The winter goes to its end, ice town is being destroyed

This winter was very strange. At first it could not start, the temperature kept unusually high in December and January. They built the ice town in the center of Yekaterinburg as always, and tried very hard to stop it from melting down. They decided to remove the ice town by the end of February. But here came the real winter with all the colds and its temperature of -25C. On the picture you can see the ice town being destroyed away in a real cold weather.

The first week after vacation

Someone wise once said: "nobody needs rest so badly as the one who just returned from vacation". That's exactly true.

After 5 wonderful days in Prague full of beautiful sightseeing, good time with friends, and of course good meal with Czech beer, coming back to the office is really hard.

The first week in the office was fast and full of small tasks related to things that were missed while I was away. Finally I seemed to get up with everything, so this coming week should be more productive.

The number of daily visitors of Convert-me.Com dropped significantly last week. The site position in Google search results became worse. Looks like I need to investigate what is causing this. Being banned by MSN for unknown (well, unknown for me) reason, then loosing positions with Google is not very optimistic. Hope I'll manage to identify the problem and eliminate it.

Holidays were good, but short. Back to work!

Our holidays in Prague were very good, but too short. We walked around Prague, consumed lots of meat and very good beer, listened to jazz music, visited Karlovy Vary and enjoyed our 5 days in Czech Republic very much. Now we're back to Yekaterinburg and back to work.

While we were in Prague, Yekaterinburg got another portion of snow. The picture displays Anna working hard to get the car out of it.

Off to Prague!

We got our visas, flight tickets and hotel reservation from the agency. Our flight takes off in 11 hours. The things aren't yet packed, my wife has not yet come home from her office. But in any case we're going to be in Prague in 15 hours. And I'm sure we'll enjoy our travel.

Car bumpers tested

In January I happened to test both my car bumpers. Surprisingly enough they both proved to be very good.

First time I managed to run over the car in front of me. We were crossing the road in a lane when someone all of a sudden decided to make a U-turn in front of us. The traffic was pretty heavy. All of our lane put the brakes on. Unfortunately for me, my car just happened to be crossing the tram path that was covered with metal plate. Not surprisingly it was very slippery so my brakes could not help. I caught up the car in front of me. It was only a gentle touch, but the bumper of that car lost part of its covering. After carefully looking at my car's bumper I could not find any sign of damage. I guess the other car was badly painted after its previous accident. However, my insurance cost for the upcoming 3 years now increased.

The second bumper test was just the opposite. This time I was caught up to my back bumper by a small truck. The hit was somewhat harder that the one before. However I was very much surprised when I again could not find any signs of the incident on my car's bumper. I could not believe it at first, but that was true. Since the truck had no damages too (not surprisingly), we just drove away.

So having tried it twice I can now say my Hyundai Elantra has pretty strong bumpers. That's good.