It had reached the stage where the roof of the building was starting to disappear under a verdant green canopy, and shoots were even entering the building under the tiles, trailing down towards the floor. There were also three grapevines which a previous owner had planted; and these had completely taken over as well. Unfortunately the grapes are rather astringent, so are not that good for eating. We did make some wine a year or two ago but that wasn’t very nice either. Well, LSS spent most of the afternoon up a ladder, pruning. The walls (and obviously the roof) of the building are once again visible. The only down-side of this is the huge pile of ivy-and-grapevine clippings which need to go through the wood chipper. Mind you, we’ve found that piling wood-chips underneath the hen roosts make cleaning out the chicken shed that much easier. Nothing is wasted if we can help it!

Today was the fourth day in a row in which we have not had to light the boiler stove. The lovely cloudless conditions mean that the solar thermal panel is heating the water in the thermal store to around 60 degrees with no other input necessary.

I removed the old tractor seat. Its frame has been repaired in the past, and is made of solid steel. As you can imagine, it was horribly heavy; and I had to lift it half-way up the cab in order to get it over the steering wheel. Once it was removed, I took advantage of the emptiness of the cab to give it a good sweeping out. I don’t think it had ever been cleaned since the aged FIL bought it. The amount of dried mud, twigs, and dead bugs had to be seen to be believed. One can now see the original floor mats!

The remains of the old seat cushion were then removed. The cushion was simply glued to the steel seat base many, many years ago – so as a result it came off fairly easily. I then removed the mounting rails from the old Renault car seat by using a hacksaw on the steel pins. A couple of U-bolts were then used to attach the bottom of the frame to the steel of the tractor seat.

Of course, the tractor seat was now much heavier than it was when I took it out, so the only way I was able to get it back into the tractor was by opening the rear window of the cab and standing on the three-point hitch to lever it in through the window. Because it’s now a lot higher than the original, I had to slide the entire seat as far back as it would go. The seat itself is much more comfortable, but the angle has changed; it’s now lower at the front edge. Still, I’ll give it a try over some bumps (translation: a normal farm road) and see how it feels.

The paperwork for the replacement door and new windows in the barn has now been completed, and handed in at the local Mairie. At least four copies of each page. Here’s a photo:Now we wait.

Nobody turned up to feed the aged FIL yesterday morning. Because it’s Easter, the office staff of the ADMR (the carer’s company, Aide à Domicile en Milieu Rural “Help at Home in Rural Areas”) have taken a long weekend, so the office is unmanned. Mind you, the office is unmanned every weekend. Which brings us to another important point. If a carer has a problem, their aged clients simply go hungry/thirsty unless a member of the carer’s family is feeling conscientious. It’s somewhat difficult to explain without giving a real-life example from a year or so ago. Names and places have been changed to protect innocent people involved…

Miss X is a carer, working for the company HHRA (Motto: “A Culture of Personal Service”). Grandmother Y is the client, and is bed-ridden. Miss X is scheduled to visit Grandmother Y three times on this particular Saturday; to give her breakfast, lunch, and supper. Fortunately (for reasons which will become apparent) Mrs. Z is scheduled to look after Grandmother Y on the Sunday.

Now, Miss X, en route to Grandmother Y on this particular dark, cold, winter’s morning, swerves to avoid a wild boar, skids across the icy road, and crashes into the ditch. Another early-morning motorist discovers the accident, calls the fire brigade, and the injured Miss X is taken to hospital. The hospital obviously notifies her next of kin.

By now it is 2 p.m. Miss X’s father, having ascertained that the injuries to Miss X are not too serious, knows full well it is pointless telephoning the offices of the HHRA to tell them about the accident. Unfortunately he doesn’t know which particular clients Miss X was supposed to look after on this weekend. Fortunately, Mrs. Z is one of his friends, and he knows she also works for the HHRA, so he telephones her instead. And, also fortunately, Mrs. Z happens to know Miss X’s schedule for the weekend.
So at least poor Grandmother Y gets a drink of water and some supper.

Out-of-hours emergency contact number, anyone? No. Because that would mean one would actually have to do extra hours of work. Which – by law – the company HHRA is not obliged to pay for.

