Quote of the Day

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Spoken like a project manager

Voyage of discovery

This last two days have seen a really nice change to the environment, it is gloriously sunny and quite tropical , this for me is a delight as I bask like a lizard in the sunshine, OK OK, I know its bad for my skin and it will turn me into a cancerous prune, but I get a genuine pleasure out of sunny weather, something like an emotional high, it makes me want to do things and see things, so it makes me go out and explore, that is what I did yesterday afternoon, I went for a long walk along the river bank, it was teeming with the local black fly or midges that were basically flying jaws and were eating me alive for the entire time but I just kept going as it was a perfect day. I found myself again listening to the calls of the jungle birds here and the chorus was amazing, I can understand people buying CD’s of jungle music as it is quite amazing and totally different to anything else I have ever listened to. It was a constant high level background din basically of screeching and warbling and chirping of birds I could not see but really would have liked to. I scrambled across the gravel banks of the river as it is very low this time of year across to an island that sits in the river and looks like it harbours lots of the calling birds. I saw a flock of birds that I thought looked like Nighjars but they were very good at disguising themselves amongst the rocks and I didn’t want to disturb them. But I did see the local specialty, the black necked stilt,

what a wonderful bird and so elegantly dressed for the occasion, all dressed up for the ball and no music to be had. That left me feeling good as I had seen a new species for me and I ran away as quick as possible as my vision had become blurred by the 30 million biting bugs that had swarmed around my head. I then saw a blur of red dashing about the path in front of me and a fantastic little bird was looking at me and thinking, ‘what a crazy asshole walking about in the sun along the riverbank being eaten by the bugs, must be English’. It was a pretty bird but again I don’t know its name, but it will take me a good while to search through the 1800 different bird species that live here in Peru. I have had the offer of a book with all the Peruvian birds in it and while I was talking about the birds I mentioned that I had seen some animal footprints in the sand along the river and they told me that this area is full of Pecary and Jaguars and Tapirs, she said she had seen the Jaguar swimming across the river. I am tempted to do some more investigating at night to try and see some of them myself.
I am swimming in a sea of my own ignorance with my hideously bad Spanish. I cannot hold a conversation I only utter present tense, first person, 3 word sentences at people who normally laugh at what I say, then they talk to me in acceptable English and all is well but it isn’t doing me any favours really. It is astonishing that everyone here wants to learn English and will tolerate my utterings as long as I speak to them now and again in English. They want practice at all costs and I am better than nothing but they really want an American to speak to as I speak strange. Nothing new there then but my Spanish is improving as I am learning new words daily and I am even practising my verb conjugations which I haven’t had the motivation to do before. Some thing is stirring inside of me to make a change to my mental attitude to learning a foreign language. Hopefully it will all fall into place over the next year, I am tempted to put my brazil move on hold until I am fluent in my new found language, I cannot spend all my life trying to slip into a lost conversation “I don’t see my suitcases”, and not have people laughing at me.

Quote of the Day

I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them.

.Jimmy Hoffa

That could be my motto and the motto of every Turbine Controls Engineer

The Mysterious Vulture identified finally

I have been watching these hawks and other various birds of prey onsite everyday as they are very entertaining and full of fun as they circle and dive and catch insects, the vultures are a different thing and just circle round and then fly away quickly, sensing there are no dead bodies about. But the are some birds in the group that I have been trying to identify as there colours are pretty indistinct, even the Roadside Hawk has only the red flight feathers that are a dead give away to its identification. There are a few others and even the so called vulture that was almost laughing at me the other morning still didn’t look like a real vulture as it was too small but it had the red head and after pouring through my online bird books I have come to the conclusion it is the Black Caracara.

The white basal tail feathers I saw this morning were the key to its final naming. This comes back to another point I made the other day that small things start becoming quite important in the daily routine on this camp. Spending lots of time just determined to identify a bird i saw.
We had some dancing girls and a Fiesta last night at the camp. This was a mixed blessing as the dancing was a welcome relief but the musical accompaniment was of a country style that I cannot come to terms with. They play with a typical Peruvian style and beat and play the saxophone like the pan pipes and that was grating to the point I thought my teeth were going to vibrate out of gums and fall on the floor. It was a nice gesture by the company to give us this entertainment for the Local Independence Day Celebrations, we were all asked to attend in out uniforms but I don’t have one and turning up in Marathon Oil shirt wouldn’t go down very well I think, but marching to the sound of military style music isn’t my sort of scene. I don’t do the military thing anywhere, I even have a big deal giving my boss the sort of respect I should. I was the worst sort of kid at school for that attitude also, I couldn’t accept that idiots who were teaching me and should have been painting walls or digging in the fields were telling me that I was wrong or I was stupid. My school days were a catalogue of nightmares for any parent and that was because I was bored with the lack of stimulus at school. They were dumbing down the level to such a point that they never stretched anyone and many of my old school friends told me afterwards, it was a great school for having fun but as an educational establishment it was shocking and I think that many teachers are only there because they cannot do anything else. So the moral of the story is , if you can get your kids to a school where they have a miserable time but get educated properly they will fare better in life afterwards and thrive on it, even if you have to pay for it

Quote of the Day

Catch on fire with enthusiasm and people will come for miles to watch you burn.

John Wesley

Innocent Horseplay Causes Disaster offshore India

Who would have thought that a little innocent horseplay



would have caused a disaster on the scale of this, blame it all on the curry, just too much chilli and you will always have terrible consequences.

Lesson learnt, never play with fire and never have a vindaloo and never go to work in India offshore.

Quote of the Day

The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.

Adolf Hitler

Spoken like a true Field Engineer

The Small Pleasures in Life that keep Me Sane

While working away from home it is surprising how small things take on a major part of your life. You have to have some type of hobby or past time to keep yourself from going stir crazy, personally I tend to surf the net and watch my wildlife. I have almost gotten into a routine where I wait for the clouds to clear before I go butterfly rescuing as before the sun comes out there are few butterflies before this. Today I removed a huge amount of moths from the screens and when I took them to the release point I noticed that there were many of the Roadside Hawks circling round the plant, I did eventually count 23 of them plus one vulture. So I emptied the bag of moths and several made a break for freedom and flew high and away only to be swooped upon by two of the hawks. I felt pangs of guilt as the birds were eating my rescued moths that had been tapped by my units and I had basically fed them directly to the birds. But the birds are so beautiful I don’t harbour any anger towards them. I spent about 20 minutes watching the hawks just circling and playing in the thermals over the two gas turbines and separation units. This sort of sight doesn’t happen very often and I felt privileged to be seeing something very few people will ever see. This made me feel a little bit happy even though I am starting to get ready for leaving and having my 4 weeks break at home. The food in the canteen is pretty nice and typical as I have said before and the choux pastry is the highlight of the week and tonight was the choux pastry delight, this is the crazy thing I said about the small things that make you happy, I was ecstatic about the choux pastry. Head over heels with pleasure with my little mouthful of soft squishy high calorie crap, what a silly man I though to myself as I was espousing the delights of choux pastry to my American colleague. This is the sort of thing prisoners must adopt to save their sanity when knowing they have a long stretch inside to serve. Keeping life in prospective and realising that the small things are that count, not the money or the job but the small insignificant delights that lift the soul and keep ones feet firmly on the ground. I think I would prefer to be overwhelmed with stimuli in Brazil though and not to have to think about the small things. Screw the small things I want to feel like a king.

Quote of the Day

Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by TREES, so let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.

