Holidays on a Houseboat

I have been away for a week, as my mum’s idea to celebrate her 65th birthday in style was to assemble her whole family on a houseboat. My sister then contributed to the holidays by cooking strictly themed diet meals – the first days we had only potato-based dishes, then soups, then beans and then rice, and then we had a bit of a diplomatic family crisis which was solved by going into a restaurant (puh, finally!!!)
My sister can be so enthusiastic that she is quite good at overdoing everything she is passionate about, and this time it was definitely diet-ing. And, as a very serious Christian, it was even spiced with praying at least three times a day before we had a meal, which upset me even more as the topics of the prayers weren’t particularily interesting or news worthy, mainly weather and stuff.
Driving the houseboat was fun but difficult, I managed to panic every time before a lock and got it spinning around in big circles till someone helped me out, and continued to crash it onto bridges and everything else which was in the way. The boat just takes ages to respond to the steering and then its too late and too much!! On Thursday we got stuck on a sandbank, and on Saturday an old tree managed to get into the rudder and got the boat out of control.
The houseboat was very luxurious, it even had three bathrooms with showers. And a small kitchen. However, the toilets were very sensitive as everything got hacked and swirled into small pieces and…. put back into the canal. igittigitt.
We saw some dead fishes swimming around, as the locals tried to reintroduce fishing as a tourist attraction into the canal, but it did not really seem to work out that well.
We visited an old famous abbey on the way and an old castle, lots of old washing houses and a ruin; it was very good we had the bicycles with us as the whole canal was accompanied by a bicycle path and we could zoom off to do some shopping or have some private time or do some sightseeing.
As a last attempt to save my dissertation I took the laptop with me, however, it seemed to have had a bad experience travelling as the harddisc controller was gone by the time we arrived on the boat, taking most of my already done work with it. Hopefully it will be sorted out under the warrenty.
Micah was invited to accompany us, it was odd to see that he did not seem to share our family’s humour values. His family’s humour seems to be more centred around “outclevering” each other, my family’s humour is more situation-based simple comedy. As my mum was recovering from several broken rips due to a head-over-handlebars bicycle accident, she wasn’t allowed to do any sports, leading to the new invention of “joggle-woggle” a mixture between jogging and walking. However, it soon became “joggle-wobble” after consulting the dictionary, some wine and the size of our bellies.
I did some pictures, but the old-fashioned way with the old SLR, so have to get the films developped and printed. The digital camera uses SmartMedia, which isn’t produced anymore, and the adapter solution doesn’t work with the old Olympus. Prices on ebay reach mega-highs, and I only have got a 16 MB card left, after the 64MB one gave up working during the G8.
In contrast, my Dad’s old SLR has been working fine most of the time for the last 35 years or so. Now the digital camera is just about three years old, and already it is impossible to replace the memory card. Maybe it is worth rediscovering and working with good old films for a while, till it is sorted out which kind of memory cards will stay around in future before buying some new digital photo equipment.