No blobbing today!

Cooking in the heat has gone by the wayside recently - either I think about cooking and go 'Nah, no chance!' or I decide, without even considering cooking, that it's too hot for anything but nibbles. But after a day of blobbing on Saturday, I had a sudden rush of blood to the head and made a proper meal. After all, I am meant to be a good wife, at least part of the time...

1: Tomato and basil, no dressing; 2: lettuce, parsley, chives and egg; 3: tuna, potato, celery. 2 & 3 with a dressing made with mayo, yoghurt, honey and lime juice. Yum.

Yesterday, late in the afternoon, we arrived outside Dale and Dave's workshop here in Braunston. First thing this morning, I got up and made cheese scones and then at 8am, the guys were ready to get to work, stripping the paint off the front half of the roof. What Dale had thought could take about 3 days has almost been completed in 1 day - probably no more than half a day tomorrow and the front half of the roof will have been scraped down, rotary wire brushed and sanded ready for painting.

When we started it was raining lightly. The duct tape is from where Dale did a test patch on Thursday last week - he covered it up in case of rain ... Dave looks suitably sinister in his hoodie.

I have a multi-tool at home and I must get one for the boat - I am sure I need one! Dale is on to section 2. My job was to sweep away the paint that had been lifted. In a way, I probably added to their fatigue - if I hadn't been sweeping as they scraped, they would have had to stop to do it every 5 minutes. As it was, I took it all so they just had to keep scraping.

The bucket full of scrapings.

And then it got warm and the shirts/hoodies came off

Working, boss!

And David was on serving morning tea and making lunch, and then on dishes, complete with marigolds. See how carefully he stacks the dishes?

We all stopped for the day at about 4.15, and since then Dale has come over to sort us out with power, and he's also taken away a load of our towels to wash in the workshop.

Between them, he and Dave are stars. I think I blogged last year that Dale removed a leaking and defunct chimney stack, and welded a piece of steel in its place, plus he welded a second piece of steel in a leaking former chimney hole that the original owners had used to bring their satellite cables down into the boat. So when it came to sorting out this paint scraping/stripping exercise, we thought of them first - it pays to keep the economy moving. Apart from that, just doing the sweeping after them today has exhausted me, so I would never have coped with doing the paint stripping as well ...

If you need any metalwork done, see them - Direct Marine Components Ltd in Braunston ph 07759257964. They are between Midland Chandlers and the pub. And they are great!

I am thinking about tomorrow's morning tea now - I think it'll need to be pikelets, just for a change.

And I realised the other day, that I didn't make pikelets for the grandsons this last visit - that will have to be remedied early in their upcoming visit, or I will lose my status as Grammy extraordinaire, and that will never do!

Thunderstorms!

We now have thunder, lightning and hail and lots of rain!

Lots of rain bouncing off the surface of the canal

Almost impossible to see in the photo, but the little white specks are hail ...

 David is now outside (rain has slowed, thunder is a fair way away) screwing down the roof vents (known as mushrooms). We've had them wide open to increase ventilation, but the rain has bounced in ...

Fortunately for the farmers and the fields, the rain has been intermittently heavy - probably easier for the parched ground to absorb.

It's a luxury to be blobbing

Here we are moored up outside Braunston, only about a km away but no traffic noise, no other boats moored close by; just the Saturday sound of lots of boats (mostly hirers who collected their boats yesterday or this morning) going past.

David has walked into Braunston on errands (generated by him, not me) and I am having a lie in. Well strictly speaking, I am having a lie in interspersed with making bread, making tea, toasting cheese scones for a snack, and now blogging. So blobbing isn't really accurate. Not to worry - I am still in bed and it's 11.33am.

We have cruised every day since Tuesday when we did a long day (about 10.5 hours, I think) from the junction of the Welford Arm to just before the Braunston Tunnel, the next day we went through the tunnel and down the locks to see Dale and sort out getting the roof scraped. As he is starting on that on Monday we had a few days to fill, so we headed for Rugby in two bites - a short distance outside Braunsrton (about 500m to a shady space) and then early in the morning to Rugby, watered up, turned around, and moored in the shade - sense a theme, do you? A big shopping expedition - Tescos was beautifully air-conditioned - back to the boat to unpack and then I sat out in the shade, still very hot, while David walked into town to buy a TV (Tescos) and to go to the 3 shop for a SIM for the modem thing we brought over from NZ - purchased from NZMCA and apparently very good, so the onboard IT Manager tells me.

