What a shower!

Even though it is soon to be the annual conference of an ... errrrr ... organisation (said he, using the term loosely) that featured quite heavily in these pages at one time or another, it is not to that which I am referring.

Neither am I referring to my visitors either. And I use the term in the plural because I had more than one today.

First off at 09:00 this morning, the phone rang and it was Désirée, the local estate agent. And 09:00 too, you might be thinking, but to everyone's surprise, including Yours Truly's, I'd been up for hours. And I mean hours as well. I'd been trying to speak to Désirée for a while and at last she was free and so she came round here for a chat. Amongst the things about which we chatted, and probably the most important, was the building that I own in Montaigut. Long-term readers of these pages will know that I own something like a derelict warehouse there and I use it to keep some cars, namely the Traction, the 2000E and the Mark V Cortina estate. Above it though is a large space that was formerly six large rooms on two levels, but the dividers, both horizontally and vertically, are long gone. I need to do something about this place and converting the upstairs into two apartments is what I have in mind. And so I had a good pick of Désirée's brains - after all, she's the professional.

Another visitor was Bill, who came round with a radio-cassette player out of an old car. There was a tape stuck in it and being an electronic unit you can't get the tape out without power. At least, most people can't get the tape out but with the aid of three long fine-pointed screwdrivers and a pair of fine long-nosed pliers, I can manage to do it. All these years of a misspent youth, that's what I put it all down to.

In between the visits I finally managed to light the fire, the first of the year. And that is busy (even now) disposing of much of the waste wood and the weeds that I have been pulling up this last couple of weeks. You'll notice though that it isn't on the site of where the greenhouse will be. There was far too much stuff to burn, and the trees were overhanging far too much. But I've left some over there - I'll burn that off tomorrow and that should kill off many of the weeds on the site of where the greenhouse will be.

But back to the shower thing. At 18:00 I noticed that the water in the solar water heater was at 31°C today, and that the water in the dump load was off the scale again. So 5 litres of that water into the solar water heater gave me 38.5°C and I had my first home-grown shower of the year. Just for a change I actually feel properly clean.

And I was right about the wind as well.