Late Ex President Ronald Reagan

what an actor

Birds of Play or Prey

I had a strange experience this morning, while walking into the plant site I heard a very strange a loud noise. I quickly scanned the horizons and this screeching was directly in front of me and was a sound I couldn’t distinguish but sounded like a bird , a big bird as it was so loud, I couldn’t see anything flying overhead and had to keep searching round the round until only 50 feet from me was a turkey vulture that was sat on a low roof. It was looking directly at me and screeching its head off. Why it was there and why it was doing this isn’t obvious to me, perhaps there was something to eat close by and it was afraid to come down and take it while we were all about. I have never seen a vulture so close before and it felt a little unnerving, thee were many birds of prey catching the thermals again as the sun came out after lunch and I tried to identify again, this time with my binoculars but the speed they were flying at was too great and I couldn’t keep them in focus for long enough or close enough to get a good close look at them. They have yellow legs and that is about as much as I know, as well as some reddish flight feathers on the wing tips and a white bar across the tail, what am I supposed to do with such a small amount of detail. There was up to a dozen flying round the towers and I was tempted to climb the towers to get a look down on top of them and see the real colours not in silhouette. It is so frustrating to only get a little of what they really look like, they had such a indistinct colouration that is was hard to make any remarks to identify them apart from the red flight feathers and yellow legs. They were playing with insects letting them drop from their talons and then stoop dive and catch it again, never seen such acrobatics from a birds before. They were just entertaining themselves chasing round and catching the huge thermals and then stooping and diving really fast, no wonder I couldn’t identify them, but I have found a great site called Mangoverde World Bird Guide , here you can scroll through many of the worlds birds until you find the one that gives you exactly what you are looking for, there are 4500 birds to look through but it isn’t difficult as you have a good idea of what it is. So I found the hawk finally here and its name is the Roadside Hawk, beautiful.

Well worth the 6 hours it took me to find it. I have had a problem keeping awake today, something to do with the fact they got me out of bed to restart the turbines 2 night ago and I haven’t recovered from it yet, I was snoring sat next to the specialist who had flown in to do the remote monitoring server setup and he was speaking on the phone to people and he tried to talk loud to cover up my increasingly loud snoring. He eventually woke me and asked me to do something for him just to stop me snoring, but as soon as I got back and sat down I was snoring again, what an amateur I must have seemed. I still haven’t gotten over the no break from Malabo and the jetlag and not really having a break for 4 months now. I should complain to my boss and demand more money or something or a job in Brazil maybe.

Quote of the Day

If we do not succeed, then we run the risk of failure

Ex - Vice President Dan Quayle

The artifice of an Oil Operation in the Jungle

Yesterday was a proper day in the tropics, with the sun shining and it was humid and glorious to be outside. We had three vultures wheeling over the barren plant site taking the thermals to glide high and away. I went for an early walk down the river to see if I could identify some new species, this is going to be a hard thing as I don’t have a bird identification book but I went to see if I could see something that looked familiar from Costa Rica. Birds are a clever lot really, they always fly away and hide in dark undergrowth and sneak about like burglars and it is always tricky to get a close look without feeding them and hiding close by. The hummingbirds I feed back home in Costa Rica are succours for sugar water and will come within 6 feet of you if you stand still and not act like a predator and it is fantastic to see them queuing up for their turn and even fighting when they get hungry. But here I was meant to see nothing other than a few dark silhouettes. There is one pretty bird that isn’t shy about being seen. It is the Tropical Kingbird, we have these in Costa Rica and hunt all day long like some crazy drugged bird darting up and down and twisting to make the catch and then flying back to its perch. There are many of these birds here.
I sat on the river bank and watched a flock of pretty black and white birds roosting on the island across from me and my binoculars are just too weak to see exactly what they were, they could have been some kind of nightjar but I know they are usually solitary and there was about 50 or so roosting in a large group. while I noticed a few bugs tickling my hands so I kept swatting them away and waving my hands about to swish them off my head but there were loads and becoming a nuisance. I stood my ground and watched the mysterious birds for about 30 minutes before I wanted to wander further but I was shouted by the guard and I assumed someone was wanting me on the plant, ‘oh God,’ I thought, there is an emergency and they couldn’t find me on site. I am meant to be on standby. But as I got to the guard he just wandered back to his hut and I left back to the plant wondering what had prompted him to shout me. I still haven’t identified the birds and I don’t know why he shouted me, many things are a mystery to me here as I struggle daily with the language. I did learn Gerencia yesterday but management doesn’t spring into the conversation very much. I am trying poorly with the language, I spend so much time writing mail and doing my Blog that I hardly seem to have time to learn it and everyone here loves to try their English with me, I have had several requests to teach people English. This I will not do as I don’t have the time and I need to learn Spanish. I also have fallen foul of my training regime since I had my flu. I haven’t done a stroke since and I have had to cut back my food intake to compensate and I don’t like doing that really. So I will for definitely think about going to the gym tomorrow night, for certain unless I feel tired or lazy then I will not think about going to the gym. Getting motivation here is tricky as I am isolated and have no-one to go with and its not a convenient time as I eat at 6 and then leave the office at 7.30 and I am still feeling full of food at that time and by the time I am feeling OK its time for bed. What a strange world in which we live that I can only complain about not having the motivation to go to the gym. Sometimes I forget that I am many miles from civilisation and that this working environment is totally alien to the whole of the Amazonian. A couple of the guys were telling me that while working out on one of the flowlines that go back to Lima, they were working in a very small fenced compound and one of them noticed that they were being observed by what they call the non-contactables, these are the indigenous tribal people that have no normal contact with civilisation. They live by hunting and still dress as they did 10,000 years ago. They were dressed in penis sheaths only and were carrying bows and arrows, I still forget that I am from an alien world to most in Peru. I walk around this site and all the non engineers stare at me. I am tall, much taller than them and I am white in comparison, they are very dark skinned. I am wearing my previous site clothing and it looks like a military uniform and the guards all salute me as I walk in the gates, very amusing, wish I had this effect when I am travelling everywhere, it would be good.

Flying Acrobat

The Tropical Kingbird. A very common bird on site and fly's all day chasing all the insects that come close enough to its perch. Pretty lazy really then

Bowel Function

What is it about bowel function that is so fascinating , I assume it is because it is essential to a normal functioning life. I was unfortunate enough to contract a particularly nasty bowel infection in Turkmenistan whilst working there. I was rushed to hospital, if that is what you can call it, I was inserted to the head of the queue as I was a paying guest, and seen by a stream of people who really wanted to help me but didn’t. The doctor who examined me had the most ridiculous hat on I have ever seen, it was at least 16 inches tall and straight up like a chef’s without the poofed out thing on top, and he had me in a tiny room that was just unbelievable. The walls were flaking, the bed was a rusted iron frame affair and the sheets looked stained and the room was overlooked from the path outside so I would be getting inquiring looks from passers by. I was told to strip by a nurse who could have been the Olympic gold shot-putter from 1966 and she strung up on a nasty rusted stand, a cut-off coke bottle with a tube on it and then attempted to give me an enema, so brutal and unsuccessful was she that in the end I took the tube away from her and inserted it myself , she filled the bottle with water from a jug and left me to it for about 20 minutes, it was my first enema ever and hopefully the last, I took about 2 pints before I had to evacuate myself in a toilet attached to the room that a bar on the outskirts of Manila would have been ashamed of. It was stinking and unclean the toilet wasn’t clean and had no seat and the cistern was also broken so I had to flush using a jug from the tap, this was while I was feeling like death anyway after having projectile diarrhoea for 24 hours. I climbed back on the bed feeling that death would be a blessing and awaited the doctor. He arrived to string up a drip, at this point I was scared and watched carefully as they brought out some sterile needles and saline solution. They stuck me with a drip and let it flow into me and then he injected something into the solution that made me feel like I was going to have a seizure. I went all cold and clammy and felt sick, he was smiling and basically trying to reassure me that I would not die with this drug, I was hoping that I would get better instantly but I felt like crap after the 1 hour it took to get the saline into me. They ushered me to get dressed and I then had to pay $20 for the service, a lot of money to them and then I left thinking that would be the end of my woes. Unfortunately I never got better from the attacks that would come every morning usually at the work site. Several bouts of excruciating projectile diarrhoea until my bowels were empty, this went on for 6 weeks, I wasn’t the only one who was feeling bad, and I think everyone on site had bad guts apart from Pete who was bullet proof and a good guy as well. I lost 16 pounds in weight in 6 weeks and when I finally got home I was diagnosed with Giardia Llamblia. This is a protozoan that usually infect sheep and cattle and as we saw the state of the local meat market in Turkmenistan it isn’t surprising that we caught something. The animals were slaughtered in the market and meat was chopped up on a tree stump that was black and rotten with years of uncleaned blood and god knows what else on it, it was a surprise that everyone in town hadn’t died from salmonella. My treatment for the infection was a particularly strong antibiotic that is the only treatment. The main part of this repulsive story is that my bowel function has never returned to normal since then. I cannot eat salad in abundance with an oily dressing as it works like a laxative on me, straight through at the speed of a steam train and it feels very bad on my twisted guts. I cannot eat milky things as again it has the laxative effect. I have been reading lately that around 10% have a permanent lactose intolerance from the initial attack and they have no idea if it is for life. They claim that it doesn’t need to be treated as your body develops a defence to it and I can say that mine didn’t and I think if I had carried on like that I would have withered to nothing inside of 6 months. So life now in a morning is dominated by a desire to have a normal crap, I can be disappointed mostly but somedays I feel great. What would it be like to be normal again. I cannot decide what form this will take, long term or perhaps I am permanently damaged to be disappointed every morning.

