The new year rolls on

This is going to be an interesting year. perhaps I should have written this posting before the last one, but forget the chronology, it is the content that counts - well anyway the relevance of the subject matter.

It is now just coming up to being a year since I started this weblog, and I notice that this is posting number 52 - wow! one a week; fantastic for a lazy sod like me. I am certainly no Granny Buttons in the scheme of things.

So, as readers might have gathered from blogs passim, we have been dividing time between the house and the boat; with the nett result that the house has actually commanded more time than the boat of late. So lets start with that.

The raised vegetable beds were completed just in time for late Autumn planting of over winter crops such as onions; garlic; shallots; brasssicas and a large number of asparagus crowns. We also managed to get in over forty raspberry plants; three gooseberry bushes and some hybrid soft fruit including thornless blackberries before the frost and snow set.

Amazingly enough, we will have to start tilling the remaining beds and start our spring sowing next month, but we are glad we got such a head start already! I have been watching too many repeats of 'The Good Life' methinks, but haven't extended to goats and pigs yet. Though it seems that Jeeves now has a mind set on raising hens, fowl which did actually occupy our garden until they; were removed next door when the house was sold.

Well with any luck, we won't have to visit the fruit and veg section of Sainsbury's so often in the coming months. All in all it is rather exciting.

Now on the last posting, I mentioned that we were invited to Derek's surprise birthday party - something that certainly could not be put on this site prior to the occasion. The whole evening was a huge success and Derek certainly did not tumble to what was happening until he turned up at the restaurant in Rugby.

Derek and Sheila were at this time moored up at Napton and very solidly iced in, so we couldn't go back to Clarence for after dinner drinks, but we had their daughter Nicki and her partner Dave staying with us - a delightful couple. So we weren't short of company in Rugby either.

There are some things to be said about the ground thawing out - you get to see your lawn again; bulb shoots are peeping out of garden beds and you won't fall over walking down the pavement to the corner store. However, it isn't February yet and we all know that last this was the coldest month.

Perhaps we shall do a little more of this ice walking nonsense - and no, we don't use skis or wings, well anyway a wing and the prayer that we don't fall through! We know that we wouldn't drown, but how cold and wet would you be getting out of zero degree water and walking back to where you could change.

Here also are a couple of pictures of the marina and how we bravely used Gleemaiden as an icebreaker to charge out on to the Oxford Canal in search of fresh water and diesel fuel.

Actually not true of course - because you don't spend five hundred quid on a blacking and take it down to bare metal six weeks later. Funny thing is that NB K2 went icebreaking last year, but I doubt if even she would have got through this thickness of ice.