Playing Catch-Up: The Times They Are A'Changing

Well, I've gone and done it again. Neglected the blog, I mean. So where were we?

Oh yes, just back from holiday last year.... which was a funny time all round. My job was all up in the air - managed to find a big chunk of the funding to keep it going until 2015, but was having problems finding the 'match-funding'. And if you don't get the match-funding, you don't get ANY funding. As a result, from the end of June, I wasn't getting paid. I reckoned we'd be ok, though, for a few months, just so we could find that elusive match-funding.

How wrong can you be?

No match-funding.

Add to that, our office was up for sale following the death of our landlady, so we really didn't know what was happening or where we were going to go...I have to admit, I was the least happy I have been for a long time.  The crunch finally came when the office was sold, and we were required to give up our lease. Short notice to move and thirteen years (and more) of stuff to get moved or disposed of. Books, games, equipment, furniture... there was only one thing to do - call in the Rangers!  With the knowledgeable eyes of the experienced packrats we all are, the environmental education community swept through the place like a swarm of...no, not locusts.
Wombles.
Who else do you know gets excited about a dustbin liner full of yoghurt pots? Or a full-scale cardboard albatross?
Just about anything that could be salvaged for re-use was, and temporary storage was found for the stuff that was actually mine that I have no space for at home. Things that really were junk were taken away by the removal men to the tip. Freecycle took care of most of the furniture, and as the new owners moved in, we swept up the last of the dust and moved out.

So. No office. Vastly reduced income. There comes a point where you have to draw a line under it and say 'It can't go on like this', and move on. I haven't exactly parted company with my old job - there are bits of it I still do as a volunteer - but the days of school talks and outings are past. 

What now?

Slow Boat Up the Creek

Day Four: 6 July. Birstall to Pilling's Lock.
And this was the day things stopped going according to plan....
After breakfast and a quick shopping trip, it was business as usual, with added clunk. A grass snake swims across the river ahead of us as we leave; naturally the lens cap is on my switched-off camera.
The clunk gets worse. We don't like the sound of it, and there seemed to be trouble with the steering, so after Thurmaston Lock we stop to check the hatch again.
Plastic bag.
Extracted.
Still clunking, so we get to a reasonably accessible stopping place, and ring the boatyard, who send out helpful mechanics who arrived with about an hour.

Spirits plummet, and 

we halt. Going nowhere fast

we call the boatyard.

After poking about in the bowels of the boat, they deliver their verdict.
Not good news.
The bearing on the prop-shaft has popped out, so the shaft etc isn't properly supported going through the hull to the prop. And it's hitting the prop on occasion...so it needs taking out and refitting - which means finding a yard and taking the boat out of the water. I can feel the holiday falling apart around us.
So we wait, to see if there's a yard that can handle us...

Help is soon at hand.

with stilson wrench and grease:

Matt, our new Best Friend.

Well, Pilling's Lock Marina can take us, but it's quite a distance away, so Matt the Engineer is coming with us to make sure things don't get worse, and AngloWelsh have been real stars - they've offered to either pay for us to have a day out somewhere while the boat is fixed (on a reimbursement basis) or the boatyard will let us have a dayboat for the day. PLUS as we'll be losing 2 days of our holiday, and Jupiter isn't booked out next week, we can stay out until Monday morning instead of returning to base on Saturday. A couple of quick phone calls and it's all agreed - so as long as it gets fixed tomorrow, all is better than good!
So here we go, letting Matt and Drew do the locks and steering.
Cossington Nature Reserve slips past, with terns screeching overhead. Lots of sizeable weirs (mostly dry-ish), some very posh houses, long gardens, some boats, overhanging willows (of course you always meet the oncoming boat where the willows mask it!).  Not quite sure why one house appears to have cannon on the waterfront...

 
The river widens rapidly after Montsorrel, very rural and lovely. We get to Pillings Lock by 1700 and then there is all the messing about getting to our mooring, and finding someone who knows what's happening.
They say they'll start at 0700...
8 miles/7 locks/0 tunnels/River Soar

On Being Spotted – a cautionary tale.

One of the lesser joys of working with children is the potential for catching things from them. Until recently, this has been – in general – coughs and colds, mostly easy to shake off, but this last week has changed the record.

Last Tuesday, I had a headache. I put this down to working on the computer all afternoon, concentrating on the end of year accounts and getting my reports up to date, ready for the evening meeting with my Management Committee, and the actual meeting itself – never the most stress-free of occasions! Paracetamol (and a small bar of free-trade chocolate!) made me feel better, and carried me through to 9.00 pm and my eventual supper.

