Post Christmas Somnolence

26th & 27th December

It's not long before I shall be starting the 2008 blogs, and shortly after that it will be a twelvemonth since I started blogging. Amazing how time flies.

Yesterday we had a lazy start – it was just possible that the Brycelands and Nocturne's crew would turn up, but they didn't (Sheila and I had a disagreement about which day Nocturne was leaving – looks like I was right.)

It was a grey old day, which was a shame – there were, as usual for Boxing Day, a load of walkers on the towpath, and the car parks and local roads were jammed solid. When I walked down the road to get a paper later in the day, there were a lot of horse boxes around, too. It wasn't clear whether there was to be a hunt meeting, or just an organised ride.

We took a load of recycling to the tip first thing – it was very quiet at that point, though no doubt busier later in the day.

We didn't exert ourselves much beyond this – after lunch I did the catch up blog that I would normally have done the day before, but apart from that we read and ran a washload and stuff.

Today was a warm, damp start, after a windy night. About the middle of the morning Dave and Margaret turned up with family to take Nocturne away, and we had a chance to say hi to Iain and Luisa who were seeing them off.

During the morning I had a call from Klaus on Sebeq. They were moored at High Lane, and we arranged for them to come down and tie outside us once Nocturne had moved off.

Nocturne set off at around half eleven, winding outside the yard and heading for Macclesfield – they are planning a trip up the Llangollen. It wasn't a very nice day, I'm afraid, blowing with a steady rain, but they seemed cheerful enough. Once they'd gone, we backed onto the water point and filled up whilst running another washload. Sheila's washing schedule had got well behind during our ice bound stay on the Deeps, so she's trying to catch up before the kids descend for New Year.

By the time the tank was full and we'd pulled back onto the shop mooring it was lunchtime. In the afternoon, first Arcturus turned up looking for water, and shortly after, Sebeq. We had a quick chat with Phil and Pat on Arcturus, and then were invited for a) tea and b) dinner with Klaus and Helga.

During tea I showed them Elanor's fiendish bottle puzzle, but they were no more able to solve it than we have been. At this rate, we're not going to be able to do it before she arrives with the answer.

After tea we went back to Sanity, and I cut Sheila's hair before she had a shower. I'm going to extract the bottle from the puzzle in the cheating way so we can drink the contents tonight, and then put the empty back in the beast to keep working on it. Elanor may not be pleased but the wine looks too nice to resist.