Nonsense and stuff

So, carrying on from where we left off last time, I discovered quite accidentally, whilst using a pair of industrial scissors to chop up some cardboard, that industrial scissors are really good at shearing off acrylic nail extension. Spent time deliberately shearing off the tops of the rest of extensions.

Did I mention Jen got me a Jensen Ackles (one of my TV boys for those who don’t know) cross-stitch for Christmas? It’s simple cotton so very, very easy to work. Aiming to finish by The Weekend in mid-May. Suspect might be a bit over-ambitious.

Due to snail explosion in aquarium, attempted to introduce clown loaches again. Ickle ones this time. Immediately discovered need to explore methods of giving them their supplemental blood worms without the other fish (Keyop) getting there first.

Friday 23rd was Chris’ birthday. Decided that posh wrapping paper would be unappreciated, so carefully selected paper with cartoon octopi and fish on it from the children’s section of Hallmark . Seemed to go down better than the actual presents. Spent the evening with the dive club at an Indian Restaurant in Rainham. Good food, interesting company, non-existent service.

Got woken up at 7.30 Saturday morning by Café below work. Water leaking through their ceiling. As I was in Rochester, sent boss (CAT) in to switch off stop cock. Have you ever tried to get a plumber out for a small job? Doesn’t happen; do it yourself, they say; just tighten the iso valve they say. Buoyancy Ade from the Dive Club agreed to fix it as a favour to me. And the reason why it couldn’t be fixed ourselves? The isolation valve had been welded shut.

Spent time picking off the rest of the nail extensions and flicking them at Chris and the kits. No one was very impressed except me.

Discovered that holding frozen bloodworms in fingers until melted worked quite well. Loaches got a couple of worms, Ben had a good old suck of my thumb and Keyop nibbled my fingers before tugging the bulk of worms free and swallowing them whole.

We spent an evening at an Indian Restaurant in Rochester. Good food, interesting company, excellent service.

Chopped hair off. It’s all around about an inch long. *bliss*. Sleek and elegant pixie cut. Need to experiment with it.

Friday 30th March was Dom’s last day. We celebrated with much wine at pub. In the evening we went with Jude to a Chinese Restaurant in Chatham. Good food, interesting company, bagpipes with pudding.

On Saturday, I went to the see my bank manager as one does every once in a while; a half hour appointment. After spending far too much time discussing my finances we then spent the other twenty nine minutes discussing eye surgery. She’s going to have laser done this year.

That evening we had a lovely time and mum and dad’s with Annelies and Richard. Excellent food, excellent company and excellent time had by all.

On Sunday was the dreaded Boat Handling. After a couple of drop outs, there was just me, Chris and Buoyancy Ade up for examination. Due to a minor communication hiccup, the Instructor taking us (Pete) ordered us to be at Gillingham Marina at 8.30 *snore* as he was unaware that we could not launch the RIB until high water.

We practiced some chart work at McDonalds (it was *warm*, okay?!). We launched the RIB, and took off up the Medway. We didn’t go far; the water was a little lumpy and we just needed to be far enough out to be able to do high speed drills, so we lurked just outside the speed limit.

Pete demonstrated some things, one important point that he tried to do were donuts at full throttle as tight as possible until the engine cavitated (actually, not cavitate, but aerivate or something that I can’t pronounce let alone spell – basically the engine makes a loud unhealthy rattling noise), but the engine refused to do anything of the sort purring away happily. He was very impressed –a sign of a good engine on a well set up boat.

We all passed the course. However, we decided that I should never be allowed to put divers in the water unsupervised (I kept dropping our pretend ‘virtual’ divers just about anywhere but where they needed to be). Ade should never be allowed to pick divers or anyone else up unsupervised (he either ran them over or missed entirely), and Chris should never be allowed to park the boat when he’s in a strop (less said, better).

It was a good day, very cold, but fun and instructive. Much looking forward to practising this season. Laughed muchly at fishermen attempting to get baby fishing boats on trailers without getting either trailers or shiny new range rovers wet.

Tried spiking hair a bit with mousse. Ended up looking like a woolly sheep pulled through a hedge backwards. Not sexy.

Discovered that allowing bloodworms to melt in net at top of tank and then distributing randomly in tank works marvellously well. However, when putting hand in tank to clean, fish nibble in hopeful anticipation of receiving bloodworms.

On Good Friday, tried spiking hair with extreme fixing gel. Excellent Johnny Rotten look achieved. Or, to put it another way, stick fingers in plug socket to achieve same result. We were due to go to Chris’ mum and dad. We left on time, but got to Clackett Lane and rolled past at twenty miles an hour. This probability was factored in to our timing. The fact that we were still rolling along at 20mph long after Clackett Lane was not good news, so we called Ann and Dave up. The plan was to go to a craft fair, and we agreed that our ETA would not be conducive for this, so we came off the M25 at Lingfield and followed our noses.

Good Friday is not a good day to drive when one is in a hurry, so we happily rolled through the countryside still at 20mph, with no particular place to be. Found a beautiful old, recently renovated pub called the White Hart near Wakehurst Place. Had a gorgeous lunch sitting in the sunny garden.

Rolled back to Ashford cross country and retired back up to Rochester.

At the moment, we’re sitting in Chatham library manning a dive club exhibition, waiting for someone to be interested, other than the lady who asked us we knew where we could stamps and the man looking for the Ordnance Survey maps.