Time flies like an arrow;…..

Fruit flies like a banana.

I was doing my regular tour of the blogs that I’ve been following, when I thought it must be a while since I’ve updated ours. That was a surprise, our last update was May 2009! It’s not that nothing has happened, it’s because I’m not very good at keeping a diary. I enjoy reading other blogs, however small the detail, but I can’t do it myself. I love notebooks and have several, but after the first couple of pages I forget them. I really want to put all my thoughts in a notebook because I have so many ideas in my head but for some reason I don’t write them down. This means that those thoughts disappear after a while or I end up working it all out in my head. When I had a brief, but enjoyable, career change and studied garden design there were a lot of art projects and we were encouraged to keep a notebook but all I ended up doing was writing down the brief, doing all the design and then filling in the notebook afterwards. A bit like maths really, I’d have the question, I’d produce the answer and then get marked down for not showing all my working out. It was all in my head. So when I thought it was about time I updated this blog my head then overflowed with all the things I needed to write down and by the time I’ve finished writing this I will probably have forgotten half of it. I think I’ll buy a nice big shiny notebook today and try again to write everything down.

So, here goes, what have we been doing since May.

After getting back from dry dock and settling down into our new mooring and getting on with enjoying life aboard we set about painting the deck. This involved much rust busting, Vactaning (if that is a verb), priming and top coating. This went well and we used different colours for each coat so we could see were we’d been, but life kept on getting in the way. So for this year we're left with the foredeck, aftdeck and gunwale and the fiddly upright bits between deck and roof (I have no idea of the correct nautical term). Inside we’ve got the current living space more or less right, but it’s still just a huge bedsit and started work on the other half. This will be the bedrooms, proper bathroom and study/office. So far in there we’ve removed a ton of scrap metal and sold that (we still have about the same again to remove), scraped about half the bilges and cleaned and Vactanned (is that a word?) half the hull. The plan is to lay half the floor to give us a working space and then clean up the rest. Well that gives you an idea of where we are, sorry about the lack of detail, I will try harder this year.

Whilst rambling on about notebooks I took a look at one in my collection and found a piece I intended to write last year. It was about waste, not the most interesting subject, but something I’ve grown not quite passionate about but more a case of a little heated. We try to recycle and make regular trips to the local tip. But if you spend any time at a tip/recycling centre you’ll see an enormous amount of waste. I know there are problems with recyling mountains where no one really knows either what to do with it or the cost is prohibitive, but some of the things I’ve seen thrown into the landfill bin when the appropriate recycling bin is yards away winds me up. Probably the most extreme was when I saw someone throw a mini-moto motorcycle into landfill, I’m sure it no longer worked but to throw it like that is… is… Grrrrr! Anyway rant over, I’ll still get wound up when we go there but what can you do, we do our bit and hopefully the majority of other people do too.

I had to take away the ability to leave anonymous comments on our blog after we received loads in Mandarin. After getting them translated in Google I found that these were basically ads for things that included rubber women. So if you want to leave a comment you’ll have to have an account etc. I did check Google Analytics and was surprised to find that even though we hadn’t posted anything for nearly a year we were still getting quite a few visits.

OK, I’d better go now.

Now, what was it I was going to buy……………..