Quiet weekend

23rd & 24th October

It’s been a couple of days of lazy starts and just quietly getting on with things. Yesterday, after I’d ambled down to the paper shop and back, we reversed off the mooring and went down to the water point. Not long after we’d got set up we saw Peter Mason and team manoeuvring Skye out of the yard onto the service point. Peter made book-opening gestures at us from which we correctly concluded, not that he wanted to play a round of Charades, but that there was a parcel from Amazon waiting for us.

Accordingly, once the tank was filling, I went round to the bungalow to pick it up. Peter told me that the shell for Sanity Again is to be delivered on Thursday 5th November, which confirms what we suspected. The book was, as expected, the Missing Manual for Mac OS 10.6, Snow Leopard. I’m a great fan of the Missing Manual series for all kinds of software. They combine a cheerful laid back approach with authoritative advice.

Once we’d filled up, we pootled down to the winding hole, spun neatly round on our heel and returned to the mooring. Iain Bryceland had suggested it would be helpful if we could reverse in, a) to find out if it could be done; and b) to run the engine in gear to blast more silt out from the corner.

Both of these were done, though manoeuvring in was not easy and involved Sheila wielding the long shaft to push the bow round into line. We left the engine running in reverse for a good period, but I suspect that all that has been achieved is to blow a ridge of silt about half way down the boat. I’ll try again tomorrow when we’re charging the batteries and see if that does any more.

Today was another, even lazier start; it’s the first time for ages that Sounds of the Sixties has started before I even got up to make a cup of tea. It was Sheila’s turn to go for the paper and whilst she was away I did some investigation on the Mac Mini to see if I could get our printer/scanner running in scan mode. It’s a Hewlett Packard psc 1210 and the answer is: no it won’t. HP stopped supporting the 1200 series with OS 10.4 Tiger and their web site says, more or less directly, “If you don’t like it, tough, buy a new printer”.

Instead, on the odd occasions on which we have scanning to do, we’ll plug it into the iBook and then if necessary move the resulting file onto the Mini.

Apart from that we’ve been pottering round the boat; Sheila continues to dismantle the bow fender whilst I’ve managed to do not very much bar order some supplies from Lakeland. Their online ordering system refused to let me confirm the final stage of the order either in Firefox or Safari, so I had to use the phone number to make the payment.

This reminded me that we had this problem last time as well. I would wonder about the website not coping with Mac browsers, except that the helpful woman I spoke to at Lakeland said she’d dealt with several such calls today.

Between walking down to the paper shop and pulling a fender apart, Sheila was feeling perfectly well exercised, so I took myself off for a solitary walk through Lyme Park. On my return, I found that Graham Johnson from Priscilla had dropped in for a cup of coffee and we had a good natter before he went off to collect Beryl from Poynton Station.

They are going to be boating about for the next week, so hopefully we’ll see more of them in due course.