Pillings Lock blog #3

Pillings Lock Marina 2009 #3

Today is Wednesday 28th October 2009 and we have been at these moorings for just a month. Unlike our stay at Bulbourne for the previous two years, we have actually spread our wings a little and investigated three different pubs, two of which are in Quorn and one in Barrow. So far, of the three, we still prefer The Fox in Quorn, which has a big frontage but looks no different to most other pubs inside. This is the pub I took Alan to on the day we bought the Alfa.

Now, as most of you will be well aware, I have a lousy memory and so you will have to pardon me for not remembering the names of the other two pubs. However, the second pub we visited was also in Quorn and, although very friendly, it was very small and somewhat crowded, with footballing kids. I have to say I quite enjoyed the experience, and I do like a pub that is popular, so I dare say we’ll go there again.

The third pub is in Barrow right by the River Soar and, once again, seems pretty popular, especially where food is concerned. Obviously it has a very good reputation in that regard.

Today I’m going to carry on with the building of our new roof top flower boxes, which are going to be good and sturdy at around 21”long by 11” wide and nine” tall. Yesterday I completed the bases, which leaves me to connect the ends and sides, after which there’s the painting to do. Goodness knows where we’re going to store them once they are built but, wherever it is, they need to be covered until they have been painted. They certainly can’t stay inside the boat.

Tomorrow morning, which will be Thursday 29th October, we have a 7.30 appointment for blood tests, followed later in the morning with a visit to my old RAF pal from Germany, who has now bought a flat over her at Newcastle-under-Lyme, which is right next door to Stoke on Trent.

The weekend is here again and it has started out very much as the forecasters predicted, cooler and very much wetter. However, even though we won’t be going very far today, I still have plenty to keep me occupied. I have now built the two flower boxes for the roof and all I have to do now is paint them.

Today is Saturday 31st October and our visit to Alan and Chris on Thursday went very well. Unfortunately, having ignored my own map directions, we took a wrong turn and, what should have been a journey of an hour or so, took us almost two. But we had a good visit with a rather decent lunch laid on by our hosts. Hopefully, some time next year, perhaps we can meet up and we can return the favour.

Alan and Chris have only had the flat for a short time but, just recently they ordered a sofa. Now, you would think that a man of Alan’s calibre would have thought to take a few measurements before buying. But, since we did exactly the same at Westfield, with the result that my dear brother had to remove a front window to get ours in, I suppose I really shouldn’t crow. Anyway, having sent the object back for the upholsterer to play with, they finally managed to get it through the front door. But, once again, they ran into trouble. You see, their flat is one floor up with just a straight flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs there is a low wall which, unfortunately, they could not get the sofa over. They are now back to square one and, as Alan informed me by text last night, he is not amused.

No doubt, when the saga is over, he will see the funny side of it, but it might take some time.

Well, my good wife has condescended to arise from our pit, so I had best get breakfast prepared but, before I go, let me tell you about my visit to the clinic yesterday.

Sheila went in to collect my prescription yesterday and, when she emerged, she said they wanted to see me. So, in I went and the receptionist told me that, having studied my recent blood test, the good doctor wanted me to take a Glucose Tolerance Test. This entails starving myself for 12 hours, having a blood sample take, drinking a 330 ml bottle of Lucozade, waiting for another two hours without food, at which time I would have another blood sample taken.

Naturally, being diabetic, I protested, at which point the receptionist suggested that she have a word with the GP and phone me back. The result of which was to say that, not having studied my notes, the doctor had not realised I was diabetic. Future dealings with the clinic are not looking too rosy. Anyway, no need for the test, surprise, surprise!

After a very blustery and wet Sunday, Monday 2nd November dawned bright and breezy.

I have several books stored on the laptop that are in the public domain, but even though they are in Word and Pdf formats, they are not very pleasing to the eye, because the left an right margins are far too wide. Anyway, I thought that, with a little jiggery pokery, it shouldn’t be too difficult to copy and paste them to new Word documents. How wrong I was because all that happens is that they end up with the same margins.