Nostadamus Predicted This 500 years ago

In the year 2029

* Ozone created by electric cars will kill millions
in the seventh largest country in the world, Mexifornia

* Couple will petitions court to reinstate
heterosexual marriage.

* Last remaining Fundamentalist Muslim will die in
the United States of the Middle East (formerly
known as Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and Lebanon).

* Iran will be closed off; physicists estimate it
will take at least 10 more years before
radioactivity decreases to safe levels.

* France pleads for global help after being
over taken by Jamaica.

* Castro finally dies at age 112; Cuban cigars
can now be imported legally, but President Chelsea
Clinton has banned all smoking.

* George Z. Bush says he will run for President
in 2036.

* Postal Service raises price of first class
stamp to $17.89 and reduces mail delivery to
Wednesdays only.

* 85-year, $75.8 billion study: Diet and
Exercise are the keys to weight loss.

* Average weight of Americans drops to 250 lbs.

* Japanese scientists have created a camera
with such a fast shutter speed, they now can
photograph a woman with her mouth shut.

* Massachusetts executes last remaining conservative.

* Supreme Court rules punishment of criminals
violates their civil rights.

* Average height of NBA players now nine feet, seven
inches.

* New federal law requires that all nail clippers,
screwdrivers, fly swatters and rolled-up newspapers
must be registered by January 2036.

* Congress authorizes direct deposit of formerly
illegal political contributions to campaign accounts.

* IRS sets lowest tax rate at 75 percent.

* Spotted Owl plague threatens northwestern
United States crops and livestock.

* Baby conceived naturally . . . scientists stumped.

And last but certainly not the least

* Florida voters still don't know how to use a
voting machine

Delivering a sharp Rebuke

As you all must be aware by now that I am a wildlife nut, there isn’t anything I will not save given the chance and there is nothing I find fascinating, from the ugliest squirmy thing to things that want to bite and hurt you, including a giant bug that I rescued from the plant today, it had a set of jaws that I swear could have been used to open a can lid with, it was covered with spikes and had a fancy red warning pattern on its back that I really should have taken notice of, but I did take care not to get bitten and not tear its legs off while removing it from the metal screens that it was clinging to for dear life. I have realised one mistake all the bugs make while holding tight to the metalwork. They seem to think it is all a windy day and will sit there until the wind finally stops but the problem is it doesn’t stop on the fans, they ruin and run and run continuously so the bugs and moths and butterflies all sit there until they die of exhaustion. It is really sad that they do this as sometimes when I get close to them they will struggle really hard and fly away, they escape the rushing torrents of wind and fly to safety, but all usually sit tight, in a section the hot air circulates round and round and the air temperature gets to about 120 F so any bugs in that section suffer heat stress, it cooks them as they have a really poor mass flow system around there bodies, so they just fold their wings and die very quickly, even if I rescue them pretty quickly they send a few days vibrating their wings and finally go to insect heaven, where there are no birds and lots of flowers dripping with juices for them to slurp away with the long tongues. Anyhow getting away from the story line, my wife is also a conservation minded woman and is in the midst of completing a masters course in Natural Resource management , this will enable her to become a National Park Manager in Costa Rica, so she is conducting some field work on conservation work, like how to measure the population density of animals in an area, so they catch hummingbirds and Bats and she sent me a fantastic picture of a bat they were weighing and it wasn’t happy ,


It was planning on tearing somebody a new asshole. It didn’t look frightened just plain angry. So someday I am planning to have a house in a national park in Costa Rica and being the house husband to a park manager, sounds good to me.

Quote of the Day

You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

Al Capone

Life on the Ocean Wave

Now a long long time ago I used to spend a lot of time in the North Sea on both sides of the demarcation line, seemed like I was at war working out there. I worked for a turbine controls company called Woodward Governor and they made some very good controls systems but couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery. Anyhow I did spend many hours flying to and fro from shore to platform and platform to platform and from platform to shore, over and over, week after week, I did think it was exciting at first as any first timer would but after 2 years the grey sea and grey sky was just too damned miserable for me. I got out not because I wanted to just because of a company takeover and circumstances and I ended up in the US of A, the land of plenty and lots of it. So I didn’t really miss the flying in helicopters anymore. So I land in Malvinas the camp in the jungle and what do I see but helicopters everywhere. They fly all day everyday, there are no roads in the jungle so when the guys out to drill somewhere in the jungle they fly in helicopters, and when they want some large piece of equipment to be sent they fly it slung below a huge helicopter, either a skycrane or a Chinook, they have access to every type as Peru and Ecuador are a booming oil economy. The noise of a helicopter taking off is unmistakable and it brings back the smell of kerosene and the sweaty survival suits that we used to wear. And being stuffed into a relatively small helicopter and thinking I am never going to get out of this if we hit the water with a 350 pound guy sat at the side of me. So it gives me a little shiver to think of all the flying I did while watching these guys flying in and out all the time. Also i was thinking about platforms that explode and sink as we have here.

A BP platform that hadn’t even started producing and was half sunk, some leaky valves or something that allowed water to back up through the producing lines and into the oil tanks, could have been really nasty. I am so glad that fate had its evil way with me and sent me to the land of huge burgers and supersized fries it kept me out of harms way and I will never ever go offshore again as long as I live in a small house in Costa Rica, but that can all change overnight in this game. I would prefer to never fly offshore again. I would like to go and work in Brazil which is my main aim for the next year. Even though Rio is one of the worlds worst places for being shot to death, at least you get a chance to get away, unlike if you were flying in a helicopter and the pilot lost control or the engine fell off.

Quote of the Day

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labour.

Oscar Wilde

Did i do something bad to deserve this weather

I cannot quite believe what is happening to the weather here in the tropical Amazonian jungle. I am astonished to find myself in cool fog. It was like Scotland on a summers day again, very spooky and the locals are saying they have never experienced anything like it before.
This global warming is doing something bad when the Amazon cools off and turns into Scotland. I was wondering if I had done something bad maybe even in a previous life to be suffering like this. Does Jesus not like Blogging engineers, are we meant to suffer for putting our thoughts in writing, are we meant to suffer in silence the slings and arrows of our foes without saying a word.

