What a couple of days!

The ideal 'dream' of living on a narrowboat certainly doesn't make you immune to the everyday trials of life! Waterworld and other such 'lifestyle' programmes show the rural and tranquil idyll and certainly not my last couple of days!

Work has been extremely stressfull but rewarding at the same time. Yesterday my Ipaq 4150 PDA that runs my entire life decided to terminally die on me. Not only has it totally given up the will to run any programmes or even restore from my backup files but the screen is cracked resulting in the touch screen stylus not operating. Great timing as this evening I had parent's evenings at school and my children's entire marks and grades were stored in my little secretary! I managed to print off enough information to 'blag' my way through this evening and bit the bullet to upgrade to an Ipaq 2790 as seen above. I hope this should arrive some time next week and so allow me to begin the lengthy process of re-installing the software, upgrading the software that won't run with this operating system and attempting to re-load and gain access to my data. I have also discovered that for some strange reason I purchased an extended warranty on the original and now damaged Ipaq and so plan to arrange a warranty repair on that to keep as an emergencey backup device given that my entire life is run by it.

I returned home late this evening after the parents evening to discover that I had left the inverter on all day resulting in seriously depleted batteries - I have now been running the engines for the past 3 hours in an attempt to restore enough power to get me through tomorrow and still be able to run my washing machine tomorrow evening!

My Eberspacher central heating system has, in the last couple of mornings, decided not to fire up on the first attempt. Granted it does eventually kick into life, but only after a pregnant pause with me holding baited breath waiting for the expected roar of it to burst into life after 2 or 3 attempts. This evening I have been running the system for the past 2 hours in the hopes of burning off any carbon deposits from the glow plug and tomorrow, I will see if it made any difference or simply waster another 2 litres of diesel and 20 amps of electricity!

Although the weather looks set to be fairly dry for the weekend, I think the wind will be the preventing factor from any anticipated excursions. Forecasts indicate gusts of up to 20+ MPH and that means a decided 'no-no' for any boat movements yet again. Today was beautiful! I took a walk up the local sandwhich bar at lunchtime, (an extreme 10 minute luxury that I forced on myself knowling that I would be late home this evening,) and on the return journey the sun was positively hot on my back.

At school today, I had an eco-school assessor in to assess if we were environmentally friendly enough to be awarded our 'green flag' status. We passed and are now officially the first junior school in Warwickshire to be awarded this national status - my baby, so naturally I'm chuffed and extremely proud of the children who are so enthusiastic about this project.