So what’s new?

We’re now slipping into Autumn here in the Dordogne and suprisingly quickly compared to previous years since I’ve been here. Quite a few leaves have already fallen and we’ve experienced a bit of a cold snap over the last week or so which has made me turn the heating on during the evenings and sometimes during the day as well to keep my house at a reasonable temperature.

Some of that is due to my health – I’ve found that I’m now experiencing the cold more as well as the heat when I didn’t too much before – but hopefully that won’t be forever.

I’ve had some good news on the health front. My consultant told me a week or so ago that according to the last scan, I’m effectively cured as there are now no signs of the disease, although they will continue with the treatment as scheduled as they must do to make sure. So that was good news.

However, the scanner expert picked up another small anomoly that they don’t think is serious but needs to be investigated. So in the event the news was a bit mixed and life will continue for now much as it has done for the past few months.

The main result of that, of course, was that I completely missed out on Summer – flying, going out to eat, meeting friends and especially going out to the local ‘marchés gormands’ (gormet markets).

These are where a whole range of food providers gather in a car park or some other area in a village or commune and you go around them all picking and choosing what they have on offer to make up whatever meal you want. And then you sit with all your friends to enjoy their company, the food you’ve just bought and as much cheap wine as you can drink. They are a highlight of the Summer down here and I’ve really missed not being able to go to any this year.

But the main thing that I’ve missed is the flying, not having been airborne since late April. The buyer for 56NE, my X-Air, didn’t materialise but I’m not too worried about that right now. It would have been nice as then I could have replaced it in the barn at Malbec with 28AAD, my Weedhopper, but I’ve waited a year since I completed the work on that and it became flyable so a few more weeks won’t matter.

But my main concern, of course, is 77ASY, my Savannah. Due to my health, the nose wheel work still hasn’t been completed so its new propeller is also still unfitted and leaning against the back of the sofa in my lounge. There’s only a tiny bit of work to be done to secure the nose wheel faring and adapt the mountings for a tow-bar, but I just haven’t been able to do it. Hopefully that situation will also change in the coming weeks.

On a lighter note to finish, as I mentioned in a previous post, because I’v been ‘confined to barracks’ for much of my time over the past weeks in order to avoid the chance of infection, much of my time has been involved with X-Plane 11, the latest version of that particular PC flight simulator, which I greatly enjoy.

In past years I used to create airport and airfield sceneries for Microsoft FS2004 and FSX but lost interest, but my surfeit of ‘spare time’ over recent weeks has renewed my interest in the genre and I began working on several local sceneries for X-Plane.

The main one was LF4722 Castillonnès in the Lot et Garonne where I was signed off for my French licence and I was very pleased when I finally completed it a few days ago. I put together some shots of the new scenery for a flight simulator forum of which I’m a member but I won’t include them in this post, which is now long enough. Instead I’ll put them into a ‘special’ post probably next time, which will include just them.