Moving forward again

It was exactly two weeks today since the passing of my lovely old Toddie. I still miss him terribly, and there will be an enormous hole in my life for a long time to come, but I now feel that I have to begin making the effort to start moving forward again.

Exactly a week ago, after having had a wonderful friend come to stay with me until the Saturday when she had to return home, I went out for a walk and had the pleasant surprise of meeting some new English friends who live only a mile or so from my house, for the first time. Much of the rest of last week I spent either indoors in front of my wood burner or outside in the garden cutting wood for it, exactly the kind of things that I needed to do. I found out from the internet how to go about sharpening the chain on my chain saw and was very pleased with the results. However, after yesterday chopping up the final logs from the last dead tree that I got from my garden and then going on to chop down another, when I went to sharpen the chain again I found that the exhaust system was hanging off the chain saw that I only bought less than two months ago. So I ended up having to finish off the job by hand and I hope that when I return the saw to Brico Depot tomorrow they can sort something out pretty quickly because as I type this on Sunday evening, I’m coming to the end of my stock of chopped wood.

The last few days have been cold and bright with little wind, following below-zero temperatures overnight. As a result, the ground has become so cold that it has become covered with a blanket of advection fog in the form of ground-hugging mist. I’ve watched the situation closely and although the hillside opposite, where Galinat is situated, has always taken longer to clear as it is north-west facing and therefore gets the benefit of the sun later, I thought that I’d have a fair chance of getting up in the air today. So after wrapping myself up well and picking up some fuel on the way, I went over there with the idea of flying for an hour or so at about 1.30 pm, when the temperature was forecast to be at its maximum. But it was to no avail because on arrival, it was immediately apparent, as shown by the following pics, that much of the field was still frozen under heavy ground-frost.

The shots show my X-Air, 56NE, and my friend Regis’s Zenair that he bought as a wreck and spent the last 18 months repairing to fully airworthy condition. It’s up for sale now at around half the usual price of a Zenair if anyone’s interested. As can be seen in the pics, the main area affected by the frost was where the aircraft are parked. However, I thought that although I could have taken off, I’d have been faced with considerable problems afterwards getting the aircraft safely back up the slope to its parking position (note the wheel-spin marks left by my car in the first pic when I got stuck just turning round on the up-slope). I therefore decided not to risk it and to leave it to another day, hopefully this coming week, which is forecast to start with several more clear, bright days. One idea I’ve had is to move my aircraft round to the other side of the existing hangar (see the pics) which is flatter and therefore easier to manoeuver the aircraft on, especially if the ground is a bit slippery. Usually we prefer to leave that area as parking for visiting aircraft but I don’t think that that’s a major consideration at this time of the year.

I’d like to finish off this post with a picture of my Toddie, the last I took of him. It was taken at the end of October while I was experimenting with my new Lumix camera but I had forgotten about it and only came across it today.

Good bye for now my lovely old dog. Rest easy.