{"id":4176,"date":"2013-01-25T19:50:44","date_gmt":"2013-01-25T19:50:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=4176"},"modified":"2013-01-25T19:50:44","modified_gmt":"2013-01-25T19:50:44","slug":"going-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/going-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Going up!"},"content":{"rendered":"

No, I don’t mean the exchange rate, but I’ll come back to that later. It’s my fireplace. We had a lovely fine day yesterday but instead of continuing work on my fireplace, I went off to Brico Depot and bought the wood for my proposed temporary work shelter. Wood, and I think most building materials actually, seem to me to be very cheap here and I bought 13 lengths of ‘demi-chevron’ measuring 63mm x 40mm x 3m for only 2.75\u20ac each. I also bought a hefty 2300W angle grinder (‘meuleuse d’angle’). I’ll need this when I start on the floor tiling and I couldn’t see the point of buying a titchy one as in the future I’ll need it for cutting paving slabs and goodness knows what else.<\/p>\n

So it was today when I completed the next stage of my fireplace work. I had one more concrete block to go into the base, which I knew wouldn’t take very long, and then I had to put the lightweight slabs on top to get the additional height I need. Getting this next level on was my main aim today. The ‘meuleuse d’angle’ came in very handy making it amazingly quick and easy to cut stuff down to the sizes I needed and having started the job just after lunch-time, I was where I wanted to be in time for Toddie to have his dinner only half an hour late. But from the annoyed grunts from that direction, you’d have thought it was much later \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

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I had one ‘You’ve Been Framed’ moment, though. After laying one block onto its bed of soft mortar, I was banging it down to level it up using the handle end of my hammer when I belted it down right onto the tip of my little finger. Fortunately Toddie is quite used to the odd profanity around our house so didn’t bat an eye-lid when I jumped up and down, loudly mouthing the appropriate words \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

I took another look at the exchange rate today and the Pound\/Euro rate had dropped further to 1.17.<\/p>\n

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However, I then took a look at how the Pound is performing against several other key currencies.<\/p>\n

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This was only a quick snap-shot and a proper analysis would need a good look back at trends over a reasonable period, but on the face of it, in the short term, although the Pound is collapsing against the Euro, it’s moving upwards against all of these other currencies, even including the Australian Dollar which I know has been performing very well recently. So what’s going on? Surely the situation vis-a-vis the Euro can’t just be a response to Mr Cameron’s recent speech on the EU, can it? Or to the noises from the usual voices from within the EU saying that ‘the Euro crisis is now over’ when it plainly isn’t? I don’t claim to know, but I am really cheesed off that the currency markets can be so easily led and volatile and can just hope that things are back onto a more realistic footing later in the month when my next pension payment is due to be made \ud83d\ude10<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, I don’t mean the exchange rate, but I’ll come back to that later. It’s my fireplace. We had a lovely fine day yesterday but instead of continuing work on my fireplace, I went off to Brico Depot and bought the wood for my proposed temporary work shelter. Wood, and I think most building materials … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4176"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4185,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4176\/revisions\/4185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}