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!
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