I came home from work yesterday to find our electricity cutting out. The inverter screamed at me for a while so I thought I better investigate before it exploded and the hubby told me off for allowing it to explode. After wandering up and down the boat for a time and turning off all electrical appliances and scratching my head in a rather clueless manner it was decided that the most sensible thing to do, and perhaps the most obvious, was to plug in each appliance individually and see which one was causing the problem.

Everything seemed to work fine when plugged in individually so I started to switch on different appliances at the same time. This probably wouldn’t take very long normally, but on our boat we have a multitude of “essential” appliances… chest freezer… fridge… microwave…toaster…tumble dryer… washing machine… the list seemed endless.

I eventually massed the courage to switch them all on together. The inverter didn’t like that and started screaming at me again. I really didn’t understand what could be wrong. We haven’t bought anything new… everything used to work perfectly fine when all plugged in together.

As a last resort I thought I’d try unplugging the shoreline power and reattaching it again.

As I pulled out the plug something fell out… and stared at me in a very dazed manner:

It was a very large house spider. I’m not sure how it survived in the plug socket, but it did and seemed a little bit upset about being removed.

I reattached the shoreline power and… hey presto! Everything works fine again. The spider eventually wandered off. I think it has now taken up residence in the cat flap.

Read More 10 comments | Posted by valonia | Links to this post |

Our mooring used to be an old gravel pit before a channel was dug to join it to the Thames. There are a number of disused gravel pits here. They are mainly used for fishing and soon the new Wilts and Berks canal will cut few one or two of them.

But for now they are peaceful and used mainly by waterfowl.

Read More 2 comments | Posted by valonia | Links to this post |

We like Samhain. It is, I think, my favourite festival to mark from the old calendar. Every year we invite some friends (mainly boaters) to join us for a meal.

With the help of these friends we decorate the boat:

And Rob and I carve some pumpkins. From here on the photographs are a bit shaky as the main photographer for the evening became very drunk (and passed out rather early).

We crammed the narrow boat full of as many people as we could and fed and watered them (though technically no water was drunk). We also set aside a place for those who could not be with us.

Read More 3 comments | Posted by valonia | Links to this post |