Lockdown day 19 - Summertime(?) and the living is easy...

No, I know it's not easy at all for a lot of people at the moment, but I'm finding that many folk deal with the stresses of the virus situation by being upbeat, and finding the positives in each day. It's a philosophy I try to follow. It doesn't work all the time, but there are many days like today when I can't help but say "Wow!"

So wow! The weather yesterday! It was more than 10° warmer than it has been in the boat when we woke up, and it just got hotter! Today, however - meh.

Kantara's had a strange little fault for several months now. While we were back at the house, we had word from Sue and John on Lyndsey Ann that an alarm kept going off in our boat. A quick visit to Yelvertoft to investigate revealed that it was a low voltage alarm on our 12 volt systems. I phoned Simon, our go-to electrician, and got him to come and investigate, and we went back to the house, leaving him to do the job as soon as he could. In due course, he got back to me to say he'd found a loose connection in the monitoring device, and thought all was now well.

Not so. Since we've been back, the alarm has gone off randomly on many occasions. It's easy to switch the alarm off whenever this happens, but we needed to know what the problem was that was causing it.

Enter Simon again, yesterday afternoon. He checked everything, and found that it was all just as it should be - batteries, cabling, monitoring device, everything - so the alarm is NOT signalling low voltage or anything else. The problem is with the alarm itself. Solution, switch the monitor off, and only switch it on if we need to know the state of the batteries. We have another gizmo that actually switches off the 12v systems if the voltage drops below 11v, preventing harm being done to the batteries. Problem solved.

My afternoon time at the end of the pontoon was idyllic. The sky was totally blue, the sun was hot, fish were jumping - literally hundreds of them right around the pond stretching out from my viewpoint - but there was no cotton to be seen. The reeds were pretty high, though.

And, come the evening, just look at those reflections!

Wow!

Lockdown day 17 - Photos; twenty-four hours of social distancing

Yesterday afternoon

The wind-turbine turns very slowly

Nine o'clock this morning

My afternoon walk takes me down a bridle path to Yelvertoft, then back home up the canal.

I enjoyed the walk, but this is my favourite part of the day;

coffee and music at the end of the pontoon.

Is that a scareduck?

Lockdown day 16 - Masks... and pants

My dear wife loves a challenge, and today she's preparing to make a couple of face masks using the limited resources we have on the boat. If only we were at the house... (fabrics, sewing machine, large table...) She started off by suggesting that I could keep my mouth closed and stuff this up my nose,

but, after a brief discussion, she was persuaded that she might better use it as part of the structure of something rather more effective and less humiliating. She's now hunting through my drawers. I haven't told her about the YouTube video in which a guy makes a mask out of a pair of his boxer shorts.

(Darn, she just looked over my shoulder and saw it, and beetled off excitedly.)

These two are discovering that using women's panties doesn't quite work - though it may serve some other strange purpose.

Maskless, I went shopping at the Co-op this morning where, for the first time ever, there were several gaps on the shelves. They did have mixed peel this time, though, so we won't go too hungry. There were masks on neither staff nor customers, except one young man who had a black bandanna tied over his nose and mouth. It made him look shifty. I was quite expecting him to go to the checkout, pull out a gun and demand they hand over the cash. Come to think of it, wouldn't you think that of the SpyderMan, too?

[Later] I now know that Grace has ordered some cotton fabric for making the masks. My underwear is safe for the time being at least. She's very cleverly identified pipe-cleaners to be ideal for the bit holding the fabric over the bridge of the nose. (I'd like to point out that we don't smoke pipes; these were bought for craft work.) I can confirm that the elastic will not at any point be going into my nostrils, but will be used to go around the back of the head to hold the masks on. Watch this space for details of the finished items. You'll have to allow time for slow delivery of the fabric, but the wait will be worth it.

Lockdown day 15 - Coffee rituals, crossless buns and virtual churches

There's not a lot going on at the moment that's particularly photographable,

as you can see. I take a camera with me whenever I go for my permissible one-exercise-a-day walk, but the several possible routes are totally photoed out now. Even the camera's getting bored. It's a compact Samsung model, pretty old and much used. It zooms its lens out when I switch it on, and it opens a shutter in front of the lens. Except that, now that it's got fed up with being pointed at the same old scenes over and again, the shutter often stays shut, responding only to a sharp tap.

Perversely, it co-operated fully yesterday when I didn't have much to photograph during my afternoon coffee ritual at the end of the pontoon. The coffee and the music were just right, the sun was out and the wind was warm. The evening before had set the tone for Saturday,

and Saturday took the hint the next morning.

Come mid-afternoon, the clouds had rolled in, but did nothing to spoil things.

In fact, they enhanced the view.

What was missing was the birds. One lonely moorhen pootled around aimlessly.

The off-duty swan graced me with his presence. His missus was curled up on their eggs at the other end of the marina. 

