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Showing posts from February 16, 2014

Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...
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Douglas and his family stayed with me in Duluth last night. I went to a funeral today for a church friend. Dennis always wore Hawaiian Style shirts, so many of us wore Hawaiian shirts with black arm bands. It was good. http://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/news/2014/feb/19/dennis-marks/ Pic from last week.
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Back from Russia. I got to watch the Russian - USA Olympic Hockey game from the Russian perspective. We went to Sergiyev Posad, one of the Golden Ring cities and had hands on experience making Matyrosha (Russian nesting dolls). We also visited Lenin's tomb. No pictures are allowed in most crypts. We realized later we had visited quite a few significant dead people (and saints). :-) The dog statue is Malchik in Mendeleevskaya Metro Station. Malchik It's a long trip. I went through Rome because of the ATL ice event. The pic from the airplane is Zadar Croatia. It gets crazy here in Atlanta with ice and snow on the roads. Living on a perfectly level street, my four wheel drive truck and my bias towards using MARTA kept me very much unaffected. I have gasoline/generator and fireplace if I needed it. Since it was really all above 32F, I wasn't concerned about heat. Having temps in the 30s inside my house will only slightly affect my normal routines. The snowy road picture looks ...