Streaming weather and other things

10th & 11th April

So I was going to do a post on the Building Sanity Again blog about engines yesterday, I really was. By five o'clock, I'd got as far as sitting down in front of the keyboard, creating the document and writing the first sentence.

I then sat there in front of it, fourth hanky of the day pressed to my streaming nose, and tried to think of what I wanted to say in the second sentence. The problem was, I wasn't capable of coherent thought about what to have for dinner, much less everything I want to say about motive power in narrowboats.

Until yesterday, I'd thought I was getting away quite lightly with this cold. A fair amount of Co-op Mixture for Tickly Coughs was being consumed, but since the stuff tastes like liquid Victory Vs, to which I once had a brief addiction, that wasn't a real hardship.

Then my nose apparently managed to take in a documentary about the Victoria Falls (National Geographic Channel, I expect), without the rest of me noticing, and decided to let us have an impression of how stunningly dramatic the Smoke That Thunders is by doing it's very own interpretation of it.

I was seriously worried about the risk of dehydration by bedtime last night, but it seems to have come under control as today went on.

Apart from that, we've had a good couple of days. We made a prompt start yesterday, and spent the first 45 minutes going up to the winding hole at Bridge 28, winding with some difficulty (it's very shallow), and coming back past the Hartshill moorings. It rained on and off, and I was glad I'd put the full wet weather gear on.

At Atherstone, we tied immediately below Lock 5, had a coffee, went shopping, then carried on down the flight to tie just above Lock 8. There were a couple of kids on bikes offering to huffle for us, but when I explained that we were only going down two more locks, they decided to help a boat going up hill instead.

(Huffling: offering to help with lock working in the expectation of a small reward. Normally innocuous, but can sometimes become threatening. These ones seemed OK to me. Unlike the story about the bloke parking his Jaguar in Liverpool:

Bunch of kids wanders up: "Look after yer car for a fiver, mister?'

"No thanks, it's all right, I'm leaving my German Shepherd in there, look."

"Oh yeah, good at putting out fires , is he?")

There was a lot of holiday traffic, even though the weather began to deteriorate seriously, until it was raining nearly as hard outside as it was down my nasal passages.

After lunch we had some difficulty in getting a good internet connection, until I rigged the modem in the porthole on the other side of the study, after which it was fine.

I spent some time exploring the Mobil Read forum, which is an excellent source of advice about eReaders and of lists of ebook sites.

Towards the end of the afternoon, we had an email from Peter Mason with the initial quote for building Sanity Again. We read through it, looked at each other silently, and went and sat down quietly for a bit, until our pulses had settled down. It's not a lot more than our worst case expectations, but we're going to have to think hard about which extras we want.

Situation normal, then for this stage of play. The problem for Peter (and so for us) is that, although the price of steel has fallen back a lot in the recession, so that the shell is cheaper than it would have been a year ago, many of the fittings, like the electrical stuff and the heating systems, are priced in euros originally, and as the pound is now close to parity with the euro, the price to us has gone up.

We'll find our way round and through it, but I'm glad that last night was one of the ones on which we allow ourselves a drink...

Today, weather much better, cold getting better, though I'm feeling pretty feeble (and my sense of humour seems to have suffered), and we did some more good boating, ending up between Polesworth and Alvecote near the country park that's been made out of the post industrial wasteland around here.

We cut up a load of bits of wood from the roof, and, on the internet, explored the possibility of a twin tub rather than a fully automatic washing machine. Main difficulty is the extra width – more of this on the other blog in due course. I'll do the engine post since I've started thinking about that, then possibly do a catch up with the way our thinking has changed since I started posting over there.

Tomorrow, we go back through Fazeley, then plan to tie on the Birmingham and Fazeley near Drayton Manor, as Elanor is joining us for the night, and there's a bit of roadside parking there.