Yesterday we came back from Rubgy to just about the same place outside of Braunston, but better and more shady. The afternoon was a sitting outside reading and blogging one for me, and an inside sorting out modems, the new TV, phones and IT for David - so we were both pretty satisfied. And then the wind came up and cooled us off, and the new TV worked happily, and we watched for a bit and went to bed and woke up to rain on the roof and wind - lovely stuff!

Today we are not moving the boat (when it's windy the boat tends to act like a giant 62 foot sail) and late tomorrow afternoon, we will move up to Braunston and moor up beside Dale's boat ready for work to begin on Monday.

Here are some random photos to add interest to an otherwise picture-less post ...

Yesterday, as we cruised from Rugby to Braunston, we passed this very familiar boat - it did seem strange not to see James and Doug on the stern suggesting drinks and nibbles on board ...

I made this rhubarb pie a few months ago to take to dinner at Bruce and Gary's place. I note there are several mistakes in my latticework where I have too many overs instead of unders ... I had taken the photo so I could put it in a blog post, but I hardly blogged at all while I was working - somehow I couldn't find the time to write personal stuff when I was writing project and programme stuff. Of course, I could have written screeds when I couldn't sleep at night as my brain wouldn't shut off. However if I couldn't sleep, I used to get up and work - I figured if my brain was thinking about what I needed to be including in the documents I was writing, I might as well get up and do it, even if it was 3am. Somehow it didn't often occur to me to get up and blog.

Here are Rodger and Pat from Cat's Whiskers - they come to NZ every summer to stay with their daughter in Karori (a Wellington suburb). They came to visit us in Waikanae, and David took this photo so we could What's App it to Mike Coates at Mercia Marina - I have a feeling it was to make him jealous that he wasn't with us. But mainly, because we are nice people, it was to say hello to him - honest!

I took this photo of the screen on the plane - it showed where we were as we flew over the Baltic Sea near the coast of Poland. Elblag (said Elblonk) is where our grandsons' mum comes from. Isn't that a great display for an airline to show? I do like Virgin Atlantic!

Mid Summer Kiwi Xmas

We had mid summer kiwi xmas close to Welford Junction - a 17 minute walk for Tim from the North Kilworth bridge after a drive down from working somewhere up north, and the rest of us were already in place - we already had the grandsons, and Mick and Julia arrived on Unknown No 3.

We had made the grandsons work for their passage - dishes, lockwork, steering the boat ... But we also let them play and sleep too, just in case you think we gave them no peace!

Karol opening the gate after Olek had worked the paddles

He's a good kid - and he knows the mantra of red before white and you'll be all right ...

Playing in the field at the top of the Foxton Locks.

And see, we do let them sleep in in the morning!

I was on the phone to Jaq Biggs while Olek was steering - he is a champ and when he comes back next Friday, I plan to make him steer all of the time!

And Karol is on dishes - he is pretty good at doing them although he swears he doesn't like the job - do I look bothered? No, because I am a meanie Grammy. And on the stove is the gammon, being cooked for Xmas dinner, and the lamb leg is in the oven - 4 hours being slow cooked - yummy!

Saturday morning and the shade tarp is being constructed. That's Tim up the ladder

Flag found in the locker under the sofa

Hedgerows are great for tying to, and another flag found

The flag is pegged on but got moved to the other end - this is one of the flags that were part of the referendum - it was the one we wanted so we bought it ...

Tim made a skirt to go over the gunnels in case of dropping stuff down the gap ...

The boys made small flags to be taped to sticks that they had stuck in the ground.

Pre-lunch nibbles in the shade

Roast potatoes and lamb, coleslaw, potato salad, kumara orange and walnut salad, carrot salad and gammon.

Xmas dinner in the shade. Julia, Mick, Olek, David, Karol at the table, and me - Tim did eat too ... Note the tarp 'skirt'  Tim constructed to mitigate the falling in the gap effects between boat and armco?

I think they look well fed ...

Not sure what Karol is doing but there were races in the late afternoon ... He was given a head start each time, and managed to win every race. I think the head start needs to be much shorter! He is little but extremely speedy.

Boating at last

We are moored up just before Rugby town bridge at Brownsover - in the shade but it is still too hot ...

Mel in Waikanae, ready to go in the suitcase. Holding the best Marmite, none of this UK stuff ...

