24th & 25th September
With shopping rather than boating to do, we made a lazy start yesterday, and walked down into Macclesfield at around nine. One of the first stores we found was Waterstone's, where, however, we were doomed to disappointment.
I'd planned to buy Sheila the Sony Reader for her next birthday, but it turns out that the smaller Waterstone's aren't stocking it "for security reasons". Sheila thought this was fair enough, but it seemed a bit feeble to me. We were able to agree that it was no excuse not to have at least one as a demonstrator, since it's not the sort of thing many of us would choose to buy on-line without first at least holding one in your hands to form an opinion about it.
If it proves to be all it's cracked up to be, it could do for our book storage problem what the iPod has done for the CD problem, that is, eliminate it. History seems so far to be repeating itself, in that the big difficulty is the price and poor availability of material. Ironically, the Waterstone's site is especially difficult to use to buy eBooks, but there are several other legit sources, and I suspect (though I won't patronise them myself) that if the eReaders take off the way MP3 players did, there'll soon be a lot of unlicensed copies of books available.
After all, the technology for scanning a book into pdf format is already available, and the Sony Reader displays pdfs as well as its native file format.
Be that as it may, back at the boat, after a much more successful raid on Julian Graves for dried foods of all kinds, another search of the Waterstone's website elicited the info that the Burton branch is stocking the thing, so we will possess ourselves with patience until we get back there.
After this burst of energetic activity, the rest of the day was spent rather more somnolently. I did an account of the Owners' Weekend to send out to the magazines as a news story, and emailed it to Braidbar for their comments, and to see if they had any photos to use with it.
During the afternoon first Sebeq and then Cala came by, and Cala hovered for a while for a chat before boating into the distance, determined, it seems, to get down Bosley before the end of the day. Since it was already late afternoon, this seemed a bit ambitious to us, but today we tied by them at Congleton (though there was nobody aboard) so I guess they made it.
Apparently, they are now reading this blog by mobile phone, which is a bit cool.
Today was very different. We wanted to get down Bosley ourselves, and on to the Little Moreton Hall mooring. Sheila decided she fancied some early morning boating, so, although it was my turn to steer, she nobly leapt out of bed at seven, whilst I was making the first thing tea, and set off.
After getting washed, dressed and breakfasted, I took over so that she could get eat too. This meant that we made the run from Gurnett to the top of Bosley by nine, and some good teamwork took us down the flight in around an hour and three quarters.
By twelve we were tied at Congleton for lunch, just behind the locked up Cala. Off we went again, and got to our destination by half two, having taken six hours for the whole run, plus an hour for lunch.
More internet type stuff has been undertaken this afternoon, and Sheila has washed out the plant pots which held the summer flowers. When they are dry, they'll go away for the winter under the well deck. While I was spell checking this, Cala came past again, heading for Scholar Green for the night. They looked remarkably fit, considering they'd spent the evening before drinking with Klaus and Helga on Sebeq.
Tomorrow, we'll do it all again, so as to get through Harecastle and Stoke and down to Barlaston in one move.
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