Wether you like it or not every year that day keeps coming back! And this year is no exception… But most of all I love that my kids are here to remind me : I am not 25 anymore and by giving me an incentive to get out of here.
So how does a retentive boat owner celebrate, you may wonder now… In my view there is no better way than finishing what I started last week: the oil and filter change. This one was my very first time so obviously I was feeling a little nervous. And all the classes I took in the previous year have indeed increased my confidence and knowledge level : undoubtebly the “pella oil extractor“ was a breeze to use even if I still found a way to spill a bit of oil in the engine compartment!… So with the contribution of *V*`s smaller arms we managed to clean the mess under all the places you can’t reach!
As you may all wonder at this point, the inspection for the fabulous crazy install passed with flying colors, *V* is impressed, we just need a little touch up on the wood finish! And once all the work was done we cleaned the boat and re-instated it to a more regular state of affair. In the midst of all our re-organization *V* dropped one of the boat hook over board ( this is for the record)… so we had to clean on our knees like the good old days! Needless to add it was a good workout for the ego as well!
We ended our day with our monthly sailing meeting (of course), where saddly again the old prejudice was present! Although, I feel at this point that there has been enough said on that subject (read my rant) so I won’t give you all the details on the «you will die in a thin keel boat, or even production boats are too fragile!…» Let alone we didn’t mention we own a cat!
We completed the day with a dinner of Peking duck and a chocolate birthday cake with the children once they had finished work. Work! did you say work? « Well! you bet they need to work if we have any hope of leaving soon!”.
This will leave me with island 230th, my favourite the Cyclades group, I spent three weeks on a caique like the one in the picture below, a blast just a little younger. The Cyclades is a Greek island group in the Aegean Sea, south-east of the mainland of Greece; and a former administrative prefecture of Greece. They are one of the island groups which constitute the Aegean archipelago. The name refers to the islands around the sacred island of Delos. The Cyclades is where the native Greek breed of cat (the Aegean cat) first came from.
The first archaeological excavations of the 1880s were followed by systematic work by the British School at Athens and by Christos Tsountas, who investigated burial sites on several islands in 1898 – 1899 and coined the term “Cycladic civilization”. Interest lagged, then picked up in the mid-20th century, as collectors competed for the modern-looking figures that seemed so similar to sculpture by Jean Arp or Constantin Brâncu?i. Sites were looted and a brisk trade in forgeries arose. The context for many of these Cycladic figurines have been mostly destroyed and their meaning may never be completely understood. Another intriguing and mysterious object is that of the Cycladic frying pans. More accurate archaeology has revealed the broad outlines of a farming and seafaring culture that had immigrated from Asia Minor
ca
5000 BCE. Early Cycladic culture evolved in three phases, between ca
3300 – 2000 BCE, when it was increasingly swamped in the rising influence of Minoan Crete. The culture of mainland Greece contemporary with Cycladic culture is termed Helladic.
In recent decades the Cyclades islands have become popular with European and other tourists, and as a result there have been problems with erosion, pollution, and water shortages.
