Getting back to "normal"

Sheila went for a hairdo today and came back with a message that I was to get on and do a proper blog again... Truly, life onboard can be very strange. Anyway, it's a very good hairdo courtesy of Jo's itinerant hairdresser, probably the best she's had for a while.

I won't bore you with thrilling accounts of tiling bathroom floors and rollering emulsion onto walls. I'll just confirm that it was all worthwhile and Elanor's house really shows the benefit. There's still plenty to do in the other rooms and the hall, stairs and landing, but we've made a good start.

We'll get a bit more done over a couple of weekends, especially some paint stripping with Nitromors that proved impractical whilst Elanor was sleeping there. She's coming to stay with us to avoid the fireworks at Hallowe'en and on the Saturday after Guy Fawkes, so we'll probably spend the days in her house and the evenings on the boat.

Today, we've all had a day off. Sheila and I spent it on the boat (surprise, a wash load did get run) and Elanor went riding. I've taken the opportunity to scrub personal stuff off the hard disk of an old laptop. It's a G3 Bronze PowerBook that I had as a work machine originally then bought from the University and gave to Elanor to use. She's long since replaced it with a later MacBook and it's been lying around gathering dust for years.

I managed to get it booted up and then had to remember how to work MacOS 9.2... Finally, I set it up as a target disk on the Mini so as to use the OSX sophisticated deletion process. After trashing the personal info, I used Disk Utility to write zeros over all the unused space on the disk.

I suspect that the machine is only good for recycling, but I'll ask about in case there's a charity that wants it to send out to a developing country. It's still a perfectly good machine, just needs its battery replacing.

The other IT task was to rip the two DVDs Elanor gave me for my birthday, the Kenneth Branagh Much Ado about Nothing and the Trevor Nunn Twelfth Night with Helena Bonham Carter, Nigel Hawthorne et al. By converting them to mp4 we can watch them on both the laptop and the iPads if we want.

We'll have another quiet day tomorrow, then we're off back to Elanor's on Tuesday, house and dog sitting whilst a plasterer repairs water damage to the back bedroom ceiling. Wednesday, we're into Derby for the day and being quiz masters in the evening.

It's all go at the moment.