I don't seem to have done much today.

Mind you, that's not very much of a surprise considering that I managed to sleep through all of the alarms in here this morning and was ... errr ... somewhat late in raising myself from the dead. In fact, much of the morning was spent sorting out the wood that is leaning against the end wall of the barn, and then sawing up a dozen or so lengths.

The strange thing is that while the woodpile is slowly increasing, the number of lengths standing up against the wall doesn't seem to have changed. Perhaps I have hit upon the secret of the self-reproducing wood supply - something similar to the Irishman, granted two wishes by his fairy godmother, asked for a bottle of Guinness that refilled itself every tilme you poured some out of it.
"And your second wish?" enquired the fairy godmother.
"I'll have another one of those bottles".

This afternoon I carried on with the wiring in the upstairs of the lean-to. Most of that time was spent looking for equipment of course, but I now have two lights and two pairs of 12-volt power sockets. They are all wired up, but they aren't wired into the circuit of course - I need to drill a 40mm hole right through the stone wall into the house to do that, and that's something that is going to have to wait for a bit. I've a drill that will do it - a 1050-watt SDS drill, but with the current that it draws, you need a briliiantly sunny day. And while a strange golden thing did pop out from behind a cloud for 5 minutes, it's been about 9 days since we have seen the sun. It shows just how lucky I was with that little dry spell that enabled me to do the roof of the lean-to.  

Long-term readers of these pages in one of its several predecessor forms will recall that I bought 2 x 400-watt wind turbines from the manufacturers in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 2002. One of them flies proudly above the barn but the other one is in the back of the barn because the blades on these turbines are rather brittle and I've ended up having to make up one set out of the two that I had originally. And the manufacturers never ever replied to any of my mails asking about buying s new set of replacement blades. So a couple of weeks ago I bit the bullet and contacted a company in the USA that makes parts for home-build wind turbines, and I've bought a set of blades from them, complete with hub, to fit on the other wind turbine. In what was left of my working day, I've assembled the blades onto the hub unit and what I intend to do tomorrow is to resurrect the abandoned wind turbine and stick the blade and hub assembly onto it, and then  shove it onto a pole somewhere where it will catch the wind. These blades have the lowest drag co-efficient of any after-market wind turbine blades and so I'll be interested to see just how they perform.