Dry, very very dry, but cold

After the excitements of Sally's blog last night, it's back to me again, I'm afraid…

Sally didn't mention (because she doesn't care) that Elanor brought us a load of post yesterday, as well as a pooch. This included the wrong ink cartridges ordered by mistake from Amazon (they were the ones for our old printer), the right ink cartridge, Sheila's birthday present, arriving at the second attempt, and a second CO monitor to put in the engine room.

Getting a refund from Amazon for the wrong ink cart was straightforward as always, and now that the printer is working again I could even print off the return postage label. The FireAngel CO monitor looks as good as their other kit; it's a seven year battery job, warrantied for the full seven years and with a digital display. There are two principal potential sources of CO in the boat, the Squirrel in the saloon and the Hurricane in the engine room, so we will now have a monitor near each.

Today, the weather forecast has been accurate as usual; it's now bone dry, but extremely cold, especially by contrast to recent conditions, with the wind blowing straight out of the North. It looks like we'll have this state of affairs for a few days, with temperatures hovering in the single figures Celsius, dropping to around freezing overnight. The water is unlikely to freeze, and it will take quite a few days, if not weeks, for the river levels to subside.

Even the canal here is up a couple of inches, so of course the marina is too.

We walked to the village this morning, posting some stuff, popping into the pharmacy for some aspirin and then carrying on to Betty's Farm Shop where we bought veg and a loaf of bread.

As we're going to the quiz night tonight and can't be sure how much or when we'll get to eat (it's a food provided do), we decided to lunch in the Willow Tree, joined there by the other half of our team, Stephen and Jayne. As always with them, a merry time was had for an hour or so before we broke up to reassemble later.

Finally, we went into the shop here and bought 2 more bags of solid fuel and trundled it back to the boat on our cunning folding trolley.