It's 12 days since we got to the boat but we didn't actually leave the marina until a week ago. Well, we did leave on Wednesday but had to go back rapidly, after a fortuitous check of the weedhatch. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me go back to the beginning ...

The journey to the UK was lovely in Business Class - AirNZ to Shanghai Pudong (12 hours but actually only 11), a four hour stopover, and then Business Class on Virgin Atlantic to LHR - also very lovely, great food, and great staff, lots of sleep.

A yummy meal on board Virgin Atlantic partially eaten before I remembered to photograph it. Even though my memory of the flights is hazy, I know it's Virgin Atlantic because the salt and pepper shakers are in the shape of little planes ...

This time we picked up the car straightaway instead of collecting it the next morning - Saturday morning at Enterprise is always really busy with a queue often out the door, so Friday night was a better bet. Into the hotel, realise that the careful packing for ease of locating stuff means nothing after 30 hours of travel when the mind has lost memory of recent events ... And then dinner at the hotel with Barry and Pauline who had lovely news that they are coming back to NZ and that their grandkids are coming to NZ to live too. Yay!!!

The next morning we drove to Desborough up the M1 - I am sure drivers have got less patient here than they were when we first started coming over: lots of non-indicated lane changes with almost no space in front of following cars ... We arrived at Mick and Julia's place before they did - they had been down to Waka Huia finishing up tidying after Mick's marathon work on board. Still a few bits to finish, but it is looking wonderful.

He has replaced a number of the panels (and trim) in the saloon where there had been water damage from former chimney holes that hadn't been adequately sealed - we got that work done properly last year by the lovely Dale at Braunston. Mick built a corner seat and had a leather covered cushion made (now called the naughty seat ...) He's fixed the book case and its little cupboard now has a shelf (used to have the pump for the diesel heater that we removed). And he sanded and varnished the porthole surrounds, fixed the book case, lifted all of David's wiring for the electronics and put it behind the panelling instead of dangling below it ... He's painted the duck-hatch doors inside and the stern doors and they now both sport silver ferns - purchased online from Australia! How does that happen?

I had undercoated these doors last year, but didn't know what colours to paint them. But good old Mick knew, and don't the silver ferns look choice?

He's fixed the pigeon box that wouldn't shut properly and repainted it complete with a diamond pattern on one end outside and replaced the timber trim that had got water-damaged inside. 

He's fitted new taps for the bathroom vanity - they had seized up last year. And I gather they were an absolute bastard to get off; and he's re-tiled the vanity top,  painted the bathroom walls and put a new piece of panelling in where we removed the self pumpout switching (and we'd left a hole where the switch was ...). Since we returned he has put up the brass rod for the new curtains, informed me the ones I brought over are too scanty, so he has taken away my large redundant curtain of the same material (made for privacy between the saloon and the bedroom but never used) and at the end of the season, he will take our curtains (scanty variety) and add some fabric to them to make them more voluminous - did you know he sews as well? He is a marvel, that Mick! He's also made the front door curtain into two and now has some of that material with which to make a couple of tie backs.

He had sanded down one of the worktops in the galley and used some benchtop oil on it - looks great and has left me the sandpaper and the oil to do it again. He painted the stern bands and the swan's neck ... So we are looking very smart now, inside and out. I know I have missed itemising some things (one is the removal of the rotting roof box and repairing the roof under it). There will be more...

Lily pads in the marina by Waka Huia. Under the lily pads though was the ghastly blanket weed ...

Anyway, so on Wednesday we were finally ready to move off from the jetty, and I thought the boat was sluggish coming out between two moored boats. As there was lots of blanket weed in the marina, esp near the jetties, I asked David to check the weedhatch when we were finally outside the marina, and before we were going to cruise down to Foxton.

A damn good thing I did ask for that to happen, because even though he couldn't see it, he could hear water coming into the bilge. Bilge pump swiftly turned on and David went back to the marina to get Dean and Martin to come and cast their eyes over it. They declared that the stern gear was leaking, and that we needed to come back into the marina so they could lift us out. Rather than wait for Steve to return from leave the following day and then get into line behind other jobs that were no doubt in the queue, we phoned our trusty Ed Shiers. Fabulous man that he is, he travelled 2.5 hours to come down to repair the stern gear. He got to us at about 2.30, was finished (with Mick's help, as the stern gear was on extremely tightly and required much use of levers made from pipe and spanners and crescents ...) just before 5.30, and Dean lowered us back into the water. Oh bugger! The leak persisted and was not the stern gear at all, but a faulty weld around the prop shaft - it had failed when the grit blasting took place. Dean, who is an ace welder, declared the weld was useless - it was in 2 rows rather than one smooth rounded piece, and part of it had given way. So it was up out of the water again, and on to the blocks for the night ...

