It wasn’t to be. A night of rain and apparently a little snow in the early hours made the waters high & the weather bloody cold. Honour being the better part of valour after our last high-water episode beyond Beeston saw us retreat to fight another day. Still, we’re prepared & have a plan, I’ll try & get the necessary stuff to the boat before we try again. Probably not tomorrow, or next week (School advent market & a sleepover), but soon, and for the rest of our lives.
Answers on a postcard to the usual address.
And sorry about the military allusions, it’s more fun than they imply. Honest.
We’re not sleeping on the boat tonight, but we have stashed a car in the car park of the Navigation Inn at Trent Lock and tidied the house (for sound psychological reasons) with a view to getting to the boat early tomorrow & making the journey there, then we plan to retrieve the other car from the marina so that we can get to work on Monday.
Next week, reverse. Not exactly restful, is it?
I’ve also managed to get the old iMac booted again & have attached an iSight with Evocam configured to shoot a Quitcktime move at 1fps, and also hope to Tweet my way along the journey at salient points.
Whoever said I wasn’t ambitious?
We’re off in about an hour to see Lizzie’s school play, and then hopefully on to spend the night on the boat before starting the first leg of the Erewash trip tomorrow morning. We’ll have to leave the boat somewhere en route but we’re not sure where to aim for yet – hopefully in the first canal stretch after leaving the Trent beyond Beeston. We’d better decide soon because we need to stash the car somewhere.
I’ve also fired up the old Mac so may be able to test out the timelapse theory if I can get Evocam configured properly tonight
- Tweet fromfirefox? WTF? #
- Tweeting? too easy for somthing so pointless, unless I’m missing somthing. Apparently I can install the TwitterBar plugin for Firefox an … #
- directlt from the address var by typing into the address bar and pressing the button. Go figure. #
- Busy day Sunday, showing the kids the new house & hopefully getting afloat for a while … #
You know how life sometimes takes control and you find yourself going down roads that you thought you’d left behind for a while? We’re experiencing that now. Full-time living aboard is out of the question for the moment, and renting’s a pain in the arse. We can’t decorate, the kids can’t put posters up and we’ve had to smuggle the cats and a tortoise into the house because ‘pets aren’t allowed without express permission’. Which we’ve asked for (twice) and received no reply. I grew up quite some time ago but somehow it just doesn’t feel like it at the moment. So we tentatively start looking for a place to buy and find a possible quite quickly. Straight out of the fifties and decorated by a granny, smaller than the last one & with three fewer toilets. It’s also got a field attached and if the original ‘Allotment’ thread had survived ‘The Great Vista Download Disaster of 2007′ you’d see where that’s going.
Cutting to the chase we’ve had an offer accepted. Who’d have thought, eh?
- No, pissed it down all day.
I’ve been trying to add a ’subscribe’ button to the sidebar for some time now, not because I expect anyone to but because RSS buttons are cool and blogs don’t look real without one. Everything I’ve tried seems to involve hacking php code and while I’m capable of doing that I’ve been round the block enough times to know that I’m going to have to reinstall all of this at some point & unless I’ve got a very obvious collection of plugins I’m going to struggle to remember how I did it; I also want to be able to replicate things easily at friends’ blogs and not worry too much every time I dick about with themes. This is the twenty-first century people, get with the program.
Chicklet-Creator seemed promising, but was initially reluctant to show up in the plugins folder; I went against the strict installation instructions & moved everything up a leve land it appeared, only to push the rest of the sidebar to the bottom of the page for some reason. Likewise ‘add_to_any‘ – come on guys, I shouldn’t be fighting you for this.
Many googles later I found subscribe_subscribe, which for some reason appears way down the list. Installs straight away, sits on the sidebar where you tell it to and no code hacking. At last.
At least I think it works , but that’s academic really isn’t it?
I’m getting depressed now. That’s two weekends that we haven’t been able to take the boat out & depsite our best efforts it looks unlikely that we’ll manage the next one either. I was hoping for either the first two-day leg of the four-day ‘off up the Erewash’ trip or at the very least a trip to within view of some fireworks, but Debs’s new doctorate course kicks in on Saturday so prospects are looking bleak.
I’ve accepted that we haven’t managed the liveaboard thing yet and that’s in the (probably distant) future, but it seems like we’re still struggling with the life / work balance. I remember being told at school in the early seventies that the biggest problem of my working life would be what to do with all the leisure time once full automation kicked in. What happened to that, I wonder?
Probably went the same way as the paperless office.