So, I gave it some thought and, after much deliberation, I decided to copy and paste to Notepad and then copy and paste to Word. Magic! That worked well. Well, it did until I wanted to transfer pictures from the original document to the new one, which is when everything went cockeyed.

Individual pictures will copy and paste, but if they are side by side in the original, they will be above and below in the new document.

I then tried copying and pasting into WordPad, with the same effect and I’m darned if I know what to do next. Here am I, with all these books that need re-doing, and I can’t re-do them. My next step will be to contact The Pirates and see what they can suggest. Who are the Pirates? Well, they are an American couple who are deeply into selling material that is in the Public Domain and they are the people who supply me with all the books I now have on my laptop.

It is now a rather wet and windy Tuesday 3rd November 2009 and I’m looking forward to going shopping. Who’s a big sissy? I’m looking forward to it because we have finally decided to purchase a new laptop. This, of course, does depend upon us finding a suitable one to buy. There is no PC World in Loughborough, and besides, the last time I checked in their store in Harlow, I found them to be considerably dearer that Currys, so we’ll be giving their store a visit instead.

Despite having the aforementioned problems with our existing Acer, I’m rather keen on buying another one, but I want it wit much more memory. Of course, I could simply increase the memory in this one, but that will not eliminate the underlying problems.

One thing is for sure, I won’t be installing Norton on the new one, it really is too much trouble and seems to take over the computer. Every time I am forced to shut it down with the OFF button, it goes through a disk check and, in amongst all the gobbledegook is Norton, so I no longer trust that particular programme. Instead I’ll be installing a programme called Avast, which is completely free and has very good reports. Although, having said that, if we buy a new laptop and it has the new Windows 7 system installed, we can download the new Microsoft security programme and install that instead. At least it will be compatible with the Microsoft operating system.

Friday 6th November and I have had a pretty busy week thus far, especially with the flower boxes, which both now have shiny and new coats of red paint.

Having discovered that the Halifax Bank; of which we are customers of long standing; are to introduce a £1.00p per day charge on the use of guaranteed overdraft facilities, we decided to take the advice of the money gurus at the Daily Mail and switch to the Alliance and Leicester. We received a letter this morning which refused our application. The reason for the refusal was given as ‘going on the information we had submitted’. They surely could not be discriminating against us because we are pensioners, so we believe they could only have done so because we live on a boat and, as such, do not have a permanent, land-based, address. We have been advised that we could appeal against this decision, but giving them two bites of this particular cherry, we feel, would be giving in to their misguided policy. I shall, of course, be emailing the Mail asking for their opinion, since they are the ones who suggested Alliance and Leicester in the first place.

Having had as much as I can stand with the problems with this laptop, we have now invested in a new one and it will be delivered next Tuesday at my brother’s address in Harlow. So, instead of paying him a visit the week after, I am now going there on Monday and will await delivery of same on Tuesday. Hopefully they will not make me the last delivery of the day.

As this blog is only four pages long I won’t be posting it just yet. However, with the way the internet has been behaving of late, I’m not too sure if I would be able to do so. For the first six weeks or so at this marina we have had no problems getting online but, just recently it has been very difficult. Indeed, I was having so much trouble ordering the new laptop that I finally decided to do the ordering by ‘phone. One of our immediate neighbours confirms that he too is having the same problem but, there is a glimmer of hope. It seems the marina has its own network set up especially for us boaters. All we have to do is settle ourselves in the café with a cup of coffee, plug in to the mains and get on with it. So, when I am ready to post, I will do so from the café and that will probably be some time early next week.