Quote of the Day

"Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included."
(Karl Marx)
This man couldn't pull a girl in any bar in any town

Peruvian Delicasies

Today the weather has decided to be more tropical than Scottish, it was explained to me that during this time of year, winter time locally that sometimes the wind comes from the Andes and it brings down these cold winds and yes indeed it was mighty cold, cool really but as I haven’t seen a northern hemisphere winter in 4 years I am not used to it anymore. The food here in the Malvinas camp is typical Peruvian and this includes soup for every meal including breakfast. Sometimes the soup is really stew as it was this morning and in fact it was more like a local version of a chicken curry and that was basically all you could have for breakfast other than bread rolls and yoghurt. That is fine by me the soups are generally very nice and one the other night was very unusual, it has these giant swollen corn kernels and pigs stomach, I was quite happy to eat it as a child my family was relatively poor and we ate lots of pigs stomach, called tripe in the UK, and so it wasn’t too abnormal for me but I have never had it in soup before, there are beans or all varieties to be served with the meals and lots of stews with huge chunks of beef, this is great stuff if you like it every meal but it can get a bit tiring and when I ask for a small portion of rice they look at me quite gone out, as though I have almost insulted them, they like everyone to feel stuffed I think so I am trying not to gorge my face with all the carbs but eat light and try a little of the salad which is typical stuff but lots of Red Beet. The problem is that they serve fantastic little deserts which I cannot leave alone, condensed milk is usually added somewhere along the way, in between and on top and makes them just fantastic to eat, they also have great crème caramel and egg custards, baked apple deserts and tons and tons of fruit, some interesting ones I have never seen before like a cacti fruit, something like a prickly pear but without the prickles. It was terrible, not juicy and full of hard stones which everyone else seemed to swallow down, I couldn’t do it, it felt like having a mouthful of pebbles. Sometimes they make cream filled choux pastry things all creamy and with a slice of peach, just amazing for this environment, who would have thought that an oil camp in the jungle would be making choux pastry, fantastic. There is no way I am going to lose weight here, I haven’t got back into going to the gym yet after my flu but I am going to be fighting with the weight here without a doubt,
This afternoon I have two new engineers with which to ingratiate myself , I have to establish whether they can speak English , like English people or like Pignone people, so it is a fine balancing act to start with and once things are settled then we can begin to talk like professional engineers. Hopefully if I offer them some free music then all things will fall into place. So once more into the battlefield of anarchy and lost drawings. Print Article
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Quote of the Day

Mars is essentially in the same orbit... somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

Ex Vice President Dan Quayle

This is not the guy you want running anything including turbines

My Beautiful moth Eating Bird on Site

here is the beautiful Montezumas oropendula that is flying around the plant, i think they must have chicks this time of year but this nasty scottish weather must be making them work extra hard for the food as there are few flying insects about in the cold wind, a very distinctive bird and easily identifiable and it is the size of a crow

The Thoughts of Bonny Scotland

I awoke this morning early and felt distinctly cold, almost a shiver as I got out of bed to shower, I showered quickly and had to dry off inside the cubicle as it was so goddam cold in there, I rushed to get dressed and put on my normal attire a long sleeved shirt which is mandatory and a pair of long pants. I went out of the accommodation to the office to be greeted with what I can only describe as a Scottish type environment, it was dull and grey and heavily overcast, there was mist rolling about the small hills that surround the site it was almost foggy, this is real mist and we are only at 300 meters altitude. I was cold and the office was cold and as I did my mail and went to breakfast I was getting colder. I just couldn’t stop thinking about all the holidays I have had on the west coast of Scotland watching the mist rolling up and down the hills and dressed for winter in mid summer, woolly pully and jacket and vests and long socks and usually a hood to protect against the wind. That is how I was feeling, distinctly not like I was in the tropics. I know this is effectively the winter here but I am within the tropic of Capricorn and I should be basking in glorious sunshine and feeling the heat. I had breakfast feeling very chilly and the yoghurt and cold serial wasn’t very good making me even colder, I left and went straight back to my room to put on a t-shirt and an over shirt as I don’t really have a warm jacket as I wasn’t expecting these sort of temperatures and I finally started to feel warm, I did my usual routine of checking the units and lifted a few moths of fthe screens but there was only two butterflies, most had the sense to stay in bed this morning until the sun shines if it does at all today, yesterdays flights in and out were cancelled as the cloud base was too low for safe landing so they had hoped to get all the guys in and out today but once again it may be too foggy and misty for safe landing, but I don’t care I don’t travel for another 2 weeks and that is if my back to back returns unscathed from his trip back home to Mexico. This job has changed direction for me, I am basically a contractual services manager and I am more of an administrator rather than a working engineer. I do have the responsibility of the Gas turbines and Compressors and I have to manage them but I have all the managerial paperwork to complete and be the gopher for the office in Florence, requesting solutions to problems and trying to sort out logistical problems for the purchase of items that take 16 weeks to get to a normal site not a remote location where heavy objects have to be brought in by boat up the Amazon river and have to arrive during the rainy season as the river runs to a low trickle during the dry season. Other items can be flown in but this has to be coordinated with Peruvian customs and being a creator of the ugliest customs regulations you cannot even get an express mail letter here without it going through customs and if the paperwork is wrong for it then it just sits there until somebody either gets the paperwork correct or forgets about it, nothing is easy to get here and this nightmare has now become my little corner, trying to identify where something is in the chain, either in transit or customs or lost or even stolen, this could be a great job if it were somewhere like the USA but here I could be swamped with the never ending paper chase.

Quest for more readership

I have an addiction to this Blog and now I can understand why millions of people all over the world are writing Blogs. What I can't understand is people writing total shite, unadulterated crap to the point that nobody reads it and basically why would they, what is the point of reading about someone who is miserable over life everyday for gods sake, or why her husband died in a police high speed pursuit, who gives a shit, he was probably a moron and you are to for marrying such a dick head in the first place. Anyhow other than my rantings I am desperate to get more readership for my self opinionated and sometimes silly and amusing Blog. There are several ways to do this, one is to mail everyone you know and ask them to pass on the address which is OK if you have many friends and they have the time to do this, some do and most don’t. the other is to get your Blog into all the Blog directories that are springing up all over the place, now this again sounds far easier than it looks, most of the directories insist that you have a track back button on your site and this requires you to make custom buttons to your page and this again is tricky as it requires patience and a site that is easy to manipulate for the task. Mine is relatively easy but sometimes it plays the ultimate asshole but refusing to cooperate with my demands, I managed to get about 10 links the other day and now after 1 it has decided that I have enough and is playing the idiot and telling me I am not actually logged into my site, perhaps they are doing some maintenance on the server but I doubt it, but I need more readership, I am getting about 25 unique hits a day, that is different people to you and me but to Blogging directories it means that you move up or down their listings for the Blogs, the higher you get the more likely that people will actually find you in the listings, especially top 10 and then you will get readers just falling over themselves to read the rantings that fall from my mouth. for some reason I have a burning desire to have all my rubbish read and spread widely, not for any financial reason as I could never make a writer for the life of me but just to have it out there. So my manic ravings over my sites refusal to cooperate is driving me insane, just because one trackback button actually has your listing number and it goes up and down during the day as people read it, I am hovering about 70 and I just want to get up there with the likes of fallen angel, she is a lesbian and talks endless crap about her fear of meeting people, drivel but it is read by 1000’s a day, why, so I need to get my site listed with every possible directory there is even if they only have 2 sites on it I need to be number 1.

My Foot Looks Like Swiss Cheese

My left foot now looks like Swiss cheese as well as smelling like it. I have recently written about the fact that I have been harbouring an infection on the sole of my left foot and after untold visits to the doctors both in the UK and to the company doctor in Malabo, not one of them diagnosed a fungal infection. It took weeks of long suffering by myself to self diagnose that I had something growing in the skin and I really needed it curing before I went to the empty quarter of the Amazonian jungle. I had some scrapings done and within 2 hours a diagnosis of fungal infection was given and I immediately bought the most powerful antifungal oral medication ever created by man, I was desperate after 5 years of this thing eating me slowly from the inside. I had known all along that it was alive and trying to take me over, what would I have looked like if I had allowed it to grow unfetted by powders and creams, my foot would have looked like I had been given a white woolly knee sock after 1 year and probably looked like Bigfoot after 3, so it has come to pass that it has been given the last rites and I pronounce it dead and gone, if it hadn’t been nailed to my foot it would be pushing up the daisies. The unfortunate thing is that since it has died it has left my foot looking very strange. When it was growing it was creating pockets where it was eating into my flesh and causing micro-blisters in the skin to form about 2-3 mm across, now it is dead these blisters are just hitting the surface of the skin on the sole of my foot and my foot looks like Swiss cheese, very strange it looks I can tell you, but what a relief to know that I have finally beaten it to death.
I have my desk full again of the beautiful but dead butterflies and moths that I have started collecting. I am not quite sure what it is that motivates me to collect and photograph these insects. They do look amazingly beautiful and there are many species here in this part of the world and I don’t know any of the names of any of them but I am drawn to the perfection which they seem to have been built by. The antennae are just incredible feats of engineering the legs are so flimsy that you wouldn’t try and make anything so fragile to hold up such a large winged creature. And the variety of the wing shapes and colours is just beyond the wildest imagination of any drug induced Photoshop expert. You couldn’t create these patterns if you had a thousand years of trying. So do I believe in god’s handy work in making these animals, not likely, he wouldn’t have done such a good job as that? He would have had the holy hell cross blazoned on all sufaces and the legs would be huge wooden affairs with brass bits on them and the colours would all be crimson and white only, there are a couple of small moths like that, so he may have tried his hand but mother nature told him to piss off and make plenty more hot air. When I am rescuing the trapped butterflies and moths I get a twinge of grief when I get one that is dead, this is so pathetic from a grown man. Getting upset over an insect but unfortunately I have always been like that and even as a child would protect all creatures from the morons at school who wanted to burn and crush and kill every crawling walking flying thing on the planet, like most kids actually. So this phenomenon is not new to me but it is like a crusade I have now, I feel responsible as it is my units that are trapping them and I make all efforts to rescue all of them trapped and even jumping about like a demented escapee punk rocker to get the ones high up the screens. This must make the locals laugh their asses off no end but every one who sees my collection in the office all comment how beautiful they are, pity this is translated into actions by them at home to protect the planet and environment around them, well neither do I but it sounded great and pretentious didn’t it

