Hmm, what was that noise?

 A big thank you to Paul (Waterway routes) for bringing this to my attention.

 If you scroll to the very bottom of the blog you will see the error message that "Adobe Flash Player is no longer supported" for your pics. Chrome stopped supporting it recently and other browsers will also be stopping support in the near future if they haven't already.

I must say at first I was horrified at the thought of not being able to post photos and immediately
scrolled to the bottom of the blog but found no mention of the Flash Player error Paul had mentioned. All I had was  Watermark theme. Powered by Blogger.

So tasking Ian to look into this for me my 'man that can' sorted out the problem. He found that Flash Player was not installed on this machine so no need to worry that suddenly my pics would disappear.  This got me thinking on how others would cope with the problem, so I thought I would enclose how I get my photos onto the blog. I use Picasa 3, it's a free download and photos can be edited before uploading to a named folder of your choice in Pictures. Then from Google Albums, create an album to upload the photo too, click on upload, find the photos and add to that album. From the blog click on insert image, find the Google album folder and add the images. Simples. May seem long-winded but has worked for me for many years. 

So if anyone has problems with their Flash Player maybe this will suffice instead.

Must just mention a worrying noise that woke us from our slumber in the wee hours of the morning. Loud cracking, creaking and crunching as the ice outside was disturbed by something unknown. First thought...someone had lifted paddles and the water was draining away. This had happened to us in the early hours of the morning when we had the big freeze way back in 2010. Then an unscrupulous person had lifted the top gate paddles at Sandiacre lock. With the bottom gates leaking like a sieve the water above the lock began to drain away. It was a loud bang that jolted us out of bed. The boat had dropped and listed so much that the strain on the chain securing our boat to the bank by the fender eye had so much force on it that it sheared. This we assume was the bang we heard at 2 in the morning. We were left listing alarmingly.

 

As you can imagine we didn't relish the thought of it happening again. Ian shot out of bed, looked out of the window but all he could see was ice. This morning we checked in more detail. The ice was still intact, so we are still none the wiser for the ice movement noises we heard. All I can think of was the swans tried moving through it to find open water and because the temperature overnight was down to -7, where they had cracked it, it immediately froze again.

I will leave you with some snowy photos. And no, we never got off FS to build a snowman but a WhatsApp from Christine showed the grandkids Josh and Thomas's effort in Swadlincote.