Weekly Rundown: Not Mine

This week I had an appointment in Glasgow on Thursday. I'm always dubious about traveling at this time of year because the chances of the ferries being disrupted rise incredibly around this time of year. But the forecast was good; the weather was lovely.

Of course there's some slight disruption at the moment owing to the fact that the ferries are going to Gourock instead of Wemyss Bay while they do some work on the pier. It means that our trip to the mainland now takes an hour, rather than the usual 35 minutes. The plus side is that whereas there is only one train an hour from Wemyss Bay to Glasgow, there's three an hour from Gourock, so we can make back the extra travelling time on the train journey.

It was all going to be fine.

Until we saw the CalMac site on Wednesday. There was going to be disruption to the ferries on Thursday.

This caused a slight bit of panic and confusion. Especially when we saw that the Clyde was going to be closed to all traffic for a period on Thursday.

And why all these drastic measures?

They'd found an unexploded mine in the Clyde. It's somewhere in the region of seventy years old and given it's age they suspected that it may have been rather temperamental. So naturally precautions needed to be taken, including evacuating half of Gourock.

Luckily the first boats ran without any trouble. It was a good excuse to spend a little bit longer in Glasgow. I took advantage of not being able to get home to do a little more Christmas shopping. Obviously I can't say what I got here because it was for Mr Click and he reads this blog; you'll have to check back here towards the end of December to see what it was.

It was wonderfully wandering around Glasgow, not in a rush to get back, taking my time to look around shops that I wouldn't normally get to go into. We even visited Vodafone to get Mr Click a new SIM card since his phone hasn't been too good at talking to mine recently. We had Chinese for lunch and then casually made our way home afterwards.

There was a bit of a panic along the way. I checked the CalMac site on the way back, only to read that the train station was closed to all traffic. Luckily they changed their minds about that before we got in. But we still had a bit of a wait before the ferries were given the all clear to go.

It made for a pretty long day. You forget how much you rely on the ferries until something changes and it throws you out completely. On the whole, the extra time on the ferry isn't too bad, or at least, it wasn't the way when I had access to the free wifi so happily sat there checking the NaNo forums. On the way back it felt like ages because I was so tired and the wifi wasn't working for me.

As I had such a long day on Thursday, I'd planned to take it easy at the weekend with nothing more taxing than getting a haircut. Well, as so frequently happens, all did not go to plan.

It should be noted that I'm a pretty accident-prone person. I did, after all, manage to drive four and a half inches of wood into my thigh whilst teaching a class of Primary Fours maths; quite possibly the pinnacle of all accident-proneness. I can't deny that I often leave a wake of destruction in my path, not until a human version of a deep sea mine.

Well, as we were leaving the house for my haircut yesterday, I sat down on my beanbag to put my shoes on. Felt something tug behind me followed by a popping noise and a second later the front window's curtain and curtain rail landed on me. I'd inadvertently trapped the curtain behind the beanbag, which couldn't stand the pull so popped out of it's holder, the weight of which pulled the rest of it down.

My chair does not normally look like this.

Suffice to say, when I returned from my haircut, I quickly figured out how to get the whole shebang back together. It's as good as new, slightly less dusty even. My beanbag-slash-footrest is now banned from being left right in front of the window and all is right in the Click household again.


Until next time.