Calm, clear and cold

If this winter has been notable for wind and rain rather than snow and ice, it's also been striking for the changes of mood. After the howling gales of the past few days, today dawned both bright and a flat calm. It clouded over a bit at lunchtime, but then cleared to blue sky once more. The barometer has shot back up after its precipitous decline two days ago.

All these are the result of a well anchored area of high pressure in the Atlantic, the classic Azores High, I guess, which is funnelling depressions across its northern edge onto the British Isles. If the depression is slow moving and stable, we see a period of breezy rain, but if it's moving quickly and deepening as it goes, we get the sort of thing we've been enduring this week.

I'm pleased to say that it looks like we are in for a few days of this calmer stuff, which is good. The toilet tank will need emptying sometime soon, but with calm weather forecast, we can leave it until the tank is quite full, rather than doing it as soon as the three quarters full warning triangle appears on the gauge and we get a day when it's still enough to move. At present, it looks like we'll be doing that either Sunday, Monday or Tuesday.

This morning was a time for pottering. Sheila finished proof reading my book, and I managed to go through her suggestions and incorporate most of them into the master copy. I need to finish doing the same with the version on my own Kindle, then we shall be very close to publication.

Meantime, Sheila has finished generating content for her own book, the Boater's Commonplace Book, and has passed it across to me to do some stuff about communications, IT and favourite recipes. I also need to do the formatting, converting the basic text into something that will have chapter headings and page breaks in the right places, as well as adding all that standard copyright info and so on.

After lunch, we walked to Betty's Farm to buy veg and to order a piece of gammon. The good people at Betty's will get meat to order for you from the butcher in Repton, thus saving us a tedious walk across the road bridge over the Trent.

I think that's about all for today – have a good weekend, folks.

/bye