Sup folks. Like the motley crew of Staind would say, ‘It’s been a while!’. We haven’t disappeared, we haven’t left, we still love y’all, but we sure as heck haven’t posted for a few months so we thought we better fess up about having been slack.

November started with a week of drunken debauchery masquerading as a golf trip and we’re fairly certain we did damage to the brain cells that help us write blog posts. That pretty much scrapped November.

December saw one of our crew succumb to a run of kidney problem that we’re putting down to old age and too many frothy’s.  That month ended in a temultuous little display from mother nature involving massive dark clouds, lots of rain, and if Ash’s kidney stones weren’t large enough to be impressive, the size of the hail we received around our part over Christmas sure was.  Our cars now unhelpfully resemble golf balls.  Roof tiles have now been replaced, and remarkably Ash’s panels managed to survive the celestial beating.

Any American watching cable TV over the past few months can hardly fail to have noticed the seemingly ubiquitous advertisements extolling the virtues of extracting oil from Canadian oil sands, which the commentators assure their audience has a carbon footprint largely comparable with traditional fossil fuels, and which, if developed will provide not only millions of new jobs but billions of dollars for governments as well as energy security by weaning the Western Hemisphere off its addiction to terrorism-tainted Middle East oil.

But don’t break out your checkbook just yet.

Apparently those pesky Eurocrats in Brussels haven’t gotten the message, as on 4 October the European Commission proposed that oil sands crude be ranked as a dirtier source of fuel compared with oil from conventional wells.