Saturday, 24 February 2007

Catching up

As might be expected, it's been a busy week. We spent most of Thursday
over at Knutsford, starting on clearing the flat and meeting the man
who's going to take the funeral service on Monday. Sheila's Mum wasn't
religious, and when we said farewell to Sheila's Dad a few years ago,
she asked for a similar service for herself. The guy the undertaker
found met us for about half or three quarters of an hour in the
afternoon and was really good. He's not a humanist, he just tries to
ensure that the funeral represents what both the deceased and the
family wanted.

It's to be a mixture of appropriate music and some poetry (read by
Graeme and I), with a eulogy partly from Peter and Alastair, Sheila's brother and nephew respectively, and
the rest from himself. There will be time for contemplation, and those
attending who do have a faith will be invited to use that time for
private prayer. It's a huge comfort to be in such professional hands.

We took a trip into Macclesfield yesterday (Friday) with two aims in
view, one to stock up at Julian Graves, and the other to sort out our
mobile phones for the year.

Part of my diabetes management (and cooking mania) is to make this
seriously healthy breakfast which consists of home made muesli (sugar
free of course), stewed fruit and EasiYo DIY yogurt. The fruit
components come from JG, and it was time to restock with dried
apricots, dates, prunes and figs. They also do some fruit, nut and seed
mixes that are a great addition to the muesli.

The phone proved to be quite straightforward, as far as these things
ever are. As explained on the website, we connect to the net via an
iBook laptop and mobile phone using a Boaters Phone Company aerial on
the boat roof. Recently we've been using the Orange World deal which
gets unlimited downloads for 24 hours for GBP1. Since we mainly use
Vodafone, this has meant swapping an Orange SIM into phones originally
obtained from Voda, the best of which for the purpose wouldn't take it
as it was network locked. On the other hand, said phone is eighteen
months old, and some of the buttons are becoming erratic.

We therefore trotted into the Voda shop, upgraded the phone in question
to a Nokia 6234, and got them to unlock the old phone. Helpful staff,
fast service, what's wrong? Except, of course, the hassles of sorting
out a new phone, swapping the address book into it, buying some
ringtones (ever noticed how you get fewer and fewer actually on the
phone these days?) and then learning to respond to the new tones when
people ring up. Oh, and laying out GBP20 to Boaters Phone Company for a
new adaptor to attach the phone to the aerial downlead. These latest
phones don't have aerial sockets in the back, so BPC have come up with
an ingenious Velcro attached beast that's supposed to work with any
phone - I hope. More about that later, no doubt, after it's come.

Friday afternoon we pulled out of the yard and actually did a bit of
boating, just up the canal to High Lane, winded there, posted the
letter to BPC ordering this Velcro thing ands boated back to spend the
weekend on a mooring on the canal. This lets the guy whose mooring it
is, and who works for Braidbar, go into the yard to hook up to the
shoreline power supply so's his wife can do the week's laundry.

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