Last Day On Site In Italy

well all is quiet and slow, the testing we had is finished and the compressor is being stripped down for shipping to Singapore for assembly on the ship to be sailed to its final destination in Angola, oooooh, just had a shiver thinking about that place, thank Lord Buddha that I am not going there. We had a guy here from the main oil company and he was the head of the rotating equipment design department, he was what you would call a boffin, he tried to explain to me how you can measure the energy imparted into the gas stream without measuring the gas velocity, you use Stagnation Temperature and Stagnation Pressure of course, try reading about those in Wikipedia. He was actually a very nice man, a very intelligent and wise man, he ran the whole string test show, demanding test after test and taking his readings and forcing the manufacturer to prove their findings. He was so clever that i really envied him other than he was on salary and limited holidays package so i didn't envy his workload but it was nice to work with a real smart professional engineer for once.

I still have to clean out my laptop and hand it over along with the mobile phone, i have removed all my photos and personal stuff but left all the music on it as someone else may enjoy my taste in hip hop and golden oldies, Dean Martin was fantastic you know. I was brought up in a house where Dean Martin Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby was played by my dad and the Beatles were on the TV playing all their early stuff. Elvis was still alive and swivelling his hips. Jeez i sound really old, unfortunately i am old but i love to swivel my own hips given half a chance and perhaps Darwin can fulfil that.

My sister is coming over next week for a short holiday and perhaps I can show her Florence for the Ufizzi Art Gallery and the Famous painting by Botticceli, the birth of Venus

Waiting Game For Oz

Has anyone ever waited for a holiday of a lifetime to come around, I am counting down the days and really i don't have the exact date yet as it all depends on how long the Visas take to arrive. I am checking out accommodation and it appears very expensive but i am not bothered about that as the company is paying and I can't plan the school for my little girl and I can't plan much until i actually get out there and speak to the existing manager on the plant, hopefully he will be able to guide me through all that tricky stuff like where to live and where to go drinking and where not to tell jokes about heavy drinking Australians. I have been checking out the phone book for my mothers maiden name and found only 100 of them in the western state phone book, I know my Cousin was the 400 meters runner for Australia in the 1966 Olympic games so she may not be that hard to track down, plus they will probably be all related anyway. So where do I get a house, in Darwin centre for the nightlife and shops, in the suburbs for the quiet life with close by schools or out in the countryside with snakes and Kangaroos and the other things that are out there, each one has its advantages and drawbacks, I think we will end up in the suburbs so we are close enough to shops and reduce the drive to work in a morning as it is about 25 miles,

This is what i have been looking at, a nice Little house on the northern edge of Darwin and with a school and hospital close by and hopefully with cycling lanes everywhere., I need to get rid of my growing beer belly by doing some exercise

The Latest Beard Photo

Jeez I am looking pretty haggard and wrinkly on this photo, and the beard makes me look like an arty farty liberal school teacher.

Its Out In the Open Now

Ahoy all shipmates, the latest news today is that someone actually read my blog, this news is good for me as a blogger but the problem was he works for the company i am leaving and he was shocked to hear me bleating on about starting a new job in Australia, so he calls everyone and everyone calls me, well actually my site lead here in Italy asked me if it was true and i had to Confess it was true and i had to issue a resignation letter to my contracting agency. I have had nothing in the mailbox yet about it but I am sure I will. I feel pretty bad about how it has all ended, i had such high hopes for this project but I am losing money on this deal, I used to work on hourly rates which is isn't great but i get paid for the hours I work but here i am on a day rate and I am doing shitloads of hours and making nothing extra for it, plus when i found out i would be working in Singapore 7 days a week and maybe 7 days a week in Angola I would be making no extra money, I popped in to see my old company as my office was not 100 meters from my new one in Florence, just to say hello to all the old folks and I told them all about my work and it must have prompted them to think how they could tempt me back, They offered me probably the best job they have and to top it all they told me they would pay my taxes and two fully paid holidays to anywhere in the world plus luxury apartment in Darwin with car and a daily allowance, cant get better than this, who could blame me for jumping ship, I will probably make double the money I am making now and working less hours. Lovely Jubbly

