Wednesday, July 04, 2012

Niggles


It rained during the night. It was raining when we woke up. It rained through the morning, on and off, on and on. So we stayed put. We got a number of little jobs done on the boat, so that was a bonus. But we have a number of niggles which are giving us some grief, and there seems little we can do about them, more than we have.
The 230v generator which failed before Christmas, and which was “being repaired” for something like six months, has failed again. We cannot use our washing machine, nor our vacuum cleaner. Clothes have to be worn for longer than normal, and floor cleaning is rather more tedious. We can survive without them, but the time will come that we need to wash clothes, and I suppose we will have to find a laundrette when that time comes. I've notified Sam Matts, who was responsible for the generator, and he's “working on it”. I'm hoping he'll come up with a solution, and we'll be able to meet him somewhere on the canal for the thing to be put right.
The second niggle has been going on now since September. We get our mobile broadband connection from Three, but, although we usually get a good strong signal from them, we often lose our Internet connection. Frankly, they are being incredibly dense about it, and keep contacting me and asking questions they really ought to know the answer to by now. Unlike Option, who have dealt with a fault with our router with huge efficiency, they just can't get the hang of communicating appropriately with their very angry customer. I have often been unable to receive mobile phone calls whilst in the boat – it is, after all, a steel shell which tends to block radio waves. Nonetheless, they keep trying to phone me, and do not get the idea that I really would like to communicate with them across the Internet, as Option did to such great effect.
The third niggle is that the thermostat in the engine has failed, resulting in us not getting hot water either as hot, or as quickly as we should when the engine is running. Colin has agreed to look into this for us, but he's on holiday at the moment.
The fourth niggle is the plastic deck tiles we bought via Ebay. They were fine to start with, but, come the hot weather we had some weeks ago (remember it?), they got very soft, buckled and distorted to the point where they became dangerous. I contacted the supplier and eventually discovered that they had gone bankrupt. I told Ebay and... well, nothing yet.

At around 4:00 this afternoon, the sun came out, and stayed out for several hours before the rain came again. I went for a bit of a walk under a blue sky punctuated with huge cumulus clouds. It was good!
Tomorrow, we'll move on. Fingers crossed for dry weather. I've stopped looking at the forecasts, they're so unreliable!








No comments:

Post a Comment

I'd love to hear from you!