Time for a moan...

Our lockie is away on his hols for a couple of weeks so last Tuesday before he went I bought a couple of electric cards as we were getting low. On Thursday I went to put a card in the reader but it flashed "card error" & then "remove card" but it would not give up the card so eventually I admitted defeat & reported it to BW.
Now it has taken them 6 days & a couple more phone calls but finally this lunchtime an engineer came to look at it & diagnosed a 'deceased' card reader, he didn't have any spare card readers with him but did manage to find out that the 'stuck' card had registered, meaning we are okay for a while.
I was then advised to ring BW again when the electric gets low & they will come & look at it again - Eh, what! Why not order & fit a new card reader ? He didn't know....... Watch this space.

work & play

We are doing very well for wood at the moment as there is a small weir just above the mooring where logs & assorted bits of wood come to rest on their journey downstream, all we have to to is fish them out, leave them to dry for a few days then saw into logs with our recently acquired chainsaw.
We follow Chris & Debbie's blog "The Meaning of Ubique"after meeting them on the Leeds Liverpool this summer & noted they have just got themselves one. Can only agree with Chris, what a brilliant piece of kit - used very carefully of course ( I'm not allowed near it!)


This mornings haul of free wood

Man at work - turning an old pallet into kindling


Usually when we are outside doing stuff, the cats, Poppy in particular like nothing better than to be out at the same time. Sometimes they just like to sit & watch but more often it turns into play time - not the clearest of pics (double click to enlarge) but Poppy is high up in the tree showing Soona, who is sat at the bottom, how it's done.

Chores done, enjoying a coffee in front of nice log fire, can't beat it, one of the pleasures of being a livaboard & I actually enjoy the physical effort needed to make a fire & firewood - though as I'm still supposed to be taking it easy after my op, my role at the moment is more supervisory !

What with one thing and another I had completely forgotten that it was BW licence renewal time & only twigged this morning whilst on the phone to Han chuntering about some recent mail ( inc new car tax disc) that she has sent on to our local post office for collection that hasn't arrived, we assume because of the postal strike.
When she mentioned that there was 'some stuff from BW' the penny dropped, now last year it was our 1st time renewing the licence and we did it through the marina, all relatively painless ( apart from parting with a chunk of cash!) The date on the old licence was 11.08 & I remember trying to find out if it was due beginning of nov or the end & no-one seemed to know ( this is fairly relevant if you want to claim the prompt payment discount) so this morning I assumed I was going to have some problems renewing promptly.

I went onto the waterscape site & found that you can renew online, great! but not if you have moved moorings since last issue, oh dear, never mind phone BW & see what they say. Well, I have to say I'm quite impressed, a very helpful person told me that when we took over our new mooring in august as it's a BW mooring our records were updated which means that the 2 departments, mooring & licencing actually 'talk' to each other & we can renew online, whether the new licence will ever make it through the postal system is another matter but at least we will have paid our dues ;-)

BW seem to come in for quite a bit of flak, especially from the boating community so it's nice to be able to report something positive, oh & I found out that the licence runs out at the end of the month so plenty of time .... :-)