The roof leaked when it rained hard, and needed repair after every Winter. Time for a new roof. We have a very good roofer lives in the village, and we booked his services earlier in the year.
We also bought the material to fix the price in these days of high inflation. We were lucky to have done so. The recent hailstorm smashed about half the roofs in the area, and he has work now to last through 2024. He started work here last week, and has done the first side.
One of the things you can do with a hybrid car (or an electric one) is charge it up at a public charging station. For whatever reason, you can't wander up to any old charger, wave the credit card at it and charge up (like you can for a tank of petrol). Oh, no, you need to subscribe to a service, pay for a special membership card, and then use only those chargers that accept it. A great step forward, I'm sure you will agree.
Regardless, it happens that our local Leroy Merlin, a DIY chain, has two chargers in the car park (solar powered, how green can you get?), each good for two cars. So we thought we'd check out our new charger membership card to see what happens. (The first first) We waved the membership card at the first charger and it told us it wasn't acceptable. Oh well we thought, perhaps our card isn't good for this station. But we tried it on the other one and it worked. We plugged the car in and went into the shop.
We were in there for about half an hour, came out and unplugged the car. I think we got abot 4Km extra electric range in that time.
The second first was parking the car in a confined space using the backward-looking camera. This will take a bit of getting used to, regarding the scale, but it did work well enough.
We got home and looked up our charger card account to see how much the charge at Leroy's cost us. It was free! Can't be bad. Unfortunately, we worked out that lingering in the shop over a coffee, say, so the car could charge up a bit more, would result in spending more money than the value of the electricity. Still, I'm not complaining.
I believe that "influenced by no-one" is Peugeot's strapline for the new 308 hybrid. I haven't seen any ads myself so I don't know, but in any case I hope it doesn't mean they've been ignoring all the customer feedback they've been accumulating over the years. Regardless, my old 308CC was showing its age and I traded it in for a 308 hybrid rechargeable. Here's a few impressions.
First and foremost, it's a fine car to drive. Quick, quiet, with good handling and light steering with good feedback. A very nice drive. Could be that it's quicker than the old 308CC, but perhaps with slightly more wallow (but not much in any case).
The on-board electronics takes some getting used to. It's complicated. It took us about 45 minutes on the way home from the garage to work out how to turn the radio off. After ages spent pressing icons on the screen we discovered an honest-to-God knob that you press to turn the radio on/off, and turn to adjust the volume. Just like the real thing!
I'm not sure about some of the driver assist functions. If you engage the cruise control, by default you get the "safe distance" management system that stops you getting too close to the car in front. You do get to choose the distance between close, medium and far, but that's it, as far as I can tell. Problem is (driving on the right) if you are following a right-hand curve and there's oncoming traffic, the system can think you are about to collide, and (sometimes) brakes quite hard. Similarly if curving left and there's a line of stationary cars to your right it can think you are going to hit them and brakes hard. Both of these have happened to me, and I think it's dangerous. I have to disable this function every time I set off.
There's lane assist too, to keep you on the straight and narrow. It defaults to "on". Problem is, I drive a lot down narrow country lanes with tall grass to the side. If there's an oncoming vehicle, I have to pull off onto the verge, and the lane assist tries to put me back into the path of the oncoming vehicle. I think it's dangerous, and I have to disable this function every time I set off.
Despite the fact that the screen tells you "hybrid system loaded" when you start, the default is electric only and you have to choose hybrid to use the I/C engine when needed.
So in setting off, I have to:
This rose, a gift from Leo in the form of a cutting, has grown and is flowering profusely in the garden.
We have a wood-burning stove, so we keep a stack of wood. It's outside since we don't have a barn. We need to keep it dry, and we have tried various systems for this; we still haven't found the ideal solution, but I'm hoping that this latest trick will work.
It's best to keep the wood off the ground so the damp doesn't rise into it. We had a few tin roofing panels left over from a project, and we put them on the ground, with the wood on top. This seems to work well, and the channels in the tin allow any water that gets in, to run off.
Keeping the rain off is a different problem, and we have put cheap tarpaulins on the top, but keeping them in place is a problem. If we tie them down, it can be hard to get at the wood, and the height of the pile reduces as we take the wood off. So we either have to keep tightening the ropes, or accept slack ropes and a floppy tarpaulin. We can weigh the tarpaulin down with rocks, but strong winds lift the tarpaulin and flick the rocks off, and then the rain gets to the wood.
We found a guy giving away some tatty roof tin panelling that meets our needs, and we are using it as a test of a new system. I got some stainless steel eyes that I am bolting to the tin, and will use elastic rope to hold the tarpaulins down. I can't put the bolts on the existing tin under the wood since I need to get behind the tin to tighten the bolts, but if this system works, I'll do that in stages as the wood gets used.
Well, not brand new, since I bought it second-hand, but new to me*. Since my solo instrument (flute) no longer works for me, and I can "do" keyboards, I'm thinking that this might well represent a new opportunity for soloing. At the moment I'm exploring the sounds, and playing along to some of the tracks I used to play along to with the flute. Some work better than others.
It hangs from the player's neck by a strap, and is played with the right hand. The left hand operates the switches, pitch control and effects. It's a Roland Ax-Edge, a specific example of a Keytar.
*The French make a clear distinction between brand new, and new-to-me. Neuf or neuve indicates brand new, and nouveau or nouvelle indicates new to me. So if someone is saying "My Dad's got a new car", they will describe it as a voiture neuve if it's fresh from the showroom, and if it's a used car, they'll use nouvelle voiture.
We had a goodly hail storm chez nous this morning. The plants have suffered a bit but will recover. But it looks like I'll have to remake the cold frame lid with stronger material.