Australia Bound Finally

Some of you may be shocked to find out that I am actually half Australian already, yes it is true my mother was born in Perth Western Australia and left after a family breakdown and was fostered out to her elderly Uncle and Aunt in England. She was born in 1925 and spent only 5 years in Oz as I will refer to it and I have been drawn inexplicably to Oz all my life to visit and possibly work there as it is the last wild frontier especially in the tropical Northern Territory, even the name implies it is just an unexplored place to be left alone, so guess where I am going to be working for the next 12 months come September, Darwin NT. This is a gift from my old company to come back working for them as I was deeply pissed off working in shitty places without my wife, so this time I get married status and in Oz the land of barbies and beer and skin cancer, we have to die of something. So now my application is in for the Visas and now Australia has started issuing work permits only I get to go for as long as the maintenance contract keeps being signed maybe for ever, this will fit my retirement plans perfectly, I need only 7 more years of work and then I can just quit for good, well almost, I may do part time after that but I can get my feet up and play at being a bird watcher more often. Only problem I have is how do I quit my present job and it not cost me lots of money and get blown off the site here, I think I will just do a bunk and let them down badly by telling them at the last minute, but life is a bitch and I will never work for this outfit ever again anyway, so someone else will find out how tough life is. I still feel like I have won the jackpot and don’t have the money in my hands yet, is it all a dream and will it vanish when I wake up, I certainly hope not

Electric Bicycles

Has anyone ever seen electric bicycles ever on the road before, they have always been one of those mysterious things seen on TV on science shows and never on the road, but here in Tuscany Italy, they are a plague on the face of the earth, I think that all the riders are actually aliens ( a favourite theme of mine ) as without a doubt everyone of the riders look over the age of 60 and are hugely fat, they must be cheap enough for the old farts to buy but not fast enough for kids to want, they all ride stinky 2-stroke scooters and drive very badly, back to the elecric bikes, i am actually impressesd by them as they must be efficient enough to drag 300 pounds of ugly fat along and up and down hills without bursting into flames so they must be better than I ever thought possible, in fact this morning i saw two old guys racing each other on said bikes and they were so oblivious to other traffic that they were blocking the road, manics, they travel along in the road like they are in fact motorised and hold up traffic doing 15 mph, jeez i hate them, they are a drain on the earths resources and should be banned.

Thought of The Day

Handle every situation like a dog ....

If you can't Eat it or Screw it ,

Piss on it and Walk Away.

Beach Visits for The Little Girl

We live only 5 miles or so from the beach and it is summer and the weather is nice and the little girl just loves the water after she learned to swim this year. So it is only fair that we take her to the beach now and again. So this last Saturday we went to the beach and as it is full summer holiday season in the Italian Riviera, the roads are full of cars and the car parks are all full and it is murder getting parked, so we end up parking on the grass divider in the road along with a hundred or so others near the free beach, yes the beaches here are owned by hotels and beach resorts and you have to pay for the privilege of parking you ass on the beach, so we go to the free beach and put towels near the waters edge to keep an eye on the little girl, she just splashes around for about 2 hours and we have to join in now and again and watch out that idiots who try and play volley ball don't squash her. he beach is as crowded as you can possibly imagine, people are on the sand as closely packed as human nature will allow it maybe a 3 foot gap around the towels, all like sardines, me and my wife say that going to be beach is fun as you Can refresh your eyes, to use a costa rican expression, you see some incredible sites while people are basically naked apart from a few tiny pieces of cloth and even great looking people have not got the perfect bodies in fact i have realised that the perfect body doesn't really exist, I probably saw upwards of 1000 people on the beach and i Saw every conceivable body shape there is and even young girls are not perfect, some where very nice but not perfect in any way. My point is that everyone is trying to achieve what they think is a perfect body shape and are failing because that is human body shape all very different and perfection is unobtainable. But it was fun checking them all out

The First Excitement In My Little Town of Piazza

Yes the little town where i live here in Italy at the moment is called Piazza, and yes it has a little piazza in fron of the town hall. it is full of retired folks, the hills surrounding it are all coverd in Pines and a few vineyards and a few fruit trees, so sleepy it should be called sleepyville or the cemetary, anyway i got home for lunch as i am only 9 Km away from my work site and we eat outside for lunch and I went to bring a map from the car and I heard this terrible din coming from just down the road, i thought it sounded like two dogs fighting, screaming at each other like dogs do when engaged in battle, so I never thought anything of it, when i got back to the house only 100 yards away my wife was looking white faced and a bit put out, she asked me " did you here that ", "yes of course i did " i replied in a couldnt care less way, "what was it " i asked, She replied " A guy was beating his wife or children of all of them in the house just over there", pointing about 50 yeards away, " the wife was on the balcony shouting at him as he walked away afterwards", well i was shocked to think that an old fart was beating his wife for lunch, i suppose it takes all sorts. i ate a nice lunch and went back to work, The only issues we have is with a woman who comes to visit next door but who must be deaf as she shouts while talking, really really loud like at the top of her voice, she shouts while on the phone and when just talking to the neighbour, I could get all shirty about it but i dont care really as long as I am not trying to sleep in the big swinging sofa thingy that i take a small rest on after lunch.