somtimes things go well....

Today if I were honest did not start well. Bethan had to be in work by 7.30 meaning daddy had to bus her there getting up at silly o clock.



No coffee for me, well barely a mouthfull and dropped the lady off back to a nice tepid drink.


But it's good though, her first proper day in work and her first pay packet. She was well chuffed to come home a couple of hours later with 27 pounds in her little hand.


Now the very first thing she did was put some money in her mums money box because she had run out of
money about a month back and mum had been slipping her money here and there ever since.


How much of her 27 pound do you think she gave her mum?



£5, £10, £15, no she kept a fiver and gave her mother the rest.




And much to her delight she had a call tea time, would she go into work this weekend.



Oh great 7 AM start for me again.



R

Branwen on her throne

If you can work out what she was thinking when she built this you are doing better than me....

A few weeks worth of wood though.

Eventfull times

As a general rule life here is pretty interesting most of the time.


This last few days it really has been head down and chainsaw out most of the time. The chansaw has a new chais which is a big plus. You can keep a chainsaw sharp but the chain is never quite as good as when it is brand new.

We have probable processed the best part of 3 tons of wood this last few days our woodshed is piled right to the ceiling Probably a couple of months supply.

Around all this normal life has been going on with P back for the weekend and Gwion inviting one of his mates from school over yesterday, necessitating a trip to the cinema in the afternoon which in turn meant half an hour outside pouring cooking oil into the 806.

I have been working with a real war veteran a 1940  Elwell splitting axe that has a series of nicks in the blade and marks on the shaft that hint at a distinguished past in the war. Tools of this era are superb, the quality is exceptional and the balance is perfect.  It's a delight to hold and to use.

Unless of course you are splitting really stubborn oak or some stuff that is still a bit to wet to burn.

But anyway, having done all the cinema type stuff it was time to take Gwions mate home, something Branwen and management set off to do in Mr Tick the AX.

With the light falling

They had been gone some little time when the phone rang announcing doom in the middle of a busy roundabout. Mr Tick had stopped and refused to start. Blocking the roan and they were sat there in chaos.

Did any of the throng think a bit stop their cars and help push the car out of the way, no - that was probably to much thinking for one day.

So anyway I phoned the RAC breakdown service, if they were having problems with non thinking motorists the call centre worker I dealt with was from another planet.

He had never heard of a Citroen AX - I was starting to get worried.

This was George Bush level geography, he had never heard of Pembrokeshire,  he seemed a bit puzzled when I said it was in Wales.


I  had to resort to giving him locations in phonetic language as he didn't seem to be able to spell at all.

He said he was going to help me by looking up the location on google maps.

So of course I opened google maps and found the spot very quickly.

Gave him the coordinates and frankly he just seemed confused.

When I had completed everything I set off to the rescue.

I was tempted to take a GG but thought better of it.

Half way there the RAC guy was on the phone, he could not find them, then how could he, he was half a mile away from where I had spelled out, in words of one syllable, they were at    

So anyway I turned up and he had solved the problem.

Well OK maybe, we set off for home and I could not help noticing that the lights were not quite brilliant in fact as the trip went along they were getting less and less bright.

Eventually the AX ground to a halt.
  
So I pulled the 806 in and used the jump leads to dump lots of charge into the battery.

Which got us nearly home, it would have had we not met a bunch of boy racers outside the village who knew how to drive very fast forwards but the mysteries of reverse had passed them by.

So of course, to relax we got the chainsaw out this morning and ripped lots of wood apart then I spent a while with the axe splitting big oak blocks.

Everyone slaved with barrows and making stacks

For some reason I am feeling tired. 

R
 

Open wallet surgery.

There are times in life when the wallet has to be open.



Having had tremendous success this year with the big Euroheat log burner in our living room we decided the central heating for the bit next door is going to have to be wood.



The choice of supplyer was a given  - Beacon Stoves they are not the cheapest but get hold of them, tell them what you need heated and they will come up with a suggestion that works.




We have bought a total of 4 stoves off them,  today another 2 thousand pound order went in.







The wallet was open the surgery painfull but has now been done.




We got a good discount not because we had shopped elsewhere but because we had no intention of doing so.

Lunch in a pub and then home. 





 Monster chain saw session followed; loads of work was done in a very short time.



Then, off went the management for a run out to Daycastle  which left me to cook tea.



Lets draw a veil. Chilli it was supposed to be, but chilly is not a proper description. By god my head near blew right off, but of course I could not flinch as I was the one saying this was tea.



I think the children are getting worried, she is going to be in university for 3 years - will they survive!!!



