Another pleasant marina Sunday

Though it's been cold and it looks like we'll have some snow by morning. Indeed, I suspect we had a dusting of it overnight last night.

Sheila had a good walk round the marina with Paul from the Wetland Bird Survey, Jo the Organiser and several others. Paul was there to count the waterbirds, and the rest of them go along for a guided view of what's about. In addition to the regular ducks and geese, they saw some reed bunting, lesser red poll (which are commoner than the common red poll, apparently), long tailed tits, greenfinch and gadwall. Last month's waxwings have shoved off, having guzzled almost all our berries.

Meanwhile, back at the boat I got a recipe written and gave Sanity Again a quick Sunday clean, testing the smoke and CO alarms as I went.

We've been having some problems with nuisance cut outs of the earth leakage circuit breaker on our power pole. Stuart the handy man has tried isolating the lamp on top of the pole to see if that would stop it, but it started popping out almost as soon as he'd gone, though we'd had three days without a problem up until then.

Typical…

/floor

Using my new RCD tester to put just 10mA down our earth line was enough to pop the 30mA breaker on the pole (though Sanity Again's breakers all stayed in as you'd expect), so there's leakage from somewhere. The trouble is that it could be a number of small leaks from each of the four boats adding up to enough to open the breaker, or it could be a problem in the pole itself; Stuart's coming back tomorrow to have another look.

After lunch, we had our own walk round the marina to get some fresh air whilst we can. We took the opportunity to get another sack of kindling from Midland Chandlers as we went by. Back at the boat, we watched another episode of The River – just one left, shucks.

After a restorative cup of tea, I put the dinner on; it's a beef casserole, so I want it to have a nice long simmer in a low oven. After I've finished this post, Sheila's going to trim my hair; it seems a bit odd to do it when we're expecting the cold spell to go on for a bit, but I can't stand this fluffy feeling any longer.

/blur