New buttons

I never regretted buying a flute that I thought was especially pretty.   A professional, hand-made flute, it had a solid silver body and the mechanism was in grey stainless steel.  I thought they went well together, and they made for a lighter flute.   It was a better instrument than I was a player, but I grew into it.

I have seen professionals on the TV playing an accordion exactly the same as mine, and I have been told that I should have no need ever to replace it.  But, being intended for pros, it doesn't have the special buttons with a roughened surface that identify the C and F keys (by feel, without having to look).  So I decided to fix this.

An outfit called "La Malle aux Accordeons" supplies buttons by mail order,  and you can get shiny gold-coloured ones that I decided would make my accordion look better.  So I bought some - 68 in all, including the 12 special ones, and fitted them.   The cat helped.

The second photo doesn't bring out the gold colour very well - the effect is better than it looks in the picture.

Neglected Leeks

I confess, I have neglected my leeks.   Last year, I carefully saved seeds from some select plants that I had allowed to flower, and this Springtime I scattered them on a square yard of soil, watered them and hoed them in.  I let Nature take its course, which is of course what it did, and soon my patch of leek seedlings was covered in weeds.

I managed to keep the weeds in check until a few weeks ago, but it was a losing battle, and the leeks became overshadowed by enormous unwanted plants.   The dry weather didn't help either, and the tips of the leek leaves were brown from drought.  Time to decide to act or just write it off and treat it as a dead loss.

I had to make space in the garden for them by digging up some of the potatoes.  It's a bit early for that, but the spuds are struggling in the heat and it's nigh on impossible to get water down to root level no matter how often I water them.  so I cleared a strip about a yard wide and 3 yards long.

All you can see of the leeks are the holes that they are hiding in, they are so small.   But I am hoping that, with the fertiliser I have put in the ground, and the water poured down the holes, they will recover.   There is another positive aspect to this approach - I uncovered some potatoes I had missed.

To the left are plastic cloches sheltering Amaryllis bulbs I have put out to benefit from the fertile soil and Summer sun.  To the right are the potatoes that I haven't dug up yet.

Internet Fibre Installation

It is a general truth that, for any complicated system, the more severely it is optimised, the less stable it is in response to perturbation.

Mayenne Fibre is, I believe, a subsidiary of Orange, and, in August of last year, according to their website, a point of access for internet via fibre was available by the road outside our house.   So we bundled into the Orange shop in Laval and after a short while came away with a Livebox suited to fibre internet and phone line, and a promise of a phone call to organise its connection to the fibre network.   Sure enough, a few days later we got a call for a connection in a couple of weeks' time, and could we please be sure to be at home then?   

The day arrived, and with a small amount of difficulty, the installers had the first leg of the 2-leg connection to the house installed in the conduit under the ground.   Problem.   Connecting it to the access point in the street revealed that there was in fact no internet signal to be had there.  So the installers took out the fibre they had already installed and went away.   Then started a 10-month delay that ended yesterday.

In between times, you would not believe the cock-ups that occurred.   The first problem (December? January?) that we noticed was that our ADSL stopped working.  When we contacted Orange they told us that someone had nicked a couple of kilometers of copper cable, and that they would fix it.   They did.   A couple of weeks later it stopped working again, and I am guessing that Orange decided that they had lost enough copper, and told us that they were not going to fix it again.   They gave us an airbox that provides a 4G wireless internet connection (but no RJ45 sockets).   I was able to get our home network configured to give us all the functionality we had before except the local file server that needs an RJ45 connection.   Our archive of photos, music files etc was offline from then until yesterday.

Somewhere along the line our voice phone also stopped working.   When we complained about this we were told that our number didn't exist, which on further investigation, was because, in response to our complaint about non-functioning ADSL, someone had simply disconnected it.    So we have spent the last several months with the landline not working and all calls diverted to Anita's mobile phone.   This isn't a totally bad thing, since we discovered that with the Orange phone app we can block the spam calls we had been getting several times a day.°

And yesterday the internet via fibre arrived.  The livebox is quite a nice bit of tech, the little touch screen seems to be high-contrast e-paper (as in Kindle readers) and the installation was a doddle.   The wifi seems powerful and I have dispensed with the mesh system I had. (I'm keeping it just in case.)  The concept of security is based on physical access to the livebox - if someone breaks into your house, change the password and verify all of your internet security because the password can be displayed via simple button push so a housebreaker can get into your network easy as pie.

Livebox, file server and phone in perfect harmony.   I haven't worked out how to change the SSID of the WiFi yet, though.

° Orange have made the smart move of crowdsourcing their anti-spam service.  If you get an incoming call, you can signal it as spam (or not) and the aggregate of these signals is sent to future recipients of calls from that number.  So if an icoming call flags up as spam you can just reject it (and also block the number if you like)

Public Performance

It was the occasion of the opening of the bistrot for the summer season.  An "open mike" session, and I took it as the first opportunity to play the accordion to an audience outside of the music school.   Not ideal - I had to stop and restart, but on the second attempt I got through the piece OK.   Note to self:  build a repertoire of easy pieces and don't try challenging ones in public.  At least until I am more familiar with the instrument and can recover from mistakes on the fly.

I had thought that the sound of the accordion would carry well outside, but even with mikes it was quite quiet.  It sounds loud enough in the house.

I also played keyboards for my next-door neighbour, who is a fabulous rock singer.   We'll do more of that.

Solar panel aside

The solar panel kit that I bought has two solar panels and is intended for use with two 12V batteries.   The system can be used in parallel at 12V or in series at 24V.   The little instruction booklet explains how to connect batteries in parallel or in series.   The diagram of the parallel one is fine, but I wouldn't follow their advice on the series connection, if I were you.

In fact, if you connect them like in the second picture, the batteries will not just be not included, they might well not be in one piece after a short while.   And watch out for boiling acid.

A Little Solar Project

As we all know, solar panels are wonderful things, despite the fact that we have to wait about 10 years before they have given back all the energy used in making them.   Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

But I need some electricity down by my veg patch, mostly to power a watering pump, but I can use it for other things as well.   Getting a full power mains cable there would be a nightmare, so I decided to try a little solar project.   For less than €350 I got the bits for this installation that gives me just over one kWh of battery storage, plus whatever the sun is providing at the time.   I could probably just use bigger batteries for more power if I needed it.

I'm keeping the wires long since we might be selling up and I don't know where I will be installing this sytem in future.

Robinia Pseudoacacia

It must be 8 - 10 years ago I planted these trees, they were suckers from a tree at the entrance to our place, and about 3 feet high..   They have gone from "someone's planted some trees there" to "there's trees there".   This is the first year they have flowered prolifically.  Cool.