Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Sighs can be heard...

...emanating from the cabin. Colin came yesterday, bright and early, to fit the replacement thermostat. It was a quick job, punctuated as always with Colin's humour and the amusing banter which he sparks up with us, and he went on his way. Some time later, we ran the engine for about half an hour, with my eyes on the temperature gauge, watching to see what happened.

The needle rose past 70º, at which point the rise should have slowed as the new thermostat opened to let hot water into the calorifier, where it would heat our domestic water. It didn't slow. Instead, it rose to around 80º, at which point our domestic water was not getting any warmer, and the hull skin tank (which transfers the engine heat into the canal water) was hot. Wrong. Since the thermostat was new, there must be some additional fault. Colin will be back to investigate. Meanwhile, we have to wait here in the marina.

We also have to wait for a phone call from Three, our Internet Service provider, who contacted me at last yesterday, and tried to understand the problem we have been having for the past six months. After a lengthy interrogation, the man said I would be contacted by a Network Consultant (more sighs) in the next 72 hours. Since it's important that I get this call (if we are EVER to be rid of the problems) we need to be where we know we can receive mobile calls, and there are places on the cut where that is impossible.

So, we wait. The weather is perfect for cruising, Oxford is calling for us, but we have to wait - again.

We're keeping busy, doing various smallish jobs around the boat. We bought tubs and flowers - Gerberas - for the roof.

I'll post photos in a couple of weeks' time, when they've started to take over the tubs, as they will! We have flowers inside the boat, too - some weeks old carnations still doing really well...
...and some beauties sent by the kids to Grace on her birthday. The additional chocolates were unavailable for photographing!
The shelves in our bedroom are hideous, so we're sanding them down for revarnishing a better colour, and we'll make them less deep, and mount them on more appropriate brackets.
You can see in the photo screwholes beneath the lower shelf where there was a third shelf of similar size. However, this proved to be far too close over the foot of the bed, and we removed it. Now, we will treat it the same way as the other two, and mount them all a bit higher.

There's some sewing needed on the cratch cover, a glass chopping board to remove from the wall next to the galley (kitchen) hob - it has been glued there by a previous owner, probably to hide some horror - burning? - which we will reveal when we break it off. We'll replace it with tiles to match what's already in the galley. So, we're not short of things to do - just short of the opportunity to do some travelling. Sighs.

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