Life continues to be busy and exciting; it’s a mixture of routine tasks, sharing the final stages of fitting out Sanity Again and preparing for the big move next week.
Thursday was mostly the first and the last. We cut some wood, and took some recycling to the tip. We’re generating a lot of paper recycling because the other big job is sorting through the filing, weeding out redundant stuff, selecting what needs to be left on Sanity and rationalising the filing of the remainder.
On our way back from the tip, as it was a fine afternoon, we stopped off in the yard to finish the gardening we’d been doing last week. A couple of shrubs were cut back and reshaped, and a lot of dead foliage cleaned out from the beds.
We also tidied up a moderate amount of rubbish which had been dumped under the shrubs. Our reward for this (not that it wasn’t rewarding of itself) was to be there when Sanity Again had her first trip out of the yard under her own power.
It was only to go onto the shop mooring to get some diesel, but it was still a big moment.
Yesterday saw us in and out of the yard all day. When we turned up at ten for our regular progress review, Peter suggested that it would be good to postpone the photo shoot until the end of the day, when the front end of the boat would be virtually complete.
Instead, we helped with the turn round of the hire boat, Islay, which involves topping up the water tank and then putting her on the shop mooring for a pump out and diesel. Susan had asked me to take some photos of Islay for the new hire boat brochure, but what with one thing and another, she wasn’t ready to be photographed before it was time for lunch.
After lunch, we went back to the yard to take the Islay photos and then returned to Sanity to sort them out and record the best of them on a CD-R to give to the Masons. I’d also been able to take some nice shots of Peter and Susan:
Nice people, and excellent boatbuilders
We also drafted the blog post for Building Sanity Again before returning to the yard yet again to go through the boat, taking pictures and admiring progress. We remain on schedule to move onboard on Wednesday and Thursday next week.
Then it was back to Sanity to upload a set of pictures to Flickr and finish off the blog post. We were pretty well fatigued by now, and in a celebratory mood, so we joined Barry and Annie Cooper of The Shouting End for dinner in the Boar’s Head.
We started today with a shopping trip to Poynton. Islay was still in the yard, her hirers having been held up on the motorway from Scotland, so they had decided to stay where they were overnight. This gave us a chance to meet their dog, a delightful Alaskan Malamute bitch. Like the Samoyeds we used to keep, she was hugely pleased to have humans to talk to, and is just a nice size for boating. The only question is whether the heavy coat would be too high maintenance for living in such a small space.
We came back from Poynton on the bus and found Iain and Luisa Bryceland having a sneak preview of Sanity Again. Matt and Rick were putting in some overtime finishing the varnishing and fitting door knobs and drawer handles. I am pleased and relieved to say that Iain and Luisa were very complimentary about the final result.
After lunch, we found ourselves dozing off, so made an excuse for a little fresh air and exercise by taking a bag of rubbish round to the skip. The Shouting End is presently moored on the towpath by the rubbish point, so we stopped for another natter with Barry and Annie, and with Peter who was just showing some new customers through the boat.
After Peter had gone off, we stopped for a cup of tea. No sooner had we finished this than Peter was to be seen extracting Islay from the yard. I wanted some pictures of Islay on the water to go with the internal shots, but hadn’t my camera with me. Annie generously leant me hers, so I was able to get a couple of shots as she winded before heading off for Chester.
I took Annie’s camera back to Sanity to upload the photos to the Mac; I’ll pass them on to Peter on a memory stick on Monday.
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