The green park bench symbol shows where my family and I used to play on the playground while visiting grandma as children. Grandma’s home was a few houses away from the playground. She would always tease grandpa when he snuck us cookies with a smile before we left our visits. They moved out of this location several years ago.
The town has about 2800 residents of mostly Czech ancestry (from a country just east of Germany). Czechs love music, technology, and kolaches, a delicious roll-like pastry with fruit topping. Try a kolache some time if you can find real ones. Beware imitations that fake it by substituting soft roll bread with greasy doughnut dough.
It feels bizzare, because a few paces away from my childhood playground was the epicenter of an agricultural fertilizer storage explosion that destroyed much of the northern part of town yesterday evening. It’s strange. The things I see in the news feel oddly disconnected from the childhood memories I have of the place. It’s like distant cities thousands of miles away I hear about so often, separate from the place I remember in recollections from ten years ago. It doesn’t feel like the same place.
I don’t know why I’m posting this here. I don’t usually use this space as a personal blog. I do not even want replies or comments or sympathy.
If you want to reply, I ask you instead contact your national Red Cross or Red Crescent society to help people in your own communities, anywhere you live in the world. Donate a little time, money, or blood. Even help in small ways because everything counts. People often focus on big flashy events, and forget the untold thousands of lone individuals seriously injured each day in mundane accidents like falling down stairs.
Beyond this, I don’t know. I’m just going to move on with my day to day life.
Best of wishes,
Thalassicus
of Chariot (was 140%).
, and gain +2 with the Training tech (was 3, 0).
experience and -10% 
rate from each Alliance, and higher 
vs civs with more cities (peaceful tall).
from 
population (peaceful tall).