On the blocks with obligatory staircase. It felt very weird, I must say.

You can see how clean the hull is after being zinced and blacked with two-pot!

In the morning, I made more cheese scones (I had made some the day before when Ed was on his way - for Ed, Dean and Martin, plus Carol in the office and Mick, David and me - we donated Julia's share as extras for Ed). It is a rule that you must feed the workers!

So promptly at 9.15am, Dean and Martin came round with the welding gear and ground the weld down all round the pipe and then re-welded the whole thing. He did it in two halves so that the stern gear didn't get too hot from the intense welding heat. A good idea since Ed had re-sealed it ... Martin painted it with 2 pot epoxy, we waited a wee while for it to dry

So then it was back into the water for a test - yay! Leak was gone. Scones were delivered and we were off down to Foxton to await the arrival of the grandsons that evening.

A few photos from the last few days - blog will catch up later ...

This one's for Derek and Ted ...

I couldn't see what they were serving the children with ...

After an extremely long day's boating (left Welford Junction at 7.30am, moored up just before the Braunston Tunnel at 6pm) we caught up with Laughing John. He and David drank sloe gin and I drank chardonnay (of course)  and we ate cheese, hummus, apples and crackers. No dinner, just nibbles, alcohol and much laughter. I cooked brekkie for us all in the morning and showed John Mick's handiwork - he was very impressed.

This morning, David steering through his first bridgehole - after he'd had to take over while I used the onboard facilities ...

More later - I am sure David must be just about back from a shopping trip in Rugby, and I will have to get dinner cooked - such an effort, as I bought two Tesco curry meals today, plus naan breads.

It is so bloody hot, we will be eating out on the towpath, where we are moored up in the shade and it is still roasting! (Last year we complained about the heatwave that lasted a couple of weeks while we were down on the Avon and then we complained about it raining lots for several weeks. And now I am complaining about excessive heat again. I blame Trump, frankly.)

Sunset

Am working at the dining table, and even though it's getting darker and colder, I still have the blinds up.

I was thinking thinking thinking about what to write about rolling out a park and ride solution at a tourist spot, and as I thought thought thought, I saw through one of the dining room windows that the sky was a lovely colour.

Ever mindful of the need to take micropauses in my work (yeah, right!) I took photos. A couple of them even involved going to stand outside the back porch! Such an adventurer I am!!

Looks lighter than it was - over to the east above John and Jenny's place and over the lovely hills

To the north, over Peter and Margaret's shed and house, and over our little shed ...

If you look closely, you can see the buds on Joy and Grahame's magnolia.

OK, on with some more work!

And THAT assignment is done and dusted

I have just sent off the last email and the work is done - hopefully I will now be able to get back to sleeping as normally as I ever do (not very), and after the next couple of weeks where I have one last assignment to do, I will be on holiday (flying Business Class, of course) in the UK on the boat, and for the time being acting like a retired person. How long THAT will last, I am not yet sure ...

The work since 9 April has been done at a frenetic pace, which has not been a bad thing, so much as a sleep-loss-inducing thing with the occasional stress upheaval. One thing it has meant though is no exercise to speak of and a reduced capacity to moderate tiredness eating ... It'll be back to fasting for a couple of days a week for the next few months, I think.

I am really pleased with the outputs of the work - I've prepared a Programme Management Plan (150-iah pages) for a large piece of work, and pulled together about 22 Workstream Briefs (about 300-ish pages).

But as is always the case in such endeavours, I didn't do it alone. I had a great deal of input from a group of people from the five agencies for whom the programme is being developed - I called that group my Virtual Programme Team (VPT) - they came to workshops that I ran, allowed me to run the workshops in a style somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun, and put a great deal of thinking into scoping of the workstreams, what the risks are for the programme and what kind of skillsets are going to be required to get the work done.

