Chazd's (Charles Dowdell's) News Burps

Last week I hosted a global meeting in Duluth. It kept me pretty busy every evening for sure. Today I took a nap. It felt nice.

My "fish car" with her new friend. Angie's pics flying over Greenland from last week.

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.

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 ...

I was up in NY for two days... I guess it was two days. It is hard to keep track. Honestly. Spent the night in Michigan. Back in ATL for the next ice storm (maybe). The politicians are sure to be proactive on the rhetoric this time in Atlanta. I am off to Russia for a few days. The opening ceremony was pretty cool wasn't it? The farm is good. And I expect it to get better. Folks have been having a tough winter. Every year is a tough winter there. This year, talking to folks who are not subject to the fashionable trends-- say it is indeed a tough winter. Cold and snow. Winter life is harsh. Not just on the humans, but also the animals. I saw a nice sundog in downtown Duluth the other day. I always wonder if others saw it.

I have received questions about the catastrophe in Atlanta over that last few days from all over the world. First of all, I think that the world has a lot bigger issues. There have been no deaths (that I heard about in ATL) regarding the weather and traffic. This is much better than a normal day in ATL when everything is going good! Lots of folks die on the roads here and all across the US on a so-called "good day". I was largely unaffected by the recent events. My commute was studied before I bought my house here in Duluth. It is about 4 miles (about 2 miles as the bird flies) from my work and I cross no rivers or other extreme constraints except for the railroad tracks. I left work on Tuesday at 5:00 PM and I made it home in about 10 minutes. I am a bit sensitive about getting stranded on highways and generally any sort of delays on the road. I was stranded (and subsequently lost) on the NY state Thruway as part of my commute in the 90s for about 16 hours. There were many h...

Let it snow! We have snow in Atlanta. There was an inch on my car after work. I am cool with it although running all the defroster items in my all electric car "the fishcar" reduced my overall charge by about 10% compared to otherwise no snow conditions. It was a bit weird scraping my car without an engine running and of course, no snow brush or scrapers. I guess that is why these situations breed Yankee ingenuity. For my ancestors it meant family survival. I think that is a strong motivator to do things differently.