Equipment News

Monday turned out to be a busy day. We got up early so we could go to the vets in the nearby town to find out if we needed to make an appointment for the cat's regular/annual injections. No problem, just turn up. We tried to do a quick bit of Christmas shopping, but nearly all of the shops stay shut on a Monday, certainly the shops we wanted. But, in looking in shop windows, I saw a poster for a music evening, 'Christmas Blues'. We found the hotel where it is to be held and it is run by English chaps. We have decided to go on Friday night to the gig, but we have to have a traditional English Christmas dinner! We wouldn't normally eat this, even in England! And I expect the place will be full of English! I bet you won't get French people eating Turkey and all the trimmings! But, in the spirit of broadening our social life, we're going to give it a whirl.

We did all of this and still managed to get back home before 11am. I needed to line the Satellite dish with the sun at 11am French winter time in an attempt to find Astra 2, which is the one broadcasting english TV. Our german friends had left the dish they used for receiving german tv and we feel that we ought to try to set up english tv before our son Guy gets home from South Korea the week before Christmas - although we don't seem to have time to miss watching it.

As luck would have it, we had only just returned home when Sue spotted a lorry looking lost.

It was the lorry delivering our mini-digger which we had bought on ebay. We had been told that the delivery company would phone us the day before, so it was very lucky that we were in when the lorry arrived.

The first problem was that the 'mini-pelle' is heavy and the lorry was on a slope. We realised that as soon as we got it rolling we wouldn't be able to stop it disappearing off the end of the lorry!




















Then the lorry driver had problems with the tail-lift! We eventually succeeded in persuading him to turn the lorry round so that we (all 3 of us) could get the digger on to the lift. Having got it on to the ground, the driver obviously knew how to drive a digger. He started it up, and drove it off it's pallet. All that was left to do was tip him and then learn by trial and error how to move the digger so I could get it off the road.


















In all honesty, the digger is very easy to drive, although it remains to be seen how easy actually using it for digging will be. I managed to move it safely into one of our 'caves' so that it could be locked up out of sight.

All that was now left for me to do was to sweep the road and start repairing the damage to the grass verges. At least I have got all winter to do this before our neighbours return!

However...... still plenty of daylight left. Just before the lorry arrived, our neighbour Bernard had come over to tell us that he had talked to his friend who is a scrap metal dealer ( we mix with the nicest of people) and they would remove the old agricultural equipment we had salvaged out of the hedges. And 'gratuit'. But they were afraid that they would churn up our field. So.....Sue and I did our human donkey impressions and brought all of the scrap metal over to the road. At this point we called it a day.