Back to my watery ways

The summer is well and truly over, isn't it? Well it is here in the Netherlands. I'm sitting here on my barge with the heater on and wearing full winter garb. Okay, it's not so very cold, but I've been spoilt these last months with large doses of wonderful, really hot weather. And I revelled in it. So now it's back to the flatlands and I'm having to get used to the damp chill from all the water that we are constantly surrounded by - even as landlubbers. And it's been raining. A lot. Constantly. Quite honestly, I think I'd rather be a duck if this is what we've got to put up with.

This is the view tonight from my hatch. Dark, isn't it?

The neighbour's foredeck

My foredeck. About the only light is what's reflected from the
wet  stuff

All the same, it's good to be here. I've got my feet up on the sofa and just noticed my socks are covered with sawdust. Hmm, probably not the best place to put them, but hey, it's me talking and I've just had the satisfaction of building a new storage chest thingy that I'm a bit pleased with. Proper pics will follow when it's trimmed, painted and finished properly, but it felt good to be attacking some wood again. Here's a preview:

New storage space for lots of…er…stuff?

Of course, I imagined it would take me about ten minutes. Four hours later, I'd run out of wood to finish the lid, found I had to cut bits out, lift bits up and adjust the height to fit the odd shape of the hull, and generally needed to do a lot of head scratching and puzzling to make it work. As always it's an evolution rather than a design, but even so, I'm pretty chuffed with it.

So there it is. Not a very exciting post, but a kind of coming home to my my watery ways. To finish, here are a few pics I took at the weekend when we had a brief spell of sunshine. A walk along the canal always does me good.