Anyway, back to the aged FIL. It transpires that the person who normally produces the schedules has left, and has not been replaced. And because of the 35-hour work week, this would have meant that the remaining staff would have had to put in extra hours to produce this schedule in addition to their normal jobs. Which, of course, didn’t happen. So the printing and distribution of April’s schedule has not yet been done. And as a result, not only do the clients/clients’ families not know who is scheduled to turn up when, even the staff members themselves don’t know. We obtained this information from one of the regular carers this morning; she regularly takes a shortcut through here en route to another client and stopped to give us the news about the aged FIL’s missed breakfast. She asked him why he didn’t push his emergency button. Apparently he didn’t want to see LSS.

You couldn’t make it up.

I still have some wood to cut with the chainsaw, including some dead oak branches in Sloe Alley, but unfortunately the rainy weather has delayed this. No matter; I have lots of things to do indoors. I have started tanning the next batch of rabbit pelts; the website updating is still progressing slowly; and I have also manufactured a tool which can be used to dismantle pallets. Based on an idea seen online, I initially constructed one from timber. Although the tool worked quite well, it only removed one board before the timber split. So I have now made a replacement – in steel this time – welding together some scrap metal from the aged FIL. I’ve named it “The PalletXploder” ™. It works very well! Simply place the protruding ends under the pallet crosspiece, and step on the other end with one foot. The fulcrum is the end of the wooden handle. Excuse the clumpy-looking weld seams; my mig welding machine is starting to misbehave.

To remove the nails from the pallet pieces, rather than standing or kneeling on the piece of wood and levering out the nails, I’ve found an easier method is to clamp the nail extractor in the vice on the workbench, and move the piece of wood around that. An ideal tool for this would be the forked end of a crowbar. However, my own crowbar is of the mini variety, and the fork end of the aged FIL’s monster crowbar is too worn. So I clamped my old faithful Gedore claw hammer in the vice instead.
By doing it this way around, the advantage is that the entire workbench becomes the lever, so far less effort is required to extract the nails.

As I started this post by mentioning chainsaws, I thought I would report back on the practice of using a natural oil for the chain. A chainsaw has two tanks; one for the fuel, and one for a special chain oil to lubricate the chain as it cuts. If the chain is insufficiently lubricated, the guide bar quickly becomes worn out due to the friction. A tell-tale sign is the metal turning blue due to heat. (Of course another cause of this could be that the guide bar oil feed hole has become clogged, but that’s beside the point). This special chain oil is also quite sticky, so that it does not get flung off the chain too quickly. However, it’s also rather expensive. So a couple of years ago I switched to using rapeseed oil, available from the local supermarket. It’s the cheapest oil available here. Well, after two years of use, I am pleased to report that there have been no adverse effects. The chains are much easier to clean and sharpen. And the guide bar is still looking good; in fact it seems to last longer than when using regular chain oil. And as an additional advantage, this oil is a natural product – so it’s less polluting for the environment than the synthetic mineral oil.

Wildlife news: a pair of magpies have started constructing a nest in a tree next to the garden. I’ve told LSS that she’d better not leave any of her jewellery lying around outside. Not that she does, of course. And not that she has much jewellery anyway. We’ve also seen our first moorhen, inspecting the reeds around the edge of the pond – perhaps for a possible nesting site?

On a more personal note, I now have an appointment at the hospital in Romorantin for the end of April. (la-darnoire.com/blog/2014/07/28072014.html)

Typical. As soon as I mentioned that we had not heard the cuckoo yet, they made an appearance. However, this year it is the normal call; our dyslexic bird from previous years seems to have gone.

Another job has appeared on my “To Do” list. The aged FIL’s ancient Deutz tractor. It was second- or third-hand when he bought it last century, and I think the seat is still the original. The cover has long since worn away, and the foam rubber has become somewhat thin on the seat. The back cushion has disintegrated entirely, and the bare metal is really rather uncomfortable. Well, in one of the aged FIL’s sheds there is an old Renault van, which was given to him for use as parts. I’ve removed the passenger seat, and will see if I can somehow adapt it to fit in the tractor. This should be an interesting mini-project!

Spring is definitely on its way; the peach tree buds are showing through in pink, and we have a profusion of wild violets around the garden. Mind you, we have not heard the cuckoo this year.

Unfortunately there has been another mortality; the peach tree near the reedbed seems to have died. No buds are in evidence, and when I made small cuts in the bark, none of the branches showed any green cambium at all. Ever since we arrived, this tree was not looking very happy; we obviously arrived too late to save it. Well, at least we can replace it with our newly-purchased gooseberry bushes.

I have now trimmed back the brambles from the fence-line next to the pond, so at least we are now able to go to the back of the pond without disturbing Mrs Duck, who is on the opposite side.