Tuesday 21st May 2024
Good evening/morning/afternoon
Today is another fairly uneventful day. Not every day can be filled with a story to tell it would seem. But at the risk of boring you to tears, I’ll give it a go.
So today was my first shift on the new campsite gig in Suffolk. It was a four hour shift that consisted solely on training. First, and most importantly, how to operate the machines and make coffee! The booking system, then discussed the rota. I was then kindly provided with a toastie for lunch before heading out to whizz around on a ride on mower to mow a few pitches. That was me 4 hours over and done with.
I finished my shift just in time for the heavens to open and my mood immediately being thrown back to Winter. I’ve never been a fan of rain. We would have short, but heavy downpours in Durban. It was very rare to have rain for an entire day, let alone weeks! But I feel better knowing that several months since October 2023 to date have broken records. Wettest and warmest, sometimes the same month! I was starting to worry that I was going slightly stir crazy and just imagining that it rained almost constantly for months.
Anyway, I digress.
Washing day blues
The afternoon was spent trying to do 2 loads of washing (clothing and bedding). The first attempt resulted in the coin operated appliances (washer and dryer) deciding today would be a great day to stop working. The owner reckons its the coin machines themselves. The other warden onsite suggested that we plug the appliances directly into a socket. Fortunately, I just happen to have a 30m extension chord in Star. This allowed us to seek out the nearest sock which happened to be 28m away! So we got there in the end.
I then spent about 10 minutes wrestling with my duvet to get the cover on! The things we take for granted when we live in a house. If you’ve never experienced trying to put a duvet into a cover in a space measuring about 1.5m wide (the widest part in Star by the entrance door to the habitat) and about 2 metres in height. I’m 1.81cm so if hands are hitting the roof as soon as they go above head level. If you’d like to give yourself the challenge, go stand inside a double door wardrobe and see how you get on 😊
Old man marbles
Tomorrow (Wednesday 22nd May) I’ll be joining the owners at their lawn bowls club! I’ve only ever played, what as youths we would refer to as ‘old man marbles’, once in my life. But I do recall not hating it. So why not give it another go. The problem is my knees are not well, so I’m not sure how I’m going to get on with getting down low enough to release the ball smoothly. I envisage more of a shot put action occurring.
If nothing else, it gets me out the van.
However, if its raining, I won’t be attending. As previously mentioned above, I’ve grown to hate rain and the absolute inconvenience having wet crap and muddy shoes is in van life.
Work on Star
I’ve started compiling a list of the items I need to do on Star over the next few months whilst I’ve got some stability. So far the list includes:
- Seals and draft excluder around the habitat door
- New kitchen and bathroom sink taps
- Upgrade 12v system to Lithium batteries
- Upgrade solar panels to higher capacity panels. (I currently have 2 x 120w)
- Install new combi-boiler (income dependent)
- Internal paint
- External paint (time dependent)
- Reseal skylight properly (I had a leak in October 2023 and did a fix but not correctly, I didn’t remove ALL of the old sealant for example as I had half a day gap in week long consistent raining and floods so had to forfeit doing it the way it should be done in favour of just stopping the leak as quickly as possible in the gap I had)
- Get new set of tyres. I’ve noticed some small tyre wall cracks.
- Considering: Replacing fridge. My original 3-way fridge works well on EHU but doesn’t get very cold at all when running on gas. I will give the jet and burner a clean and see if that improves things. If not then I’ll have to consider either another absorption 3-way fridge or a compressor fridge.
Running out of time!
Its 11:40pm! So if I’m going to stick to my goal of a post a day, I best wrap things up asap!
I’ll return tomorrow to add some pics (not sure whether I actually took any today, besides depressing ones of rain!)
No ChatGTP or Google searches performed today!
Until Next Time
