the heat is rising

i can hear all you readers scratching your heads. "why has joker posted a picture of an electrical terminal?" i hear you say. well, as you might imagine there is a story behind this. herself takes quite a few pictures of this nature. they are taken so that, once she has taken whatever electrical item it is to pieces, she knows which wire goes in which place. normally these pictures do not see the light of day but this one perfectly illustrates life chez nous so i stole it for my blog. (for those readers who don't speak french "chez nous" is french for "round at our gaff").

there was one famous occasion when, on a saturday morning, she took the sky box and the telly apart in order to move the telly. (there is a long and rather boring story behind this too - relating to the new sofas and having failed to measure the living room to see if they would fit first, but that is for another day. suffice to say that there was a certain amount of panic about himself going bonkers about not being able to watch the footie). a photo would possibly have saved the day.

anyway, this particular masterpiece of photography also relates to the "moving the living room round for the new sofas" project. a book case has had to be moved to a new home. unfortunately the new home was in front of the thermostat for the central heating. not only did this mean you couldn't reach the dial to turn it up and down but also it made funny readings of how hot it was on account of being behind a bookcase. so it had to be moved.

herself is on holiday this week. it would have been no problem for her to do the thermostat moving in the morning. but she got embroiled in watching films and reading stuff people had written on the net. then we went for walk on the downs and she took lots of pictures of grey sky. so by the time she got round to doing the thermostat it was beginning to get dark. not such a problem, i hear you say. except that the power had to go off so she didn't get zapped.

this job should not have taken long. but half way through the door was knocked by a friend of himself who was dropping off a christmas card. so herself had to down tools and make him a cuppa, which took twice as long as usual as the gas wouldn't light because of the power being off and she couldn't find the matches as they were by the fire with the logs. so by the time she got back to the electrical stuff it was even darker.

then she realised that the hole where the wires came out on one side of the wall was nowhere near the new hole on the other side. and in between was loads of glass fibre insulation. herself said "if only i did knitting i could tape this wire to a knitting needle and thread it through the wall". luckily himself's friend is a man of ideas. "how about a chopstick?" he said. and sure enough a chopstick was just the ticket. in a flash the wire was threaded through the wall. then herself had the tricky task of fitting the thermostat to the wall. as she had butchered the wall so badly trying to reach the wire, the place where the screws would have gone was no more. not to be defeated she turned the thermostat round and fixed it on at 90 degrees as there was still some wall at the top and the bottom. not a problem. the power goes back on and the lights even work. joy all round. especially for himself who came home in the middle of all this.

however, the heating is now on all the time. the thermostat has given up the ghost. then herself remembers that it has a funny mercury switch which works because it tips when the dial turns. now it is permanently tipped. so we have to adjust the heating on the boiler. so she could have simply joined the two wires together and saved all this aggro...

as i say to her on many occasions "stick to the day job..."