Link to the purpose of life

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k62yQPdkwdQ

And the first contribution for the sreies - this one is Amundsen. So far all explorers, though Drake was really a pirate - and he's being reduced by a pigeon - but hey, I guess pigeon poo works just as well.

There's this big jellyfish

Oh the joy of being a highly developed blob of protoplasm with  a purpose. There's a metre long by half a metre wide jellyfish here in the Doca de Alcantara that has been gently pulsating its head (at least, its blunt end...) against the north wall of the Doca for the last three days or so. It wants to push Portugal into northern Europe and I'm sure it's really happy to be doing a great job. Photo later and maybe youtube.

Wish I could be quite so phlegmatic about life, the universe and everything at this moment! But at least one thing has gone right - just at the crucial moment last night, in the middle of crisis calls to Oz etc, this laptop expired. It loses its BIOS periodically, which is hugely frustrating because it then won't boot. But - bless his little heart, Paul Harry gave me a fix for the problem on a USB stick before we left Falmouth and I ran it and it worked. You Little Beauty Paul - may all your jellyfish come true!

And I'm going to abandon the other spammed blog with its priapic nonsense unless one of you geniuses out there can crack the password and remove all that grot.

Love youse all and I'm off ot join that jellyfish for an hour or two and encourage it to greater things.Peraps I can learn something about equanimity too.

Old farts don't weep - they just Consult...

Apologies for the long gap. Everything seemed to be going according to plan - wind gen removed, diagnosed, fix potentially under way (Thanks to Sonia at Telextronica) and big blog in my head about the joys and tribulations of Lisbon andthen -  the Examiner clobbered us with a dooozy. You may recall the saga as we replaced the shaft damper plate in England but it seems that the alignment problem is too big for the new plate to cope and it is hurling itself to pieces like the last one.  (thanks Golden Arrow - lovely job, even though it hasn't fixed the problem). So now we must pull the engine out again, and try to get it realigned properly. John W is sending a spigot re-aligning tool and a new plate from australia and I think I will try to fly the engineer down from Golden Arrow to actually do it so we know it will work.

The photo is a bit how I feel right now - and it is the second of what could be a fascinating series of the great, the gormless, the egotistical, the ungodly and the merely corporate brought down to their proper status by the doings of a seagull. Feel free to send your contributions to berrimilla2@gmail.com and perhaps Steve could put them in the blog as we go.  The only rule is that it must be a seagull (pigeons don't count) and it must be on the job. This one is Alfonso de Albuquerque and he joins the august original, Francis Drake. Keep 'em coming.