Delivering a sharp Rebuke

As you all must be aware by now that I am a wildlife nut, there isn’t anything I will not save given the chance and there is nothing I find fascinating, from the ugliest squirmy thing to things that want to bite and hurt you, including a giant bug that I rescued from the plant today, it had a set of jaws that I swear could have been used to open a can lid with, it was covered with spikes and had a fancy red warning pattern on its back that I really should have taken notice of, but I did take care not to get bitten and not tear its legs off while removing it from the metal screens that it was clinging to for dear life. I have realised one mistake all the bugs make while holding tight to the metalwork. They seem to think it is all a windy day and will sit there until the wind finally stops but the problem is it doesn’t stop on the fans, they ruin and run and run continuously so the bugs and moths and butterflies all sit there until they die of exhaustion. It is really sad that they do this as sometimes when I get close to them they will struggle really hard and fly away, they escape the rushing torrents of wind and fly to safety, but all usually sit tight, in a section the hot air circulates round and round and the air temperature gets to about 120 F so any bugs in that section suffer heat stress, it cooks them as they have a really poor mass flow system around there bodies, so they just fold their wings and die very quickly, even if I rescue them pretty quickly they send a few days vibrating their wings and finally go to insect heaven, where there are no birds and lots of flowers dripping with juices for them to slurp away with the long tongues. Anyhow getting away from the story line, my wife is also a conservation minded woman and is in the midst of completing a masters course in Natural Resource management , this will enable her to become a National Park Manager in Costa Rica, so she is conducting some field work on conservation work, like how to measure the population density of animals in an area, so they catch hummingbirds and Bats and she sent me a fantastic picture of a bat they were weighing and it wasn’t happy. It was planning on tearing somebody a new asshole. It didn’t look frightened just plain angry. So someday I am planning to have a house in a national park in Costa Rica and being the house husband to a park manager, sounds good to me.

Gas terminal ecosystem

The creation of this gas terminal in the middle of a virgin rain forest is pretty controversial and had to undergo many investigations before the approval was given, it did create much tree destruction but was built on a gravel sand bar on the river Urubamba. It in itself has now become an ecosystem. I have seen tarantulas living on the inside of the cooling fan system where they must be eating the living moths and butterflies that are caught in the screens, there are the numerous toads that have tunnelled under all the concrete paths and come out to eat all the flying snacks that swarm to the lights that illuminate the running plant during the nights. During the day there are small birds that I haven’t identified yet that run amongst the plant hopping about and running head down like roadrunner picking off the small moths that are sitting on the floor and dropping from the roofs and lights, and there is a gaggle of hawks that circle on the thermals during the sunny days and observe the large beetles and moths and will swoop to pick them up and eat them while still flying with the item skewered on the talons of these birds, I will identify these birds from some online directory. There are little flies that I thought had also been captured on the screens but in fact are just walking about looking for victims to either eat or inject eggs into or both and seem very happy to be sat about doing what they do. The ants which there are so many as to be scary can devour a full moth overnight leaving nothing but an empty carcass which will fall apart when touched they must even eat all the connecting tissues and not just the soft parts. There is nothing that goes to waste. My collecting of the living creatures is part of the overall ecosystem but I am just messing about really, I do it just because I feel sorry for the poor little creatures which is pathetic really, I must rescue less than 1% of the creatures that get caught in the screens and I probably take out 40-50 moths and butterflies and as the dry season goes on the numbers will probably get less. It is quite easy to see the live ones or just caught as within a day the rushing torrents of air strip the wings of the scales very quickly and leave nothing but a silvery skeleton of the wings so a fresh capture is still colourful. If the insects spend more than 3 or 4 hours in the screens it is probably dead but some of the big moths that have a huge body reserve to call on may last day’s even weeks until the wings have been shredded to just stalks. I haven’t seen any birds nesting onsite yet, but there are some small parrots that roost on the banks of the river just behind the canteen which for them is a safe and predator free zone, who cares if the turbines are making a horrible din all night the ocelot, jaguarundi and margay will not be climbing the trees they are in. so life can be good for some animals and distinctly bad for other, it is swings and roundabouts, in 100 years who cares if there was a gas terminal here, nobody will remember and the forest will have reclaimed it all back. Print Article
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Shuffling Entemologist picking Through the insect trash

I am a wildlife nutcase, I love looking at anything that is alive, birds reptiles and insects even. Now as you can imagine this place being in the middle of the largest forest in the world is alive with some of the biggest insects that have ever been seen by man. Now my daily routine is to do mail for a while then read the papers and then go to lunch, then go to the control room check my equipment and then go for a stroll around the Turbines. Now if you don’t know these units have lights shining all night long and they are big powerful lights and these attract a multitude of moths, just giants and these in turn attract bats they must be big as the turds they drop are the size of Chihuahua dog crap, I know it is bat crap as you kick it, it falls into insect body parts like legs and wing cases, so there is a feast going on around the lights, the bats don’t eat everything as when I get there in the afternoon there are exhausted moths just collapsed on the ground waiting to be eaten by the small birds running around like tiny Road runners. but some of them are huge, the biggest I have ever seen well today during my shuffling around looking at these on the ground I found what can only be called the worlds biggest butterfly net, it is the cooling fan system that cools the gas from the compressors and it sucks air up from underneath and blows it across the cooling fins , just like a normal A/C system and in doing so the air pulls along every big butterfly and moth that comes within range, this is a terrible waste but unavoidable one on a plant like this, I did my bit and rescued a huge morpho butterfly 3 times before I took it far enough away to escape the magnetic attraction it felt for the fans, it looked ragged but it may survive for a good while to lay its eggs hopefully. So I noticed that I was being watched by some of the workers and it will be known in a short time that I am a shuffling lunatic, I told a couple of the guys I was catching the beetles to eat them, I said I was joking but who knows, with Chinese whispers they will have me eating stray children being the only gringo on site. So my hobby for now is taking pictures of the insects and when I get familiar with the area more I will start wandering to look at the birds in the local forest and maybe even catch a ride on the boats to see what birds are living locally on the water.

