And so after my day off on Friday ...

... yes, I decided that my day off this week would be Friday, and for a variety of reasons too.

Firsty, since I moved on from PSP for my image resizing, I've been having issues with my thumbnails. Even at 93x140 , about 1/40th the size of the full-size images, they have been finishing up at about 60kb - about half the size of the full-size images. I've tried everything that I can but I couldn't resize them pro-rata and in the end I gave up.

But messing around on PSP doing something quite different, I suddenly hit on how to do it - and once I'd worked it out I was off. There were over 5000 images to edit but I could do it in batches, but that was still 24 batches - one for each month - and it took forever. Mind you it was worth it, the space I've saved on my hard drive and on my web hosting.

Second reason was that I've had another idea about refining my water collection. Is this the 6th or the 7th idea that I've had? What has prompted this is the fact that the herb pots at the front of the verandah are waterlogged - seems like the water is overflowing the guttering again.

The trap isn't collecting the dirt like it's supposed to, due to where I've had to site it and the dirt is flowing down the tube and blocking the filter. I had an idea about fitting larger, full-size guttering, having a T-downspaout with the drop arm as the sump and the cross piece as the water pipe and with there being 80mm pipe on that, feeding straight into the settling chamber. You'll see what I mean tomorrow as that is what I'll be doing - refitting it all.

And so with this in mind I went to Commentry today and bought everything that I need. Cost me an arm and a leg again but I ought to be getting used to this by now. And on the way home I thought of yet another potential improvement. But I'll worry about that later.

And while I was in Commentry I spent a small fortune too - a lot of which went on toys. Well, you might remember that I bought an excentric sander for my workshop a few weeks ago - and LIDL was selling off its stock of sanding discs - 30 in a box and all for €1:00 a pack. At that price I had to clean out the store as I'll get through a pile of them when I'm bodyfilling. There were a few other toys as well and it all adds up.

One thing I did do was to buy some ready-mixed bread mix. My baker is on holiday and so when I cook my pizza on Sundays I can experiment with making bread. This ready-mixed stuff should make it easier.

And what I didn't do is spend any money in Centrakor or Les Bonnes Affaires - and that must be an event worth recording too - it's probably never happened before.

The swimming baths at Neris were crowded but it was all good fun. So hot was it that the sides of the baths were opened to the air. And I had to wait ages for my private shower - there was a queue.

A report on the other new toys - the SatNav and the new electric coolbox from Tuesday. The satnav doesn't display the speed at which I'm travelling and doesn't have an audible speed alarm. That's a major issue - it's not half as good as the LIDL one, wherever that might have gone to, but apart from that it does everything else that it's supposed to. And strange as it might seem, when I switched it to American English I was reunited with my old friend the Lady Who Lives in the Magellan SatNav that I bought in Canada. Yes, it is she. It's just like old times now in Caliburn, with me, she and Strawberry Moose. I'm half-expecting Casey to turn up next.

The coolbox is impressive. An icecream left in there for over an hour was still unfrozen - and that was inside the cab of Caliburn with the outside temperature of over 30 degrees. The frozen stuff had defrosted after 5 hours but was still pretty cold, and so I suppose that this is doing what it is supposed to. I'll wire that permanently into Caliburn now and they can live happily ever after.

Tomorrow morning I'm helping Marianne at Roche d'Agoux, there's the brocante at Arpheuilles - first of the year, and then there's the new water system to fix. Good job I had the day off on Friday.