Weather to paint (or not)

And yes, the 'weather' in the title is intentional, although the 'whether' is also implied. I do enjoy a bit of word play

Anyway, after weeks of posting about my yoyo activities, the weather has indeed changed everything and decided to tell me the painting season is over. Since it can never be over as far as I'm concerned, this is mighty inconvenient. I find I'm scrabbling around trying to find parts of both boats that can safely be sanded and treated even when I know it's going to rain, and even when I don't, which happens all too frequently when the forecast is simply wrong.

On the Vereeniging, I've managed to paint all the window frames this last week – from the inside! They're quite deep, so apart from the sill part, it's been easy to sand them down, scrape any developing rusty patches and put both primer and top coat on them, so that felt good. A real one up for me over the rain. On the Hennie H, however, this is a bit tricky as there aren't any opening windows, other than in the roof. I won't explain why that wouldn't work. I have other plans for what we can do there on rainy days, but more of that later.

Windows before being scraped and sanded

Koos has now done several tests of the Hennie H's engine and a few things have shown how crucial it is to take this time and spend several hours just running the beast to see what happens. The first thing he found was that the original rubber joints for the cooling system needed replacing even though they looked good, but this only transpired after more than an hour of having the motor running in gear. All of a sudden and just when he wasn't watching, one of these joints started leaking quite badly (a typical Murphy trick, that). Luckily, I was painting in the vicinity and I saw the steam coming out of the engine bay, so we were able to stop everything without it causing any problems.

A quick search online and Koos ordered two beautiful new joints. I say beautiful because they are. New moulded rubber engine parts are objects worthy of reverence; I love them. They are now fitted and after another long test run of an hour and a half, they are still leak free. But of course other minor issues have cropped up. Warning lights that don't always come on when they should and an idling speed that's too high but quite difficult to reduce because the adjustment screw is in an awkward place. Altogether, though, it's looking and sounding very promising. I very much hope that we'll have a few rain free days so we can do a proper test and take her around the harbour.

In other news, I will be doing my first face-to-face class since March this coming Tuesday, and I'm looking forward to it very much. However, since the Netherlands is now a code red country and the numbers of people testing positive for Covid have escalated, we'll have to see how long that lasts.

On the home front, another first is that we've lit the stove. We always try and wait until 1 October, but we didn't quite make it this year by a day. Wednesday, September the 30th was lighting up day...not too bad. On that subject, I thought I'd be on top of things early this year so I ordered a load of firewood for the crumbly cottage. It comes on a huge pallet, which is neatly stacked inside a framework so you can keep the logs in it until you need them...that is if you can get the pallet onto your property. The service from the supplier was great. I ordered it on Monday and it came on Tuesday morning. 

The snag was that the transport company only had a small trolley and couldn't lift the pallet over the curb so we could put it in our passage. The driver shrugged with a kind of 'not my problem' attitude and drove off, leaving us with our stately pile standing in the road. What to do?

Well, Koos plucked up his courage and went to ask the farmer over the road if he could help us with his forklift. He struck gold there. Our very kind and friendly neighbour not only offered to move the wood but also to put it in his barn so it will keep dry. All we have to do is hop over the road and fetch it as needed. Aren't good neighbours just the best?

And just to give you something to look at, here are a few autumn snaps I took while on a bike ride before the rain came. Can we have this lovely gentle sunshine back please, Mr Weatherman? 

Have a good week allemaal!