Professional engineer and Butterfly Recovery Agent

I have actually decided to be more professional in my approach to the work side of things, I just have to stop walking about the plant carrying bugs and butterflies in large plastic bags and dead things about my person, it is a point of amusement at the moment but if any problems occur they could use this as a weapon against me, I have been very efficient at eliminating problems and I have suggested some very useful things for the engineering team here which they have been very excited about. I suggested a trip philosophy change and they were so excited I thought they were going to throw a party; it was something that wasn’t that good as it could save them many unit shutdowns over the operating life of the units. If you work out how much it costs per unit shutdown for the maintenance it can be a huge amount of money so anything that prevent shutdowns and saves money is very welcome to them so at the moment I am God but that can only last until I am an asshole, and that is surprisingly easy when a problem arises that you struggle to eliminate. But hell what am I supposed to do for the 8 hours a day that I have nothing to do, I suppose I could write my journal and sit in the sun but I will continue with my butterfly rescue missions,
I have found to my horror that even the insectivorous bats can get caught in the whirlwind of the cooling fans, I found a desiccated little corpse of a small bat stuck on the mesh, I was and wasn’t surprised, I haven’t seen many bats here but this is the jungle and there are bats everywhere in the jungle that eat everything , even each other, there is a bat eating bat that has a snout of a wolf with long pointy teeth and it just homes in on the sonar of the smaller bats and snaps them up, there are frog eating bats and fish eating bats and vampire bats and basically anything that can be eaten there is a bat to eat it, but I have seen none other than the dead one. I went for an evening walk along the river which is very low with it being the dry season, all the rain is in my adopted country of Costa Rica, lashing down the week I was there before flying here. And the water was very clear and there was some bird life, I saw a nightingale of some sort and an egret and a group of Montezuma’s orupendula, now you may wonder how I know that bird, it is because it is a very common bird in Costa Rica. A large crow sized bird with a very distinctive yellow stripy tail, very identifiable. I will do more walking down the river while it is the dry season and go earlier as it was dark within 30 minutes and that was at 6.00pm, so I will now go and do my afternoon shift of butterfly rescue and two hoots to the laughing operators, they all think I am a mad Englishman, well nothing new there on my travels then.

Butterfly recovery agent

I have become the unofficial butterfly recovery agent for the site as there are large numbers that become trapped in the screens around the gas coolers. My first tasks in the morning are to check the status of the turbines, check out the plumes of oil mist from the oil mist (so called) eliminators, and then I go onto rescue the moths and butterflies that are stuck against the mesh on the fan guards. The fans are huge in banks of 3 and cover a huge area and the effective capture area is huge, the problem is that the numbers of captureds moths and butterflies are such that I need a capture box in which to keep them and to be able to release them far enough away so that they do not fly straight back into the screens. I did mention that it was a feeding station for the bats in the area as I found a huge amount of guano but it has since been pointed out to me that in fact it is not bats but huge toads that some in throngs to feel like crazy and I have even found their hiding place, they have manged to dig under the concrete paths and create little tunnels in which they sit during the day and emerge at night, tricky little things they must be stuffing themselves all night long on the myriad of moths that fly into the illumination zone. I suspect the guys in the control room are watching me on the close circuit television, and laughing there asses off at me but to a true blue conservationist that doesn’t worry me at all. The biggest problem I have is what to do with all the specimens of the dead butterflies and moths I am collecting, I have a small desk and it is full and I think I ma going to have to be ruthless and just photograph them all and discard the corpses to the ants.

Dreaming with the Flu god

I went to bed early again last night at 8.30pm as I was still feeling washed out with this Mother of all Flu’s. I didn’t have to go to bed fully dressed as my shivering has stopped and I slept reasonably well. But the dreams I was having were the equivalent of anything anyone has had on any drugs ever. They included witches and jewels of giant proportions, strange mystic practices to kill the witches, very large enchanted castles and giant houses, and these dreams lasted all night until I was woken up by some distant chanting and singing, I thought it was part of my dreams as I having, but as it went on and I became more awake I realised some function was being carried out onsite at 6.00am for gods sake, what bullshit is happening at 6.00am in the jungle being blared out on the public address system, I got up and had my shower feeling still slightly unsteady on my feet , got dressed and went to the office to drop off my laptop and I saw everyone on site had been lined up on the road in front of the canteen like a mini parade ground and the police/soldiers were doing silly marching and high stepping routines , I still don’t know if it was Peru’s day of democracy or national silly marching day but everyone was there bar me and probably the Russian Helicopter pilots. I pretended that nothing was going on a walked passed them all into the canteen and got my breakfast, I hope nobody saw me or is that being stupid.
Today I have asked for permission to start taking pictures of the giant moths and beetles that bombard the site, I have never seen such huge moths in my life, the place is alive with them and that is because of the lights we have burning all night here, some of the moths are dead some are barely alive, some just resting, but I think that 1 night flying into the lights kills the majority of them, so I was wanting to take pictures of them just for my own pleasure and perhaps some of the birds if I get near enough, I have brought my binoculars to get a better view while down on the river, I did see some large catfish fighting , the river is probably as big as the river Thames in London and I was shocked to see that it rises about 40-60 feet during flood times. That is going to be a fantastic thing to watch, seeing all the trees and things floating down the river.

Frightening Face of Viral Infection

I took a long and quite astonishing look in the mirror today after 5 days of this miserable flu infection, i could hardly belive what i was looking at, not only do i seem to have changed colour




I seem to have become a totally different person with whom i dont really recognise, perhaps the swelling and bruising will dissappear over the next week or two, i will defintely not get a warm reception from my wife learing at her with my face like this. i would consider the micheal jackson face lift if it was permanent.

Just Thinking About the Red Necks I Just Finished Working With

Does these images of the Marathon Site manager and safety officer conjure up any images for you, they ran the site like they were running an illegal moonshine stil in the backwoods, so glad i got away, i would have been squealing like a pig before too long.

Do these images of the Marathon Site manager and safety officer conjure up any images for you, they ran the site like they were running an illegal moonshine stil in the backwoods, so glad i got away, i would have been squealing like a pig before too long.

Swimming with Lord Flu

I went to bed last at 6.30pm, I was floundering all day, falling asleep whenever I sat down, I was shivering still, I could feel OK outside as the temperature was up in the 80's and very sunny, I was sweating like a sumo in a sauna all the time, but I had to have my vest on to keep as warm as I felt terrible cold, the fever was taking its toll, I was drinking Mate de Coca as often as I could to try and alleviate some of the symptoms but even that was having legible effect, I had to give a training exercise in the afternoon and when I was hacking and coughing all over the place the guys kept saying the AC is terrible for the chest, I did find this immense moth outside the control room entrance that had been trodden I have added a pic to the site. So I was woken up by people laughing and joking and I checked the clock and it was only 9.30 pm, I had slept 3 hours I was wet through with sweat but I decided to keep all the bedding on to sweat the demon out of me. I had a terrible night of waking and coughing and dreaming silly dreams mostly of crazy things, but swimming, when I finally got up with my alarm clock at 6.00am the bedding was soaked. I still feel weak and drained but not shivering as I did, I decided to put my vest in the wash finally as it was smelling decidedly stale. God knows what the cleaner thought I had been doing in my bed all night as the sheets where in knots all over the place, and very damp, hope he didn’t think I was a golden rain freak. So now I am back in the office drinking Mate de Coca again feeling drained but not shivering, I think we are heading in the right direction, if I feel any better I will attempt a walk around the place and check out the river with my camera

Development of Lord Flu

Today is Friday and my flu is in its choking phase, I can cough and cough but all I get is a very saw throat. Whoever invented flu wants needles inserting into his eyes. I slept pretty good to say I was freezing and had all my clothes on again in bed, I was awoken at 2 by my neighbour who was peeing very loudly into the centre of the bowl making a din that would waken the dead, I got my own back , when I was finally fully awake at 5, I noisily peed into the bowl, swirling round and round trying to make as much niose as possible, I was coughing lots and lots, and then I got into the shower at 5.20am, and enjoyed the steaming hot water for ages, I hope I used it all up. I hope he was busting to go to the toilet but after his 2 o’clock noise fest I wouldn’t imagine it. So I am awake at 5 and in bed at 8.30 and I slept reasonable for a good while so I don’t feel so sleepy just totally worn out from the draining flu, lets hope the 7 day prediction from the doctor is correct as this is day 4 and I don’t want to many shots in the ass like I had last night, he said it would put me to sleep but it had zero effect. I struggled all day yesterday to get the office printer and scanner loaded onto my laptop but it just hated the sight of it and wouldn’t load at all, so I resigned myself to printing only and I thought what about loading the scanner onto the office desktop , even though it is running windows 98, it didn’t even blink and ran smoothly all through and I could plug in the USB and scan to my hearts content, I was pissed off of course that I am still devoid of a scanner but I will survive. I can now start processing the huge amount of expenses I have generated over the last 2 weeks. Luckily all on my new company credit card. When I got out of the canteen this morning I was reminded of Scotland in summer, the air was fresh with an earthy smell and that hint of fungus, the air was very fresh and there was fog rolling over the local hills, I can still hardly imagine this place being so fresh. Who would have believed it, having to have a vest on in the Amazonian forest, I was told yesterday that the length of time it takes to take a boat down the river to the atlantic coast is 6 months, yes that is correct 6 months, it is virtually the entire length of the Amazon river, and that is about 4000 miles I think, it is a hard job getting supplies into this place, they fly nearly everything but they have to use small planes as the strip is so small, then they fly into a bigger strip up the river and then use barges to get things up here, a real logistical nightmare but they seem to have it managed pretty well, much better than marathon, Marathon oil ran out of food in Malabo and were buying shite from the local suppliers and the food was appalling. I like this outfit, a good site and nice people and I am on day shifts more importantly, life is good and when I get rid of this flu it will be better

