Random Writings

Yesterday afternoon I went across town to get some firewood. I haven’t actually lit the fire all that recently because the weather’s been mild, but I probably should do as the fire helps to reduce the humidity inside the boat. Anyway, I biked off to the south side of town where a lady from church had a job lot of logs to get rid of. When I arrived, it turned out that these were old fruit trees that had sat nicely under a tarpaulain for three years, so were beautifully dry and seasoned. I’d brought my long-handled axe (a birthday present, thanks Mum & Dad!) and a splitting wedge and mallet, and was pleased to discover that the wedge made short work of breaking up the logs and then it was easy to cut them into convenient chunks with the axe. It’s also extremely satisfying!
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I come from a fairly green-fingered family. My mum is an enthusiastic gardener and her parents were also very keen. Perhaps its because I’m getting a bit older, perhaps it’s because I have my own space to work with, but I’m slowly getting into the whole gardening thing.

Last year I tried growing baby plum tomatoes (a variety called “Rosada”) in pots on the foredeck – and they did really well, despite a certain amount of neglect during my absence! This year, with the boat in the much more public environment of Midsummer Common, I decided to be a bit more ambitious.

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A small thing, but nice to have – coathooks for me to hang my wet jackets up somewhere where they don’t drip all over the wooden floor, and for guests to hang their coats by the door when they come in. These rather nifty brass ones fold out of the way when not in use, so they shouldn’t catch on anything inadvertantly. They’re made by Nauticalia, but I got mine from Marinestore who had them on special offer at the time.

This is a more than slightly techie post, so apologies if you were looking for further tales of life on the river. One of the reasons for my lack of bloggage over the last six months or more has been that my old faithful Acer laptop died in early August. I replaced it temporarily with an Asus eeePC 900, although that was such a pain to use for more than about half-an-hour that my enthusiasm for blogging diminished considerably! Anyway, I saved my pennies and splashed out on a new Mac a little while ago, which brings me to the mainstream of this evening’s symposium, as Tom Lehrer used to say…

I had a laptop with a nontrivial fault (either motherboard or processor – it wouldn’t boot) but reckoned that the hard disk was okay. Based on this hunch, I got a cheap caddy from Dabs and converted the laptop’s internal hard drive into a USB external disk. This let me recover my data, but the PC also contained quite a lot of software – much of it paid for – that I was reluctant to reinstall and track down all the relevant licence keys. Besides, I’ve moved to a Mac – so I bought VMWare Fusion to met me run Windows for those odd awkward things that won’t work under Mac OS. Read the rest of this entry »

After all of Tuesday’s excitement, Wednesday brought a day of gentle rain. By Thursday morning, the river was much, much higher – right up to the edge of the path where I’m moored – and in fact it had clearly peaked during the night as the path was still partly wet. It was also cold – and there was ice on the path and, rather more crucially, on the gangplank. Faced with an icy gangplank with the “shore” end submerged, I decided not to go into the office and worked from home. By the afternoon the river had subsided to the level we’d had on Tuesday and I managed to get out and get provisions. Snow was forecast for the early evening, and didn’t disappoint. By this stage the river had dropped quite quickly, and so lots of fun was had out in the snow rescuing various boats that had got caught on the bank. Then we (myself and some of my neighbours) retreated to the warmth of the Fort St George and warmed our cockles with plenty of Abbot Ale.

Today (Saturday) the river’s come up a little bit after the snow melted on Friday afternoon. My achievement of the day has been beating the deformed end of the chimney extension back into shape, with creative application of a crowbar, pliers and a Mole wrench. So I won’t need a new chimney after all, saving me from shelling out £100 for a new one…

There are pictures of the floodwater and the chimney here.

Firstly, some very quick apologies for the very long absence of blog posts – I’ll explain later…

This morning I was lying peacefully in bed, gradually coming to, and the boat banged against the bank a couple of times, which it often does when there’s a strong wind or a rowing eight passing. A few moments later there was a much bigger bang, and some shouting. This is less common, but not unheard of – usually it means a broadside collision by a rowing boat – but this morning the bangs and shouting continued until I jumped out of bed and realised all was not well. In fact, Innocenti was 250m downstream, having come adrift, and had been rescued by two kind gentlemen from one of the rowing clubs. Read the rest of this entry »

I bought a little tiny Bluetooth GPS module the other day, just as it seemed a total bargain at £20. I’ve had a bit of a play around with it, and can now offer the waiting internet the prospect of Live Narrowboat Tracking! Perhaps only marginally more exciting than watching paint dry, clicking on the Where is Innocenti? link in the sidebar you can see where Innocenti is, assuming that I’ve remembered to turn on the PC and GPS module…

What happened to May? It seemed only a few moments ago that it began… Anyway, here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been up to in what seems to have been a very busy month…
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I’ve had a very good day today. It started auspiciously at Screwfix, when they had all four of the things I wanted, and therefore clearly the gods of DIY were looking favourably on me…
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I now have a working inverter/charger on the boat! Back at Easter I started a big electrical upgrade of the boat, fitting new batteries and some new internal wiring. But I was hamstrung by not having the right terminals on the cables to the inverter. I called around Cambridge’s extensive range of electricians’ merchants (“electrical wholesalers” to use the jargon) and eventually found one firm, Hedley & Ellis, who were prepared to help. Unfortunately, their giant crimping tool (a thing about the size of a large pair of boltcutters or a tree lopper) was out on hire. It returned yesterday. Today I cycled into town with about 10kg of copper cable in the bike panniers, got the terminals crimped on for the princely sum of £5, and then this evening I’ve wired it all up.

And it works! The batteries charge quite rapidly, and I can now run the generator in economy mode (where it adjusts the throttle according to the load) which should hopefully save me quite a lot in petrol.

Probably next weekend I’ll fit the SmartGauge battery monitor and split-charge system so I can charge the domestic batteries from the engine, and after that I’ll have to do something about the wiring spaghetti on the kitchen wall!