Home for the Bewildered

The Home for the Bewildered out the back, finally finished, is now accepting "customers". A bevvy of carers and nurses has arrived, and the first residents are in. We watch developments with interest. The Management are saying that locals can get a guided tour of the building. The Angel B says she is going to get her dirtiest clompy boots on and tread some mud into their new furnishings, see how they like it! Go Angel!

Diamond is home. We met John this afternoon walking home to his own house, from having just delivered Di into the tender care of fiersome Stockton-on-Tees friend of the fambly, Joan (quake, tremble). House has to be kept really really really clean because Di's immune system is still under par, so there must be absolute minimum risk of infection. One gets the impression Joan is the one to do it! No Ragworth allowed yet, so he's still at his "hotel" and no little white furry dogs yet either. Good to have you home though Diamond!

As promised, some recent Cambria pics. First a view you'd never see unless you owned one probably and had it up in dry dock to scrape barnacles off the bottom. This is taken with a wide angle under the port bow. You can just see the aft end of one of the new inner planks. the pale grey paint is the only "original" wood preserved in the restoration - the very bottom boards, pickled in salty mud since at least 1970 and almost certainly well before. At some stage in the barge's 103 years the underside may have been "doubled" (covered with a new layer of planking over (outside) the old) but we have no way of knowing, and these boards may actually be truly original 1903 wood.

Next, again with the wide angle, is a nice shot of the framing under the port bow. Finally is one of the hold with Dad's colleague Richard wandering about for scale. Running along the top of the shot above the camera and out to the right ( port side, as we're looking aft from starb'd bow) are the 2 new, 90 foot long "marjin planks", which form the sides of the hold hatches, take the hatch coamings, and support the long-ways, short "carling" beams.

All good stuff. Meggie, meanwhile, has spent a day at the vets having her feet poked and prodded. Turned out she had no grass-dart (which had been a possibility) and a small pink growth on her pad (which has been there ages and is just part of being an old girl) which might have been causing pain was cut away and cauterised, and sent away for biopsy. So she's on anti-biotics and mild pain killers, and has to wear a lamp shade for a few days. Wonder what is the price of NOT taking her pic for my blog....... mmmm... perhaps I prefer to live long and be poor.

Deefer