Ode to the God of Flu

I sniffle and croak and moan
Snortle and gag what a bag
Of shite this flu has become
Tedious wipes of my snotty, running, dripping
Flipping red raw hooter,
What a shooter, I sprayed the monitor
With infected nasal spray
Jettisoned at supersonic velocity
What a monstrosity I am

I am vaccinated
And intoxicated with drugs galore
How can a bug so small
Kick my balls this hard
Death seems like heaven
I am driven to scream
God you miserable shit
What sort of humour
You deserve a tumour
That is why they are all
In a tizz turning muslim and hindu
Their god gives them
Starvation and inflammation
But not Flu Print Article
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My Hopeless Spanish and Flu

I had a slow relaxing rest of the week waiting for permission to fly on the Monday which never came and I started just enjoying what I had left of my break at home, Monday morning arrived and I had a crappy nights sleep thinking I was going to miss the taxi as always and got to the airport with loads of time to spare, I landed in Lima only 10 minutes late and I was surprised to find the airport basically on the beach. I assumed it was up in the Andes somewhere like Quito, I got off the plane and found not a cold wintery place as I was told by several people but a sunny and very pleasant place, I went to customs with my brand new visa and he was put to attention by it and didn’t even bother looking through the rest of the passport he stamped it and I was waived on my way far better than the corrupt thievery of Malabo airport. I was met at departure by a very helpful guy who assumed I spoke Spanish as everyone did and I had to ask him to slow down his talking as it was just rambling to me. He guided me away from the nasty pirate white wrecks of taxis in the rank and was calling someone on the radio, mine turned up a larger ramshackle Kia with a throbbing exhaust. He was pleasant and didn’t smell, he tried talking in English which made me feel ashamed that I could hardly string 3 words together for him, we laughed a few times and it killed the 30 minutes to get to the hotel in central Lima, I was shocked again by how big the country was and how developed it was, quite unlike I was expecting, they even obeyed the red traffic lights and there was traffic police everywhere. Very civilised I thought, no signs of abject poverty, just shops and houses like any big city but they did have bars on the windows like San Jose. The hotel I went to was pretty large 7 floors and it was more like small apartments , but with a bath in the living room which I thought was very silly, I had wireless LAN and meant I could surf in bed, I checked mail and was summoned to go to the main office of the company here and it was in the huge tower block next door , which was the BBVR bank offices, very impressive I had to show all my Vaccinations and I picked up my Medical Pass which is actually my travel document for the Malvinas site. I went back and went for a sandwich on the rooftop restaurant. It was great but they took so long and I was starting to go past the hunger. I ate a huge Bacon lettuce and tomato along with a fried egg and tons of cheese on it, why it was so big I don’t know I felt stuffed. I went back to my room and somehow felt really strange, I started shivering even though it was still warm but as soon as the sun went down I felt really cold the sun was deceiving and it was a winter’s day after all. By 9 o’clock came around I was stone cold and shivering and couldn’t get warm , I went to bed fully dressed and pulled all the blankets and covers up onto me , it took me maybe 30 minutes to get to sleep even though I was dead tired from having so little sleep the previous week. I woke up when it was still dark and felt refreshed , I looked at my clock and it gave me the wrong answer, 12.30pm, I had only had a couple of hours sleep but I was past sleep already, I hooked up the laptop and got on the wireless LAN again and did all my mail, telling everybody that I had arrived and the hotel was OK , the place was very dusty and it looked like this part of South America has very little rain , and in fact the Attacama desert is around here somewhere. I did a few things, I was hoping to find out how to copy a windows XP installation disk and get it to work properly, and I found out from reading a few selected items that I already had the necessary software but I didn’t know how to work them correctly as usual, so I tried to memorise the stuff and failed to copy things to my laptop, it has been acting a little funny since I cleared out what I considered lots of old installation junk from the initial setup but I did damage the office setup, it kept asking for the installation disk but would work if you cancelled it often enough, so I did learn how to create a boot CD in the we hours of the morning, I finally decided to take a valium as I could see this turning into an all night waking thing and I really needed some sleep, I did wake up really sweating from all the clothes I was wearing and I had slowly thrown them all off, I went back to sleep for about 3 hours with a full valium inside me, I woke up feeling like shit as normal and went for a breakfast but I felt dreadful and aching all over I had picked up the virus my stepson had at home and I was travelling to a site where I thought I had read that they would refuse to accept me if I was showing symptoms of illness, so not as to possibly expose the local native Indians to some strange virus that could wipe out the entire village like the Spanish did 500 years ago. So had fruit juice for breakfast in the freezing roof terrace and waiting in my room for the taxi at 9, I got to the airport, a rather large new one and was ushered to the queue and showed my travel pass and was given a bus ticket, that is what it looked like anyhow, we boarded at 11 and was told it was a 1.5 hour flight , when we took off all I could see was low level fog and as we went further inland the mountains started to appear and it was all dry and barren , the only thing visible was the few trees existing in the river valleys. We got higher and higher and started seeing some white capped mountains but nothing worth taking pictures of, those were as I flew into Lima. So I took a few as we were about to land and of the huge river that passes our site.
I was totally unaware of what I was coming to when I asked for the job in Peru , only that it was day shift and it was a lot closer to fly to, so when I got off the short charter flight that landed on the jungle strip easily seen from the Aerial photo I have added, I was surprised to find the temperature very pleasant, something like an English summer day, we got a bus to the camp and I was met by my back to back, he showed me the office, and my accommodation, and yes I am being treated like a professional and I have a better quality room and I am treated like a professional and not a goddam peasant as I was by Marathon oil. The camp is very clean and the food is very nice but typical Peruvian, lots of rice and beans and chicken every meal if you want , even rice soup for breakfast which I like as it is the only thing I fancy eating while I am feeling like shit with this flu. My introduction to the plant was very nice, I was told I go and do training several times a week and only go to the main control room to take data for the office back in Florence and when they have problems. This is purely a supervisory position and I feel very happy with it, the only big stumbling block is my lack of any tangible Spanish language. From the first conversation I was lost like an overboard sailor, bobbing in the turbulent see. I knew I had to learn quickly but this is shocking for me. I can understand what they are basically saying but for me to string a few words together is impossible, and they probably are laughing there ass off at me but not to my face yet, once things have settled down and they open up to me then things will change. I have several contacts who I will deal with all the time and one has excellent English as he studied in Portsmouth. Small world isn’t it. So I am garbling rubbish to everyone and using my tried and time tested few phrases to ask for everything. I have been twice to the docs and trying to explain what I am suffering from is so difficult, I have been referring to the translator program a lot since I got here. My back to back was with me 2 days to hand over everything and he comes back on the wrong day so this means I have to change my flights already. When I got up this morning after another terribly wrestles night with coughing and barking all night long probably keeping all my neighbours awake, I felt like death and had been feeling cold all night long and when I got out of the accommodation I realised why, it was freezing outside, that is a relative freezing, maybe down to 55 or even 50, I was shocked, I had to go back inside and put on a vest, I was shivering all the way to the canteen, soup again. The units have been tripping since I got here and I have had to attend several meetings to address the problems , I thought I would change tactics on the issue, I said we need to have a trip reduction plan, to look at all software options to see if we can eliminate all sources that are unnecessary and perhaps give me an easy life. I got the impression that I was talking exactly what they wanted. They loved the idea of being able to avoid lots of problems without doing hardly anything. so I have got them eating out of my hand and I have only had 2 meetings and cannot speak Spanish, just what I wanted. This project is going to be a great one for me I can tell apart from me feeling like death with the flu and not sleeping yet. Print Article
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those who point the finger of doom in vane, will suffer the fate they invoke