I’ve also been talking to another boater about this problem and he believes it has nothing to do with signal strength, but has more to do with bandwidth. The service providers, such as Three and Vodafone, have sold so many of these new-fangled dongles that the systems can’t cope with all the people trying to get online, especially at evenings and weekends. So, for the rest of our stay here, if we have something important to do online, we’ll just have to grab a cup of coffee at the café and plug in to the network. Hopefully it will be secure.

Now, all of the foregoing about Internet access has been typed on this clear and calm Sunday 8th November and I had hoped to post this blog today. However, it being a Sunday with everybody and his uncle wanting to be online, I can’t even get my dongle to connect, never mind find my homepage. So, most unfortunately, I’ll have to wait until Tuesday. Meanwhile I will now transfer this scribe to my external hard drive in readiness for setting up the new laptop.

Saturday 14th November 2009 and we’ve had a pretty stormy night. Unfortunately, we’ve also had a pretty hectic week, which has mostly been taken up by sorting out our new laptop. Have you bought a new PC or laptop lately?

We bought ours online at Comets and, true to their word, it arrived last Tuesday morning, which meant, since they would not deliver to an address other than the one at which the payment card was registered, a trip into Harlow, all 240 miles round of it.

I also ordered the new MS Office Home and Student at half price, which is just as well, since I would not have been happy paying full price for this load of rubbish. Unlike the 2003 Professional, which we had on the Acer and which has all the bells and whistles, this version comes with just four programmes, only one of which is of any use to the average Home user and that’s MS Word. The result of this discovery was to uninstall the new one and install 2003 Pro.

The next step was to install all the programmes and documents, and that takes an awful lot of time. I came up against just one serious problem with this and that was my Recipe Book Programme, which is called eBook Starter. Try as I might, despite entering the correct key codes, I could not make it come up as the Pro version, only the Demo, I now await info from the company regarding what the problem may be. I suspect that it is not set up for the new Windows 7, or it just might not recognise the new system onto which I have installed it. I do know that the programme can only be installed on one PC or Laptop, so I will probably need a different key code.

Another wee problem setting up this Toshiba Satellite was with MS Outlook and my Three USB Modem. For a start the laptop was reluctant to open the modem, which was not very helpful, because the Acer was pretty reluctant in this regard either. Anyway, once we got connected, I set up Outlook with the necessary info and, lo and behold, I was unable to send emails. What is more, when I tried to do so with the Acer, that wouldn’t do it either. After going back and forth between laptop without success I telephoned the Three Helpline and, unsurprisingly since it was based at a foreign call centre, I received no practical help whatsoever.

Going back to the drawing board I finally managed to persuade the Acer to send and receive but, as you would expect, the Toshiba would have none of it. Eventually, after much jiggery pokery and shutting down of Tosh, I finally got it to run properly. The result of all this is that we simply will not try sending or receiving emails on the Acer. Not that we need to you understand, but that option is now taboo.

Now, when I’m sitting here first thing in the morning, I usually bring the blog up to date which, as you can see from the delay since the last posting, I have not had time to do. Following on from that I would then play a few games of Mahjong until Wifey surfaces. Sadly my old favourite of MJWIN, which I have been playing since the Big Bang, is not compatible with Windows 7. I have to confess that I was pretty fast on that one, usually finishing in a little under two minutes. The game that comes with Tosh, and there are quite a few in the Games folder, is much more difficult, so lots of practice is called for.

Later on today I will attempt the impossible and post this blog. I say impossible because just lately getting online has not been easy. We are not the only ones to have suffered, so we suspect the company maintaining the servers or transmitters ahave been carrying out maintenance work.

Doggy seems to be off her food again today, but it has nothing to do with the tinned food because she didn’t have that last night. Still, she still has a wet nose and sparkling eyes, so I suppose she just doesn’t need as much food these days. She is, after all, almost 12 years old now.

OK, so, let’s post this blog and wish you all a really good weekend although, judging by the weather forecast, it’s going to be a bit blustery and wet for most of us.

Cheers for now.

Dave, Sheila and Rusty.