Overnight, I felt horrible. Woke at around 1.30 am, couldn’t stop shivering, my feet were freezing, although I was quite warm otherwise, so at around 3.00 am I threw my dressing gown across the bottom of the bed. This seemed to solve the ‘ice-block on the end of the leg’ problem and I dropped off to sleep, only to wake at around 6.00 am absolutely roasting! And I mean boiling. Well, I put this all down to being a woman of ‘a certain age’, and headed back into work, to go over the accounts with our treasurer and figure out why things weren’t coming up in the right columns in the computer printouts. We sorted it out, and felt rather pleased with ourselves, and I headed off to get ready to travel down to Mum’s for the Easter break in a small haze of achievement. Still felt ‘heady’ but put it down to the lack of sleep, and thought – ah well, it’ll be OK after a decent night tonight and then we’ll be off on holiday and I’ll be fine. Had a shower before bed and was slightly askance to find a few spots here and there – put this down to excessive sweating, and possibly a change of hair conditioner.

As we drove South on Thursday, with the dog mumping and grumping in the foot-well as usual, I noticed one or two more spots appearing on my arms. Odd, but it could still be a minor allergic reaction, so I thought no more of it.

Friday morning, things were very different. I looked in the bathroom mirror, and realised I was turning rapidly into a Dalmatian. This was NOT an allergy, but a definite spotty outbreak. We consulted the family encyclopedia. A virus – measles, rubella or chickenpox seemed the most likely. I felt OK, apart from being concerned I would frighten passers-by, but it would be useful to know what it was I had, and how long I might have had it, and who I might have infected on the way and now needed to tell…

Process of elimination on symptoms brought us down to – oh joy – chickenpox. As a mate of mine who caught it a couple of years back said – ‘I’m covered in unsightly bobbles!’ Every time I looked, there were more – my head felt like it had a bad case of sunburn, and my skin like someone had planted a crop of lentils just beneath the surface. And then highlighted the subsequent lumps with red paint. And then stuck little dabs of custard on the top of the lumps…

So the holiday has been spent quarantined. Infectious until tomorrow. Can’t do all the things we planned to do – no trip to IKEA, no trips to more garden centres, no taking the rubbish to the tip…hey, maybe there’s an upside to this after all!

Perhaps not. It’s been itchy, sore in places, and for one who is no oil painting to begin with, the join-the-dots facial embellishment is not a terribly successful look. But apart from that first night, I’ve felt fine. I haven’t even lost my appetite – in fact the major gripe has been frustration! I’ve been trying to find out what the ‘join-the-dots’ puzzle actually makes when done, but unless it’s a map of the far side of the moon, craters and all, I’m flummoxed. It occurs to me to wonder – if they’d all joined up, what would have happened then? Would I have turned into a chicken? Why is it called chickenpox after all, if not?

But it’s going away, fading and drying up. Somewhere in Aberdeenshire there’s a parent who’s been sat up with a spot-ridden child, the statutory bottle of calamine lotion, and far more worries than we’ve had. But, looking at the possible complications, far fewer potential major side effects. We used to take these things in our stride – measles, mumps, chickenpox, and the rest - we used to deliberately try to get our kids infected early in life, when the risks are lower. I know this was the case with me – I just didn’t ‘catch’ the darn thing when I was supposed to, though we thought at the time I had. (Moral of the tale – one spot doth not a pox make!) Nowadays, we go straight for the inoculation. I’m not sure which is the better move, myself. Being left to catch everything has resulted in me having a resilient system that fights infection, and this has been an exercise in patience more than anything else.

Now I need to know – was the one apparent (measly) measle I had back in 1960 the real thing, or is that still lurking out there too, waiting for me?

No safety in numbers

So I blearily stumbled out of my door this morning to take out the trash and thought - where the heck's the bowl of flowers? Some b*stard's nicked some of my plant pots!

Now I know my garden's overgrown - (but it's intentionally like that, the owner squeaked) - but nicking my plant pots is a bit much! By the look of it, there's three gone. It's difficult to tell, as I have a lot of them - it's a small garden with a chunk of concrete -hence pots on the hardstanding - but it looks like the ones that are currently out (like - flowering with a vengeance, looking great, cost a lot!) are among the vanished. Rhodohypoxis, I mourn thee - ten years I've had these, and they've dutifully flowered every spring/summer, they have been the subject of mystery - why did I plant half red bulbs, half white, and they all end up white? - they have cheered me up every year. Gone, now, probably to some a**hole's stall at a car-boot sale. It's not as if it would be awfully easy - walking down the road with a pot of plants would be a bit obvious, let alone several - has to be a car heist. And they'd have to be looking closely - the garden ain't that self-evident.

What, or who, can profit in plant-pot heists?