Wednesday morning 5.30am and I am feeling like worse than shit, I haven’t had a decent sleep in 3 weeks and life here is far from relaxing. I have to be up and at the embassy and up to the clinic for my blood test results, I have also been suffering from a small skin problem on my foot for almost 5 years since i worked in Zambia on the Congo border town of Kitwe, I had originally thought it was normal athletes foot, so I sprinkled it with powder and massaged it with anti-fungal cream and it would shrink a little bit and then grow a little bit but never really doing anything, the occasional little red dot would appear in it and then go, so I really never gave it much though, but since I had been working in Equatorial guinea the problem had grown much worse, the skin became very thick on the sole and the redness got worse and even started hurting like I was being stuck with needles, I went to the camp doctor to be told that It was not fungus but an allergy and nothing to worry about, it would go with time, but after walking myself silly in the camp as they provided no transport it really flared up and when I got home this time I was hurting like hell and covered half my foot, I was getting worried and as I was going to another hot sweaty jungle camp I needed to find our what it was I decided to consult the clinic for some tests. I went to the Peruvian consul and picked up my Visa as I was told and I felt joy at going to the Amazonian jungle for the time , being a very keen bird watcher I was really enthusiastic about the prospect of seeing interesting birds and wildlife, after that nice thought passed, back to driving around like a nutcase, we then went to the clinic only to be told that he could only obtain 1 blood test showing if I was protected with the antibodies for chickenpox, this pissed me off as I could see my trip to Peru disappearing up the Amazon without a paddle. There was nothing I could do, he said he would have to send to the USA to get hold of the stuff if I needed it and that could take a lot of time and would be very expensive, time I didn’t have. I asked for a test to be carried out on my strange foot affliction, The medic who called himself a doctor took a scraping from my foot and 2 hours later proudly told me I had athletes foot, which I don’t really believe but I knew I was fungal in nature, I went to the pharmacy and bought an 8 week course of the strongest anti-fungal tablets available, I am going to kill this irritating bastard once and for all and it will clear up my dandruff to boot. So I took the results I had and went to mail my office with all the latest developments, I have also been struggling with the new girl in the office who did timesheets and expenses, now the last thing you need with that is someone who is not cooperative, and she was not in the least cooperative and it was difficult to get a response from her let alone some intelligible reply. This week she claimed that I was missing timesheets for several months and lots of expense receipts and copying it to my manager which infuriated me, this is ridiculous I thought, I haven’t missed anything for 14 months then she claims I am doing everything wrong, after the jetlag and the rushing about at home, I let rip with my own rather barbed response about the lack of information and non cooperation and total lack of any replies, I found out from my manager in Malabo that in fact I had missed nothing on the timesheets as she seemed to think that I lived in Malabo full time and that the missing timesheets were missing when in fact they didn’t exist as I was at home recovering from the jetlag. This message I sent on to my manager and telling him to get something done about the girl as it isn’t acceptable to have to deal with that attitude, the next day I got a response from all my mails to her, which was great I thought, a rocket up the arse didn’t do anyone any harm from time to time, and I sent back another mail to her but getting back an out of office reply that said: Cristina Agrisano doesn’t work here anymore, I was shocked and happy at the same time, she had shown herself to be incompetent and had decided to do the honourable thing and quit while ahead, I was feeling a little bit guilty but sneakily glad, the previous girl was excellent and had been moved upwards because of it, but in this game with guys working long hours and being remote you cannot afford to have slack workers at the end of the line, they need to be helping us guys in the field and making it easier for us, not pointing the accusatorial finger at us, those who point the finger of doom in vane, will suffer the fate they invoke.

Unrelaxing Break from Projects

Well life at home was far from being called a holiday, I was feeling like shit as usual, the 7 hour jetlag was killing me as bad as ever and I don’t recover for about 5 days, as the body gets older the body clock is getting harder to pull round the levers, I was up at 5.30 as the boy has to be on the school bus for 6.15am, that is ridiculously early I know, I cannot do anything about it but suffer, I was lucky as I got home Friday night and was able to just sleep and eat for the weekend but I felt like crap, we did go to the cinema and see Batman,$2 each, what an entertaining movie I thought, yes we do have cinemas in Costa Rica and we do get the new releases, in fact I went later in the week to see the new War of the Worlds, it was a spectacular film but the film of the book is a bit thin, a weak ending, and we have H.G. Wells the thank for that. So Monday morning and it was off to a flying start, First to the photographer to get my visa pictures taken and it was a painless operation but I was shocked to see how goddam grey I had gone since my last actual passport picture had been taken, I told the wife “I want a flat top and a No3 all over” just to remove as much grey as possible, then straight to the Peruvian Consulate put in my Visa application, very straight forward and no problems, then to the Travel shop for a ticket to Lima and I can say I was robbed as it was summer holiday time for Costa Rica and the prices quadrupled, but as I have just got hold of my brand new company credit card I don’t care, I had a leisurely lunch at a little diner that cost $4 for two of us and afterwards we went to call all doctors that we could to get some vaccinations and blood tests, I was told that I could get all my blood tests done at a local clinic and that all we had to do was show up at a Hospital and take the vaccinations with us and they would administer them for free, but getting hold of them is much harder than you would think in this country, as it is so small Costa Rica has a small demand for things like yellow fever vaccination and things like Hep B vac is even harder, so we tried a few farmacies only to be told they have nothing at all, I am wondering where I can get all my vacs from in future, it may be easier to get them all in Lima which is a laugh rally as I would have expected it to be very hard here. Anyway we settle for the blood tests and I started to collapse with the dreaded jetlag about 3.30pm I managed to keep going as the wife was driving me all over the place and slumped dead into bed at 8.00pm, this doesn’t mean I got a good sleep, I was awake at 1.30 am ready for the working day to start, this is my usual practice, I struggled for at least 2 hours to get back to sleep and managed it eventually but this isn’t a normal sleep, just a horrible catnap that makes you feel dreadful and not like you slept at all. So getting up at 5.30 again feeling like I had a great night out but knowing I didn’t, with another day full of things to do. Tuesday was the day I had to start my residence process, I have prevaricated enough about should I and shouldn’t I do it, I always fly in and out of here pretending to be a tourist, which basically I am, I don’t actually work here and spend more time away than at home, but I want that little document that allows me to enter as a local in the immigration as those queues are much much smaller and I wouldn't get that silly look from the immigration officer while he looks through all my Costa Rican passport stamps and USA stamps for that matter. So armed with all my new passport pictures and passports, 2 we are allowed 2 in the UK as we think we’re important. I was told by the lawyer that I needed a photocopy of all the pages in both passports a letter from the British consul stating that I am not a criminal, which they cannot do for legal reasons and the British do not have a national register of ex criminals anyway, they just provide a letter saying thet have no such register,so I got that letter over 12 months ago and just put it in a bottom drawer, I then had to produce a certificated birth certificate, this takes around 3 months to obtain and that is after my sister sent it to Costa Rica for me which also took a month to get hold of. And I got that about 6 months ago and put it in the same bottom drawer. So now with all this I thought I was fully armed but no, I was then told that I needed to show that I was an financially independent person but I had to have it within Costa Rica and not external as that would put my case through a different legal channel that would cost more and take double the length of time, I have been able to do this as I set up a house building business a couple of years ago and failed miserably to make any decent money from it and even though it is still alive I don’t do anything anymore but I can use it as my claim to be financially stable without having to resort to showing my contract from an American company with its office in Dublin and me being based out of Florence in Italy, I don’t think they would believe me anyhow. So the lawyer had drawn up this huge document stating everything and I had to sign and of course he wanted his money up front before he starts this long drawn out process, $400, they are now just looking at applications from March 2004, so maybe by Christmas 2006 I may get a nice Christmas present. The only fly in the ointment is that I will then be eligible for Costa Rican tax and that is one thing I am not happy about.