Change of plan

We had intended to go into Macclesfield today, to bank some cheques and do a bit of shopping, and then move on tomorrow. But the weather is even worse than we had anticipated, wild, windy and pouring with rain. The thought of travelling into town dressed in full waterproofs, and trying to shop whilst saturated, was quite repugnant. Furthermore, it looks as if it will be Wednesday before things are more civilised, so we've decided to stay put, lurking in the boat until the storm abates.

You can tell it's bad, I've not even been out for a paper.

/floor

Instead, I experimented a little with my problem camera – I thought to check that the USB lead, which has been trouble free for years, was not the cause of the strange behaviours and failure to upload. Lo and behold, an alternate lead gave no trouble at all, and trying again with the suspect lead brought the problem back.

In experimental design parlance, this is an ABA trial which is reasonably conclusive as to causation. I've cut the plugs off the offending lead and chucked it out. So, no new camera for me this year, which is a bit of a relief, frankly. My Fuji Finepix S6500 does quite well enough for me, and has two great merits. Firstly, it has a proper viewfinder as well as a rear screen, and secondly, it's powered by standard AA rechargeable batteries.

This means that I can have several sets of the things, and recharge them at my convenience, or more often in the galley, that being the nearest handy power outlet, all the ones in the study being in pretty permanent use.

/wahaha

Apart from that, we've been reading, we watched two Campion episodes, and I'm running the engine to recharge the batteries. There's pretty well nothing coming from the solar panel in these conditions, and power usage is quite a bit higher than on a sunny day, what with the central heating first thing, DVD watching and even LED lights get through a bit of juice when you need them on all day.

Oh, and I improved the shining hour (ha!) by giving both pairs of boots a good coat of that traditional waterproofing, dubbin.

We're still going out tonight, though; Peter and Susan are picking us up from the Bowling Alley car park to save us slogging along the towpath in the rain; I'll report on the Sutton Hall tomorrow.