So wow, it’s August and it has been months since an entry showed up on these pages. Apologies to those who have wondered what happened to me, life has come at me pretty fast these past few months and it’s hard to believe it is almost time for school to start again already.

For those of you who follow international news and saw there was a Phosphorous spill in the oblast I live in, don’t worry I wasn’t around and although it was a pretty big mess, it was overblown. I’ve just been forbidden to swim in my local river for the rest of the summer. What was most disturbing and admittedly a little funny in retrospect was the specter given by an official that it may be the next Chernobyl event. Talk about doing nothing to assuage the public, that caused unnecessary panic and from what I heard he was a little drunk when he made the proclamation, he apologized later. The real situation was nowhere near that bad and although there was a cloud of phosphorous that sent people to the hospital, no one died that I heard about.

With that, here is a little bit of a fill-in on what I have been up to during this time. One of the original reasons I didn’t blog for a while was my hard drive crashed and I lost everything on it. That really sucked, since I lost about five months worth of pictures, documents and everything else on my computer. The good thing is that I had a lot of data backed up on an external drive so I didn’t lose as much as I might. Music and many documents were backed up, unfortunately I hadn’t backed up the most recent pictures, so some of those will only be found on Flickr now from those five months of service. At least I posted some from that time. That was a pretty rough patch, but ended on a positive note because I was able to find someone to fix my computer in the country, which meant replacing the hard drive and reinstalling all system hardware. All of that cost me only the cost of the drive, and I have a much larger drive now, hallelujah.

Shortly after my computer was repaired school ended, summer started and I began traveling, both for business and even a weeklong vacation. The first was a trip around Poland, which turned into an almost comprehensive look at the larger cities. The original plan was to visit Prague, which you may have heard of my plans, but the travel agency Ira and I were working through to simplify the visa process for her basically did no work and left us with no visa to go on the trip. At least they gave us the money back. So we both missed out on Prague, but took the money and spent a week in Poland.

Will try to catch this up more soon. Check back to find out how Poland was and assorted summer camps.