Nothing much to report

Well, we're back, and - as the title of this post tells you - I've nothing much to report.  I had planned to do a fair bit of work while over in France.  I'm not sure if it's the paint I have been using or my inability to apply it correctly, but the new gates I made back in 2003 when we bought the cottage, have had to be replaced as the paint shrunk and split, allowing water to get into the timber.  So, each gate has been replaced over the past few years, but when we were over there last, I noticed that the paint was splitting again.  Apart from the expense involved in buying them, I don't think the latest thing in plastic gates would look right, even though they seem to be all the rage the other side of the Channel.  I decided that what I really needed to do was strip the paint off and start again from bare wood, this time using one of the new, coloured wood preservers.  So I bought be an electric paint stripper and a couple of cans of wood preserver, reckoning on stripping a gate in two days.  There are two gates, so this would mean I could get the job completed while we were there for a week.

All went well the first day.  The sun didn't actually shine very much, but it didn't rain and I got half of one gate stripped.  By which I mean that the green gloss top-coat came off.  The primer, however, was a different matter and there was most of it still clinging to the wood.  The next morning, I was still puzzling how best to deal with this when I saw it had started to rain.  And it continued, on and off, all day.  On day three, my shoulder was agony.  A whole day stripping paint had caused the arthritis to swell up.  It has more or less cleared up again now - but that was the end of the paint stripping.  That gate is now off its hinges and sitting in the shed till our next visit.

I'm told I should get my car back this afternoon, just two days short of five weeks since the accident.  We live in hope.