R

I live with a student....

It is official, she has managed the online maze of registration and she is now officially a student.



I remember those heady days, the relentless party every weekend, I am not sure I will cope but I look forward to trying.



Unless of course she does not invite me.



R

AGA Lout

The AGA is one of those wonderful devices that really cannot be beaten.  Ours is a really ancient item maybe even as old as 1930. Imagine how many normal cookers would have come through the house in that period of time.



Every thing though does have a life span and our old AGA has seen it's best days.



Originally AGAs were solid fuel stoves and pretty efficient ones at that, these days they are often run on oil or gas. Ours was converted to oil a long while back and the conversion is perhaps not one of the best.

They are fantastic things when they are working properly, long time readers will have spotted the crucial words in that sentence. Today has been quite a day...



In truth they do  need servicing every year or so. We just ran ours till the tank was empty and so having invested nearly 1000 pounds in oil there was no point even thinking of just sticking a match in the hole, everything needed to come apart.


That is not quite as easy as it sounds. The main internal bit of an AGA is a dirty great casting called a bell. This weighs about 50 kilos and has to be lifted vertically through about a metre to get it out.



The only way to grip is is via a hole in the middle which is just about big enough to get your hands into.





Having heaved the thing out you can get in and at the burner. This is a pretty simple affair which has to be cleaned.


This might be a good time to mention soot. Heating oil soot is a really special material. It has greater adherance than any known glue and can pass through solid materials where there are no gaps.





This is only really produced in any quantity when something is not working right as in, say, when you run out of oil..   

When an aga burner is working well the paraffin evaporates and burns, over time though a heavier residue builds up in the bottom of the burner and it's supply pipe. This is not a problem as the areas are very hot, the gel stays liquid and the paraffin passes through it.  Stop the heat though and the stuff turns to a solid blob of carbon which requires drilling out.

So much stripping and drilling took place but each time the flow really wasn't right.

Several hours profanity and repeated strip downs I realised that something I thought was metal was actually a big lump of carbon blocking the the pipe.

The inside of the machine also contained a formidable amount of ash some of which went over the top, some on the floor but most attached itself to the nearest warm moving object - me.

Which in turn meant that one those occasions when I went for a break, management could trace my progress footstep by footstep and even identify exactly where it was I decided  to sit.
 
Perhaps it might also  help if I explained how you  set an AGA burner.

The burner itself needs to be level, now,. I am not refering to level as in a wall or kitchen unit. This is a sort of "level" that is beyond the average spirit level in terms of accuracy.

So, you have got that far and you reassemble the burner with 2 very large round wicks and 4 steel burner frames taking extreme care lest any slight nudge or knock push it off true.

Then of course there are the connections to the fuel pipes. Paraffin is a very light fuel and it likes to escape, so all the joints have to be properly secure because paraffin would far rather escape and be a puddle on your kitchen floor than do anything usefull like burn and go up the flue.

I am not saying these joints need to be sealed, but there are airlocks on the space shuttle that are more porous than the connections on our AGA.

So of course I did this all 3 times today.

Then I put the bell back in and the thing would not light, and of course  we were  running out of matches 

 Persuaded it to light and it  started  running backwards, lots of black soot was going into the kitchen.

This did nothing to enhance  the managements serene calm.

Coming on top of the previous events I began to suspect she was getting very slightly annoyed.

So anyway we turned the stove off and I removed the bell again, but of course with the burner having been on the bell was a little bit warm.

Rodded and vaccumed the top flues which produced a seriously impressive extra load of ash which duly went to places other ashes cannot reach.

So at the current state of play AGA is off

Getting the AGAologist in would have cost 80 quid, she is starting to say it would have been cheaper.

R

Rain stopped play.

 A good start to the day with lots of wood in the shed possibly even a month and a halfs supply cut now which is OK, need lots more doing and having her nibs in uni will limit our chopping time severely.




The scrap man turned up also and we had a huge tidy up of scrap metal, and he parted with money too, which is allways good.

Bye bye to my beloved old Land Rover, Lilly, a 1960 vintage series II ex army land rover . We were quite famous for a while as I wrote for the off road comics in the 80's and 90's when Land Rovers were not viewed as the devils devices and despoliers of the rights of way.

But today hope finally died and Lilly was taken away, she broke in half as she was loaded onto the trailer, poor old thing.

Land Rovers are not really like other cars, you develop a  relationship with a Land Rover that is individual. Lilly was the chariot that took me and the management off on our earliest adventures together.

I do however still have Lillys engine and well I do have a vehicle that it can go into.

Maybe I have a project to get on with.

R