A bit of stress for once

14th & 15th October

First up, it was good to hear from Sally Ellis in a comment to my last offering! Sheila continues to be thrilled with her Sony Reader. Despite using it a lot, the battery charge indicator had not yet moved from full last time I snuck a look at it. Just to expand on my comment that the limiting factor is the availability of ebooks, it's worth pointing out that there are a lot of alternate sources of supply, not just the big book store websites and Adobe Digital Editions.

Googling for ebook suppliers produces some interesting results, especially the Gutenberg Project and Google Books themselves. The Gutenberg stuff is in .txt format, but calibre easily converts that to a form acceptable to the Reader. The Google stuff is in pdf format, which stays looking a bit small in the Reader, so less useful.

Yesterday we did the Willie Walk, all the while waiting for a call from Elanor in Burton General, where she'd been kept in overnight. Just as we finished the walk, she rang to say that she'd had a CT scan, but probably wouldn't get the results until the next day, i.e. today.

Will promptly offered to run us into Burton after lunch, so that we were able to visit Elanor and collect her car keys. This in turn meant that we were able to extract her car from the hospital car park where it had been all night, and go back to her house to feed the cats and get a change of clothes for her. On arrival at the house, we realised that getting her house key as well as her car key would have been a good idea...

Fortunately, once you've learnt the route, it's not far from the one location to the other. Cats fed and stuff packed up, back we went to the hospital to deliver to Elanor. We could only stay a short while after that, as we needed to get back to Sanity to run the engine for a decent period of time before the eight o'clock curfew.

The rest of the evening was spent very quietly.

Today we went back to the house, fed the cats again and did some cleaning and tidying up, the stuff Elanor would have done on Sunday if she hadn't been tottering around after her fall from the horse. We were just about done when she texted to say she was being discharged, so I took the car across to the hospital, leaving Sheila finishing off.

Elanor is going to be fine. The CT scan showed no serious injury, though she may have a cracked rib. They were able to reassure her that her kidneys and vertebrae are all unscathed, so the worst consequence of the whole thing is that she needs to consider replacing her body protector and hard hat since they've been called upon to do their job.

Elanor came and had lunch with us before going back to have a quiet afternoon at home, though she plans to go to Ceroc dancing this evening as usual. We decided to carry on with our original plan for today, which was to wind below Bagnall Lock and then come up to Fradley for the night.

It was my turn to steer, so Sheila got the bike out and rode the distance, We did it in good time, and are now moored on the visitor moorings between Keeper's and Junction Locks.

Tomorrow we go on to Whittington, where we are kindly invited to sup with Des and Gill Barnard tomorrow night.