Hear that scraping sound? Dragging my ass this morning. Literally. Don’t lo0k at me like that — you know what I’m talking about, that blog look you always give me. I can see you in the back there… don’t try to hide behind the fat guy!
Sorry if I came across a bit touchy just then. This has been a long hard slog, but I have no right to take it out on you — you who have stood with me every league of the way. Damn it, I’m ungrateful! But isn’t that the way it goes with pop band denizens. Anyways…. our wayward breeze did come along eventually, and pushed us on our way-ward. (Or forward, as it were.) Once we were clear of the strange psycho-miasma surrounding the dreaded Sea of the Weekly World News, we were able to navigate using something other than Trevor James’ Orgone Generator (which, with the polarity reversed, acts as a crude bio-plasmic compass. It’s a little hard to explain, actually. Okay… just drop it, all right?)
Right, right — back to my tale of woe and intrigue. We were on the high seas for several days, making fairly good time (as pops used to say), when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) spotted the silhouette of a substantial coast line to our port side. Land! But what land was it? Iceland? Greenland? Long Island? It was hard to be sure. We thought it best to send a scouting party in the long 
boat to check it out before attempting to land. Trouble was… no long boat. (We didn’t even have a short boat.) Matt, John and I began to roll our eyes around the ship’s cabin, searching for a gullible… I mean, workable solution. Which one of our party had the greatest natural buoyancy? The answer came quite quickly…. BIG ZAMBOOLA — a true living, breathing floatation device.
Well, friends… Zamboola went ashore and did the recon, as they say (looking more than a bit like that “Rover” critter from the sixties TV show The Prisoner), quickly determining that we had, indeed, sighted land and that — yes — it was indeed the land of our homestead, the besieged, much maligned Cheney Hammer Mill, which we call home. 
(Did I say that it is our home? The mill? Okay, then.) Next step: get the ship on dry land. But how to accomplish this? Though it was capable (until recently) of interstellar travel, and has of late been modified to serve as a sea-faring vessel, the imitation J-2 space cruiser has zero capability as an over-land vehicle. We needed some means of locomotion — not wind power, not ion power… something that would give us traction for the long road ahead.
When it came to a vote over who would be elected to drag the ship back to Colombo, Marvin won by three votes. (My vote was on posi-Lincoln, but that was out of bitterness… sheer bitterness.) So forward we went, propelled by the power of Marvin’s ion reactor. Hammer Mill, here we come! Giddyap!
