A productive weekend

12th & 13th December

We’ve had another couple of quietish days, mostly occupied with doing things in the boat. I won’t take up space with accounts of going for the newspaper and the like, but will try to focus on matters of interest.

The main achievement yesterday was in registering a Seller’s account on eBay, something which is harder to do than you might think if you live on a boat. I’d tried to do it last weekend, because we wanted to sell a personal DVD player. I’d got most of the way through sorting it out when the site demanded that I give a landline phone number for them to ring with a four digit code.

Apparently they do this in order to check that you are in the UK (not sure why), but of course it makes life very difficult for those of us who only have mobile phones. During the week we pondered alternatives such as using Graeme’s phone and getting him to text us the number but it all just seemed too complicated.

Then yesterday I thought of the localphone website; we’d come across them in the context of their sister site that gives a way of dialling 0800 numbers from a mobile via a landline number. Their main business is in providing cheap overseas phone calls by selling you a geographical number in the UK and linking it to a phone number you want to call in another country.

You then pay the cost of dialling that local number (the cost of this from a mobile would normally be included in your call bundle, of course) and then a very reasonable rate for the overseas connection. However, what they will also do is sell you a geographic number in the UK which you can forward to any other number you like anywhere in the world, including your own mobile number.

For the sum of 75 pence to set it up and 25 pence per month for the use of the number, this means that we now have just such a landline number that we can either forward to one of our own mobiles or point to an overseas number that we want to call.

The upshot is that we now have an auction running on the spare DVD player; not that it’s actually attracted any bids yet.

After all this excitement, we went for a very pleasant stroll along the towpath in the bright winter sun.

Today’s principal activity has been sorting the family calendar and printing our personal Christmas cards. The calendar’s actually been in production for a couple of weeks; it’s an Excel workbook with a sheet for each month, an appropriate photo at the top and the grid of days beneath. Today saw us putting the final touches to it and printing four of the five copies we need.

Only things is, we’ve run out of 160 gram card and will need to get some more tomorrow to print the last one.

I also used the page layout function of Pages, the Macintosh equivalent of Word, to create a Christmas card using a photo I took in the snow in January of Tixall Gatehouse.

After lunch, we took another walk, this time with a little more purpose (not that there’s anything wrong with just going for a stroll) in taking our recycling down to the tip.

We came back through the canal side car park so as to have an excuse to cross the towpath bridge over the end of the boatyard and have a quick gloat over Sanity Again. In doing so we noticed a car in the car park which had a pair of reindeer horns attached to the top of the windows.

Presumably this is the latest seasonal must have for your motor; I wonder how many of those men using them will be aware of the traditional meaning of “being given a pair of horns to wear”. Come to think of it, in view of the notoriously disruptive impact of office parties on relationships, there may be more ironic humour in this than was first apparent.