Boating in the teeth of the wind, fractiously

4th & 5th December

With no great pressure to get up and get on, yesterday we loafed in bed until nearly half nine. After breakfast we ambled down into Macclesfield and had a relaxed bout of retail therapy – a new rugby shirt for Sheila, some stickers to enliven the cot side for when Daniel comes to stay, and a trip to Julian Graves for dried fruit and herbs.

The afternoon was spent on the boat, Sheila knitting and myself playing with an alternative mail client, Mozilla Thunderbird. The Mail application that comes with Mac OS X is OK, but a tad limited – you can’t use it to read Usenet newsgroups, you can’t request receipts to your emails, and you can’t use templates in your emails.

It’s always a hassle trying to use a new application when you’re well used to an existing one – time will tell whether this was worth it. At time of writing, I’ve got the main accounts sorted and email signatures created. The address book is sort of imported, but as always, the process has mangled some of the fields, so they’ll have to be corrected as we go along.

In the meantime, if anyone reading this is wondering why our emails have gone all strange, now you know. Normal service will be restored as soon as possible.

Today we sprang rather more readily out of bed and set off to go back to Poynton. This involved going on through two bridge 'oles to wind. For a change, the actual wind wasn’t helping, but I persuaded Sanity to turn round in the end and we set off back.

We stopped on dog poo mooring to do a bit more shopping at Tesco, and then watered before eating lunch.

I’d just taken a happy munch into my first sandwich when there was a sinister cracking noise from within – I’d broken the corner off a molar on a seed in the bap. It’s not actually fallen right out, but is sort of flapping about in there, so tomorrow’s exercise is going to be to find a dentist.

A quick search of the Denplan website shows that there’s a suitable practice in Poynton, so hopefully I’ll only have to put up with this until tomorrow.

We’ve come on to Bollington again for tonight – the weather remains very off and on (that is raining and blowing off and on) so short hops rather than epic trips are indicated for the rest of the week.