Happy everything to you all and thanks for dropping in Murgatroid. Seems today is lovely and sunny here but a bit of a breeze and the ground wet enough to sail on. This time of year sees a mountain of family birthdays including me and me dog’s so unfortunately things get a little out of order and before rumour control goes mental yes it is my sixtieth and it doesn’t seem that long ago I was at school working out the year in which I’d reach such an age! Now I have realised that it didn’t take that long to get to here (o: Before I forget and you think this is a rambling bonkers site devoted the strange and obscure (you are probably close to the mark however) Easy Balloons is an Airworthiness type Organisation looking after all aspects of hot air ballooning but we don’t do rides, mend curtains or sell party balloons. Right that’s that done. The events have been updated and there are some interesting things afoot some of which aren’t in the news this time round but will be soon I’m sure. Seems we have missed a couple of slots recently but to be honest it was so dull and gloomy I binned the idea quite early in the day but around the country there have been a few flights grabbing an opportunity here and there. Well done. Now it is absolutely sodden here and windy for the foreseeable so I rather think we are on the deck for a while. Big welcomes to Paul Dopson and Heaven Crawley who have joined our CAMO and operate under the name Floating Sensations, primarily in the Cotswolds. More on them in the news bit. Also in the news is a rake of stuff associated with SERA, Vera’s sister, or something like that, we aren’t sure whether its current or not but we’ll ask the CAA for an ‘official’ statement that we can understand at some point. We just read, interpreted and printed the press releases various!
There should have been a couple of new articles up this time but time has run out this week as we are off on a quick break to Hay-on-Wye for some celebrations and buy some books and new boots so they won’t be up now until the weekend. Almost everything has now gone from the farm except the chickens but we did have a nice brief visit from luvvie Andy delivering a commission to John. It is rather marvellous and made him smile. More on that later. We found an old airship article from Practical Mechanics dating from the thirties so we’ll get that up. Also coming will be a thing on railways, but not as we know them Stuart, following the gift of a rather nice little book on what is almost certainly going to become our next project. Very kindly Paulo Oggiwotsits has dropped an old C3 burner in so we’ll be able to repair our old one now. Shame about the pilot light shut-off but a super burner nonetheless. My ‘new’ kit built Mark 4 is now finished and ready for a flight test under the ’56 when the chance presents itself. I’ll have to refuel it as I knicked some of the fuel for the workshop heater! Big ones to Two Eagles on managing to cross the Pacific and end up in the sea when they were heading for land. Clearly they knew something we didn’t. It was a great crossing none-the-less.
In the mending corner things have changed little as we are still busy taking advantage of the reasonably quiet spell to sort bathrooms various and just reminding ourselves why we don’t carry out general repairs! The Velocette is starting to look like a bike again but we are looking for some front engine plates and fork shrouds. If you happened to have some for 350 MAC under the stairs we would be interested. The little old Standard is ready to have its engine removed and rebuilt and the Bonnie got fired up the other day in readiness for some spring which is certainly on the way as the crocuses 
in Wendover are coming out. I landed in an old crocus meadow once. Must try and remember where it was and go pay a visit, mind you now I’m really old I find the memory is going (gone). Best I out the old person buggy on charge. Thanks for dropping by and we will have some stuff up in the next few days meanwhile a very happy birthday to you if its yours. Front page piccie is John and his new acquisition and down here is grand-daughter Holly competing in her second dressage test. Very small person and pony in very large arena. She came seventh with a score of 58% which is around 50% more than I’d get. All the best Jane, John, Dotty, Alice and Chris. Grammatical errors might be corrected by the weekend.