It's all go - nearly - (at the moment)

Posted by Simon

I was going to do a post on our lovely weekend but first...........

........the washing machine is now whizzing around on the spin cycle and I've never seen anyone so pleased to hear that sound again as Rosie. Very kind friends and neighbours have helped us out with the washing, getting the spares and repairing the machine, but you do feel as if you are being a nuisance after a while.

The mini digger is back in action too. We took the part into the repair shop this morning at 9:15 - the man looked at the part and said he would be unable to repair it immediately. 'Quand?' we asked, expecting a french shrug and a couple of weeks - the reply instead took us totally by surprise - 'by midday today!' So we waited in town, did some shopping, got some flowers for our neighbour for helping with the washing and enjoyed a relaxing cup of coffee. After picking up the repair we then dropped the flowers off and, of course, had to have the obligatory aperitif! But I did get the digger up and running before lunch. (A late lunch admittedly!)

After lunch I did a couple of other little repair jobs before changing the bucket on the digger to carry out another job. This is when I noticed steam rising out of the engine compartment. Oh great. The fan belt had split and needed replacing. Oh great - not the easiest of jobs on a mini digger.

The job I had needed the other bucket for was to find out why the bath/shower water was over flowing by the corner of the house. I hoped that we would have a new septic tank in by now so had been ignoring this problem, but it was getting too bad to leave any longer. I started to dig it out by hand but soon got bored of that, so I rushed out, managed to get a new fan belt and got the digger going again. Digging by machine was much quicker and I soon discovered that the drainage pipe was blocked solid. Tomorrow I'm going to have to do a temporary job until I get the new septic tank in.

Now I smell like an old sewer, the mower still needs fixing and I haven't done my french homework!!!!!! Oh, and a post on our lovely weekend. Sorry but it's shower time now and then a Kir or (and) a beer. Bit of good news through - whilst digging out the blocked pipes I found my rods which I lost down the network of pipes nearly 2 years ago!