As I pulled the Workstream Briefs together, the VPT reviewed them and provided comment and corrections, so I could finalise them. Then my trusty friend Sarah who I have worked with off and on, for 29 years, did a marvellous job of:

• drawing up the pictures we sketched to show how each set of workstreams fitted into a particular project as part of the Programme
• constructing the Programme Roadmap and made lots of changes to it progressively as our thinking about the Programme matured
• which projects workstreams should sit within
• what order workstreams should start in and with what time lags
• putting together the spreadsheets (AAARRRGGGHHH!!!) showing the estimated costs for each workstream, then aggregated them up to Project level and then up to Programme level
• formatting all of the documentation so it all looks fabulous and consistent throughout
• doing a copy edit, and getting it all ready for a final print for checking (and that includes such things as inserting pages (marked as 'Page intentionally left blank') to make sure that the component documents started on the correct side of the page opening - who knew? ...

As well as working at her home, Sarah has also come and stayed with us for two separate weeks in June working on this stuff with me as I wrote, edited, swore, made cups of tea and left them to get cold, reheated them and left them to get cold ... and we worked together at our dining table. David let Sarah have his office chair and there we worked, barely stopping for lunch, and never stopping for morning or afternoon breaks.

To put it succinctly, it has been a mission! On the last night, Thursday, we were up until after midnight getting the final things done so it could go to the print firm, and be sent to a few people for them to reassure themselves they were happy for it to be distributed more widely.

Then Friday was spent making tweaks and a few cosmetic changes and repairing typos. Just as I was to get in the car and drive Sarah to Paraparaumu Airport late on Friday afternoon, we got the call that it could be sent out, so back inside to send the already prepared email about downloading it all from Dropbox (all 535 pages of it) and sending the already prepared accompanying email.

Phew! 

So then, off to the airport in a more rushed fashion, dropped Sarah off with giant hugs and thank yous - I think I was in bed before she landed in Nelson - and it's only a short flight ...

So we delivered on time! My contract ended yesterday (30 June) but I was determined to have it all delivered on the Friday. But to be honest, yesterday I worked too - I put together and sent out all of the stuff for the first Steering Group meeting that I am attending this coming Friday in Timaru.

It has been a frenetic time as I mentioned above, but a very satisfying piece of work and very satisfying to get it done on time - I am sure I have overspent the budget, because I have worked at least 6 days a week since early April, and I think they only calculate actual weekdays ...

Amid the hard work though, there has been a lot of laughter - Sarah and I are good friends, and all the work we do is creative in its own way, and I find creativity is always enhanced by being off the wall and laughing.

One morning (well, several actually) we started work still dressed in our night attire - that is one of the benefits of working from home. The other is the time saved in not commuting! It is so efficient being able to walk from the bedroom, via the kitchen to turn on the kettle, to the dining room to start work. And finishing work off at the end of the day is an easy segue to eating dinner.

4 Macs and a Heyward, hard at work

Sarah was an NZ Argentine Tango Champion and used to teach tango. So one night as an avoidance activity regarding doing the dishes, she taught David how to lead when dancing ...

Apparently the secret is in making sure that you dance close so you can feel when/where each other wants to move to. I think Sarah called it 'lead to initiate' - I will check, and get back to you ...

So, it was across the kitchen, and

past the freezer and into the laundry pantry.

One night Sarah's daughter Izzie came for dinner with her husband Bevan. Izzie renewed her friendship with Mel. Kirsty used to babysit Izzie so she had to be sent this picture.

One day we did escape the dining room and the Apple Macs and went for a quick walk up to the village. We saw this as we came back into our street.

And one day it was very cold first thing in the morning before the heater kicked in, so it was on with the burhka ...

We gave David a night off cooking and walked in the very cold evening air (so lovely and refreshing!) up to the local Indian restaurant. Yummy!

And outside the dining room window was a tui feeding from the camellia. This photo is a bit of a lucky fluke as I had to take it through the insect screen - that is why there is fine cross-hatching visible if you look closely.

David has also been a star during this time - he took on almost all dinner cooking duties, made innumerable cups of tea, delivered breakfast, did the supermarket and vege market shopping. About the only things he didn't do were sweeping and washing the kitchen floor and dusting - I am not sure what has to happen for him to look upon that set of tasks as 'must do' in the same timeframe as I want them done ...

Last weekend, while David was away in Brisbane, seeing his sister Ginny and being visited by our wonderful daughter Kirsty, Luke came around with Mr Chainsaw. I moved the motorhome out on to the street, and Luke and Mr Chainsaw got to work - the maple has had a very severe haircut. He also cut down a dead kowhai at Grahame and Joy's place over our back fence and trimmed the kowhai out on our berm - no where near as severely as the maple - it only needed shaping.