Rapidly heading for retirement and a house move to the south coast while also trying to make progress with two new additions to the collection of rental houses.
The month started with a weekend trip to position our caravan on a seasonal pitch near Dorchester. That will allow us to look at areas where we may want to live without too many return journeys between Dorset and Yorkshire. It is a 250 mile trip in each direction. The plan is for me to drive home on Monday as I am the duty biochemist from 6 till 9. I am taking the dog and Helen will experiment with the train journey on Wednesday.
We also met up with Helen’s friends from the cruise and saw the sailing club that they are members of. Currently their boat is on shore for the winter re-fit so I was able to help with a little of that during the time we were there.
This is my last full month before retiring and for some reason seems to have been more than usually frantic both as a jobbing biochemist and in my patient safety lead role. On one day I had 5 partially overlapping meetings to deal with including one which I was chairing so couldnt just dip in and out as needed. The patient safety aspect wasnt particularly affected by the junior doctor strike though so our advance work of trying to train up consultants seems to have had the desired effect.
Alongside that I am still trying to teach the other clinical scientists about the data gathers and associated specimen quality work that I routinely do and I am using that to help writing the definitive “How to……” guides for each of the gathering and data processing stages.
The only boat related work achieved this month was adding some collars onto the original cockpit cover to accommodate the new double backstays and ensign flagpole. I hope this will help reduce the amount of rain water that gets into the cockpit and from there into the engine space.
I started by making cuts into the cover to clear the items involved then made up a hemmed wrap around sleeve for each one. These were then sewn into the cuts to create a v shaped diversion around the piece of boat structure. Going by the results (including a couple of record wet months) this seems to have achieved what I needed.
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