contentedsouls

The absence of the blog has been due to the demise of the computer, but G returned from an 11 day trip to the UK with a new one so here I am all back to normal.

I’m sure the systems on this boat know when my IT Department goes away. Within 24 hours of his leaving, the satellite receiver was only picking up Radio 4 and BBC 1 (at least they were my two favourites), skype and facetime didn’t work, my kindle wouldn’t let me shop for any more books, my ‘emergency’ UK phone wouldn’t ring mobiles and the internet on the i phone and my tablet kept randomly dropping out throughout the day! Now I quite like peace and quiet but you can have too much of a good thing. A lot of stuff started to work again once the storms passed. In the first week my only human interactions were asking the lady in the supermarket where the eggs were and thanking the VNF man in a van for returning MR’s life ring which he’d found in the lock following the weekend of storms. The locks were closed on Easter Sunday – well, the ones behind and in front of me were – so the peniche that moored behind me Saturday night was stuck until Monday morning. The crew were Dutch and spoke good English and I was delighted when she asked me if I wanted to walk my dogs with hers.

Adjacent to our mooring at Pinon was a piece of rough ground leading to a playing field. On Saturday morning I set off with the dogs only to find that someone had filled the area up with hundreds of colour coded, raw, fresh eggs. I prayed they weren’t ‘planted’ in any particular order as, by the time I managed to recover the dogs they had been re-arranged and many of them eaten – at least Baxter ate the shells as well which removed some of the evidence. I was extremely glad that there was no CCTV and I don’t think anyone saw us. Whilst the dogs adored their unexpected Easter present, I was mortified.

Monday afternoon NB Temujin turned up with friends Mike and June. We will be travelling together now up into Belgium for blacking at the end of this month. G was back on Wednesday evening absolutely exhausted and then spent all day Thursday down the engine ‘ole fitting the new alternator he’d brought back amongst other things. His back and leg muscles are killing him now and he’s struggling to stay awake whilst watching the Grand Prix qualifying.

Yesterday we set off and cruised side by side (except for when one peniche passed us) in glorious sunshine, covering 5 locks and 25km in just under 6 hours. All the locks behaved themselves for a change. We enjoyed our first BBQ in the evening, but today is wet, cold and windy again; I put gloves on whilst walking the dogs.

The look of intense concentration on mine and Baxter’s faces is because that peniche overtook me – not an experience I wish to repeat in a hurry and G came to my rescue before the drag of it snatched the tiller out of my hands; it’s OK when they pass by the other way, but being overtaken wasn’t funny