… we weren’t playing today because when the alarm woke me this morning, all I could hear was the howling wind outside. This morning was amazing, with another shed-load of wind and my clothes, the ones that I washed three weeks ago, they are finally dry.
And I also had the best night’s sleep for absolutely ages, especially as how I crashed out at 22:30 before I’d even put yesterday’s blog on line.
And the dream too. I was with a lady of my acquaintance and we were in Nantwich, going around all of the places that we knew in our adolescence and looking at how they had changed. The “Rifleman” pub, for example, all boarded up and overgrown with weeds and the like. But the little pub over the road, in a converted terraced house, that was still open and we went in there for a drink as my companion wanted to use “the facilities” and she had issues about using them without being a customer. I did explain that we could pay 5p in a public convenience and that would work out far better than buying a round in a pub but she was unmoved.
We noticed after that, that it was 18:00 and we had to be in Chester later that evening. It was a long walk of 20-odd miles (I did in fact walk it on several occasions through the night when my then-girlfriend Liz was at college there in the 1970s and I didn’t have a car) and I had to push my friend in a wheelchair. I therefore made a contingency plan by having her look at bed-and-breakfasts and guesthouses at Tarporley, at the halfway point, although I wasn’t convinced that we would be there by 21:00 either.
As I have said before … "and you’ll say again" – ed … if only my real life was half as exciting as my dreams.
So after breakfast, we had a little pause for an hour or so while I made up a charging cable. As you know, with the issues about Caliburn’s battery, I don’t actually have a way of charging up a van battery from the solar panels, which is probably the silliest thing imaginable seeing as how I have about 1500 watts-worth of solar panels all told. I therefore made up a lead of 6mm cable with a North American plug on one end and a pair of crocodile clips on the other. Once I’d made that, I put Caliburn’s old battery on charge and I’ll keep doing that every 15 days or so depending on the weather. If I can keep it reasonably well topped up, it’ll do for emergencies.
Once that was out of the way, I attacked the plasterboarding in the stairwell on the wall that is on the outside of my little room here. And by the time that I knocked off, that was all finished, even down to putting a couple more battens on the wall to support the plasterboard where there will be a join. We are indeed making progress.
But the weather was really gorgeous today too. Beautiful blue skies all day and a total of 145 amps of surplus solar energy in the water tank that took the temperature up to 56°C. The absence of winter is rather worrying.