And a few lacklustre ducks came as close as they needed to to see that I wasn't about to feed them.

The tranquillity was magnificent.

I'm not having an outdoor coffee ritual today. Grace has just finished baking some hot, crossless buns; something she'd not tried before, and made without the mixed fruit that such buns demand (Co-op's had a bit of a run on them recently) and without the crosses (not that we have anything against crosses, simply that we needed taste and substance today, not ornamentation), but very good nonetheless. I don't fancy the risk of losing my bun to some cygnine chancer (opportunist swan; I'm just showing off), so I'm eating it on board.

It's Palm Sunday today, not that many people outside of the Church know that. Of course, churches and other public places of  worship across the world are closed, but if they were not, churches would have been holding a special Palm Sunday service this morning.

We've been members of Dagnall Street Baptist Church in St Albans for 28 years, and still attend there when we're back at our house. What they've been doing over the past weeks of social distancing is no doubt similar to what very many others around the globe are doing; broadcasting pre-recorded services across the internet. So Grace and I virtually joined with many others of their number at 10:30 this morning to be part of that service. It was superbly done, despite the very artificial way in which it had to be produced. It's obviously very strange not to be seeing the friends and acquaintances who were sharing the experience with us, but it was far, far better than having no service.

Should any readers be interested, the service is to be found here.

Keep well, readers, and please follow social distancing rules.

Lockdown day 12 - The list

(No, this is not a post about Kantara having started to lean over to one side. She hasn't. This boat has, however.)

A lot of my friends and acquaintances on social media have said how bored they're getting on these social-distancing days. I can thank my bullet planner for helping me to make sure that everything that has to be done - or those things that I simply want to get done - get done. Another piece of advice I've picked up from others is my list.

One entry that appears every day in my bullet planner is a line with the numbers 1 to 9. These don't get officially referred from the previous day; they're a permanent feature. They refer to nine things that I've decided I want to do every day, each of them to benefit me either physically, or mentally or spiritually. So there's

1 Exercise (largely weights and cardio)
4 Brain games (apps on my tablet and phone to challenge and develop my 68 year-old grey matter)
6 Duolingo (I was told when I retired that it's good practice to learn a new language, so I'm swatting up on my school German and school/university French, and learning Italian)
9 Walking (a decent distance at a speed that get speeds up my heart- and breath-rates)

and there's

3 TED (a daily TED Talk or similar to teach me something new, or to give me a new perspective on something.)
7 Reading (a novel, alongside one or two non-fictions that serve much the same purpose as TED)
5 Writing (not just this blog, nor the book-writing I attempt, but also fun writing exercises from a fabulous little book I was given by a friend)

which leaves

2 Meditation (something I'm new to and not yet made a habit. I use a really good app to lead me through each one)
and 8 Music (not as a background to the washing-up or whatever, but sitting down and listening with headphones and really paying attention to it. I'm amazed by the huge number of songs I'd never really heard properly!)

Obviously, it's rare for me to tick off every one of those on any one day, because there are other things to do with my life. And I've not yet tried it out whilst on the cut when I don't spend as much time below deck as I am at the moment (and who knows when we'll be able to cruise again!) but I find it a helpful list, the nine activities give me a lot of pleasure, and I always have something enjoyable to do.

Lockdown day 11 - Planning made easier

I'm not even sure what number day this is in the whole social distancing thing, but today I'm going to start using this blog as a bit of a log of our journey through this word-changing epidemic. I'm sorry if that bores you readers, but hey, you might find bits of it interesting! I'll look back at it in a few years time, maybe, and be proud that I didn't go mad from inactivity and under-stimulation.

Firstly, a visiting swan not keeping to the 2 metre distancing rule.

Since January 1st I've been using a bullet planner. Unlike a diary, it looks ahead and helps me to use my time well, and not to forget to do things - important or otherwise. At the start of the year, I listed all those things I could think of at the time that I wanted to get done in 2020. Some would get done in the first week, some of them are to do with with next Christmas. Some of them are related to the house, others to the boat. As new things come up, they go onto this "Future Log".

At the start of each new month, I refer back to the Future Log and take entries from that to put in the month's Task List. At the start of each day, I create a list of those things on the Task List that I want to do (and can do, depending on weather and other external factors) on that day; at the end of the day I tick off the ones I've done and refer forward to the next day the ones that remain, and they will appear among the next day's entries. Any number of them may get referred forward several times, but that simply ensures that they get done as soon as possible.

Naomi (eldest daughter) has been doing this for years, and swears by its power to improve your productivity. Last year, I read the book about it that she had bought, but I wasn't attracted to the idea. Then she showed me exactly how she uses hers, and I was won over straight away.

Of course, the journal can be used for all sorts of  other things, too - recipes, details of films seen, books read, ideas you've had for writing, blogging, growing, making things... It's very versatile, and it really works for her, and now for me, too.